A founding design philosophy for a globally distributed, politically neutral consensus protocol — infrastructure for making humanity's expressed conscience visible, verifiable, and permanent.
This is a working document, not a finished product. It is versioned, open to improvement, and belongs to no one.
This repository is the canonical home of the founding document for the Commons Protocol project. It contains the design philosophy, core principles, and open questions that any implementation of this idea must engage with.
It is not code. It is not an organisation. It is a seed.
Read the founding document: founding-document.md
Propose improvements via a GitHub Issue — argue with any section, suggest clearer language, identify gaps in the design, or point to relevant prior art not yet acknowledged.
Translate the document into another language and submit it as a pull request. Translations are among the most valuable contributions this project can receive.
Build an implementation that honours the founding principles. If you do, open an Issue to register it — this repository will maintain a list of known implementations so they remain connected to the canonical trunk.
Cite or share this document freely under the terms of the licence below.
To contact the stewardship: commonsprotocol@proton.me
Do not fork this document to produce a version that removes or modifies the founding principles. The principles are not features — they are the thing itself. An implementation that removes them is a different project and should be named accordingly.
Do not attach this document or the project name to any commercial enterprise. The signal must remain unmonetised. This is non-negotiable and is enforceable under the licence terms.
The document is versioned. The version history in this repository is the authoritative record of how and why the document has evolved. Significant changes will be noted in commit messages. Proposed changes to the founding principles themselves require open discussion via Issues before incorporation.
Current version: 0.7 — working draft — not for publication
Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
You are free to share and adapt this material for non-commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate attribution and distribute any derivative work under the same licence.
This document has no author. It belongs to no organisation. Those who tend this repository do so as custodians of the principles, not as owners of the idea.
If you believe this project is necessary and want to contribute to its stewardship, open an Issue and say so.
The founding document and design documents in this repository were developed through an extended collaborative process between the founding steward and Claude (Anthropic), used as a thinking partner and drafting tool. The vision, values, and core ideas originated with the founding steward. Claude contributed to their articulation, structure, and development through iterative conversation. The founding steward takes full responsibility for the content, framing, and design choices expressed here, including all interpretations and possible oversights.
This process is itself consistent with the project's position on AI: a tool in service of human judgment and conscience, not a substitute for it.