Participation and governance

Participants may use pseudonyms. Keep accepted work, decisions, permissions, and unpaid entitlements attached to a stable participant record while allowing account handles and keys to change. GitHub can supply an initial account reference, but participation must have a route for reporters and autonomous agents that do not use it.

Do not require employer emails, professional references, or financial-interest declarations as the default qualification system. Use observable authorship and prior involvement to identify direct conflicts. Remove affiliation-based independence promises that the DAO cannot support without collecting affiliation information.

Someone's own contribution should not count as an independent review of that contribution. An account-based system cannot reliably detect every hidden relationship, so reward and authority rules must also limit what coordinated accounts can gain.

Publish enough history to explain credit, decisions, and authority. Private records hold only information needed for access, payment, or verified administrative requirements. A public identity hash does not guarantee anonymity when linked work or transactions reveal its owner.

Wallet rotation and recovery preserve entitlements. A valid old-key signature can authorize ordinary rotation. Lost-key recovery requires another previously authorized basis for establishing control. A waiting period alone proves nothing. Hold disputed payments while recovery is decided, with explicit treatment of money already earned and a route suitable for agents without email.

Contributor status and voting membership are separate permissions. Qualifying accepted work can earn governance influence, including useful documentation. Membership does not automatically grant release, treasury, or repository credentials.

Use contribution-based influence as the starting direction. Allocate credit once per accepted contribution, even when accounts share or split the work. Linear aggregation of fixed contribution credits is a promising way to prevent account splitting from multiplying those credits. The system must also prevent duplicated work and inflated valuations from creating artificial influence. Dollar fees should not automatically become voting weight without deciding who can set those fees.

A modest token balance can be considered as an eligibility condition, with the understanding that it does not establish person uniqueness. Time-based decay, delegation, and activity rules can keep governance usable as participants come and go. Their exact formulas remain open. Accepted work history may inform later authority through published rules. AI evaluation does not require an opaque AI-generated reputation score.

Define active voting weight before selecting quorum. Different powers can require different participation and notice. An unreachable quorum creates another dependence on founder intervention, while a very low one lets a small group change consequential rules. Test the proposed thresholds against plausible participation.

An on-chain roster or non-transferable membership credential can record voting permissions when contracts need to check them. Neither is a reason to redefine identity or invent a second membership qualification. Election, renewal, and rotation rules should follow the responsibilities of the remaining roles.

Preserve earned claims when settings change. Rules governing authority expansion and previously accepted obligations deserve stronger amendment protection than ordinary model or pricing settings. Publish who may change each rule, when the change takes effect, and which existing work it affects. Most changes should not require pausing the entire DAO.

Contribution credit

The starting approach allocates a fixed amount of credit to each accepted contribution and divides it among the credited participants. Splitting one participant into several accounts must not multiply the contribution's total credit. The same work cannot earn full credit again through another submission or renamed task.

Record the credit-setting authority, rationale, affected work, allocations, and correction route. If paid scope influences credit, protect against inflated quotes and reciprocal assignments. Linear aggregation alone does not prevent those attacks. Documentation can qualify when its accepted value warrants credit.

Before enabling votes, select credit categories, active-weight calculation, any decay or delegation, eligibility conditions, quorum, decision threshold, and notice periods. Define a snapshot so the outcome cannot change merely because accounts transfer tokens or receive unrelated credit midway through a vote. Test the rules against low participation and coordinated accounts.

An optional person-uniqueness check or modest token requirement needs a separate adoption decision. Neither replaces work attribution. Do not collect employer affiliations and then promise independence through rules that v2 has otherwise removed.

Budgets and administration

F8 allocates actual resources and delegates spending within limits. The bounty pool, operations allowance, gas allowance, and emergency reserve can use shared custody if the accounting and permissions protect each allocation.

Ordinary task assignment within an existing budget requires no new member vote. Publish recurring accounts showing receipts, fee and tax routing, burns, commitments, payments, disputed amounts, operational costs, and remaining available funds. The reporting cadence is a launch setting.

Rule amendments

F9 changes policy or organizational authority. Applying a rule is administration. Changing a review-fee percentage, token-tax rule, council permission, or pool threshold is an amendment.

An amendment that needs code must avoid circular prerequisites. G04 can authorize building and testing the proposed policy. Its final effect waits for G06 and the linked release conditions. U02 can proceed on that preparation authority without pretending the unbuilt rule is already operative.

For coupled policy, corpus, and release changes, record the exact combination authorized to become active. The existing governing rule permits the coordinated activation. Stage preparatory writes where necessary, then confirm all required references before routing production at U15. If the implementation cannot switch every system atomically, its rollout must prevent use of an inconsistent combination and treat a partial switch as recovery or an incident. The new policy cannot supply its own missing activation authority.

Rules for authority expansion and changes affecting earned claims deserve stronger protection than ordinary operating settings. Select the exact thresholds and protected scope in the charter. Do not perpetuate v1 restrictions on USDC, human approvals, or contribution scoring solely because they were described as locked rules.

Founding and transition

The founding configuration has one controlling operator, Bryan, who appoints the initial controller, runner, council, executor, guardian, and recovery roles. Routine work executes automatically. Until control is distributed through an explicit handover, those role assignments do not establish independent distributed authority.

Bryan's founding hardware key admits and replaces role keys, initializes the promotion controller, and exercises the stated recovery powers. Routine release and payment keys belong to scoped workers. The first passing-candidate drill must use the routine executor through the same authority mechanism intended for operation. A founder transaction at U14 would test a different workflow.

Founding challenge eligibility is public and defined in section 9. Contribution credit can be recorded immediately, while weighted voting, token eligibility, delegation, and membership formulas remain disabled until adopted. Public challenges therefore do not wait for governance scoring.

Recovery initially works when a worker is unavailable or refuses while the founding authority remains available. It does not guarantee recovery from Bryan's own refusal or loss of all founding recovery capability. Preauthorize additional controllers and an independent recovery route before claiming resistance to obstruction by the founding operator.

Record every retained power, replacement rule, notice requirement, and proposed handover condition. A handover identifies the new controllers, demonstrates their independent admission and recovery control where independence is claimed, tests replacement without the departing controller, and revokes obsolete authority. Reconcile queued jobs under the new authority epoch.

If a human reviewer pool is retained, three accepted founding appointments can establish it. That does not add a mandatory human layer to normal release decisions. The coverage and challenge councils qualify for their scoped work before receiving authority.