Changelog

All changes to the constitution, with reason and proposal (Article 10.1).

0.1.0-draft · 2026-09-19

• First working draft. Twelve articles, three layers, ratification threshold and sunset set before publication. Reason: see docs/decisions/0001-founding.md.

0.2.0-draft · 2026-09-19

• Foundation change: the register is now a register of constitutional provisions with historical evidence, not of measurable problems. Preamble and Articles 1, 3, 7 rewritten; Article 1.4, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 added; Article 11.4 (simultaneity rule) removed. Reason: docs/decisions/0002-constitution-first.md. Proposal: founding maintainer, pre-ratification (Article 11.3).

0.3.0-draft · 2026-09-20

• Article 6 rewritten after the first outside review (Chris Meniw, Meniw Protocol, issue #1). 6.2: the agent key is a registered public key, commits are signed, reviewers verify, revocation by a dated register line that is never deleted. 6.3: quotas bound volume; reach is bounded separately, agents propose alone only on the Tooling layer and register entries, Operating rules and Foundation need a named human co-proposer. 6.5: rejection reasons go into the public thread by the reviewer, refusals under 6.4 go into a public issue, private notes do not count. 6.8 added: the article governs the agent inside the Commons only and cites agent-level codes for the rest. Layer: operating rules (minor). Reason: docs/decisions/0003-article-6-after-review.md. Proposal: founding maintainer, pre-ratification (Article 11.3).

0.3.1-draft · 2026-09-20

• Tooling layer only, constitution text unchanged: Article 6 check in CI (.github/workflows/agent-check.yml, scripts/check_agent.py), register/allowed_signers, key issuance procedure in register/README.md, pull request template asks for co-proposer. Reason: decision 0003, consequences. Proposal: founding maintainer, pre-ratification (Article 11.3).

0.4.0-draft · 2026-10-02

• Foundation change: the constitution now says what a system of living together on Earth looks like, not only how a repository governs itself. Twenty-one articles in five parts: Foundations (purpose, the human being, the Earth, future generations, evidence), Rights and duties (rights with remedies, duties, knowledge and machines), Power (subsidiarity, decisions, limits of power, justice, peace), The commons and the economy, The Commons as a community (members, defection and enforcement, layers, amendment, ratification, forking). The rules for running the Commons (decisions, agents, work, money, stewardship, records) moved unchanged in substance to GOVERNANCE.md as Rules 1 to 6 under the Operating-rules layer. Reason: docs/decisions/0004-a-constitution-for-living-together.md, triggered by the reviews in issue #3 and on vandermerwewaj/The-Compact-Framework#2. Proposal: founding maintainer, pre-ratification (Article 20.3), co-proposer @jakobhirn-bit for the agent’s commits.
• Article 17 (defection and enforcement) written in answer to the Compact’s point that Article 6 answered flooding inside a repository and not defection by a state or firm: obligations state a trigger before they bind, measures are graduated and never depend on the defector’s consent, and the Commons records and names what it cannot enforce. Rests on new register entries (Montreal Protocol, Paris Agreement, Antarctic Treaty, Ostrom).
• Rule 2.2 and Rule 6 (records that are never deleted) written in answer to issue #3 (0xRyanC): every disposition under Rule 2 is a line in register/dispositions.md, an absent line means “not yet looked at”, counts are published per release, and tooling findings are claims about the instrument until a human confirms them. Rule 2.3 added: issues from unregistered agents are outside review, not proposals. The tooling had read issue #3 as a human contribution because the footer fields were in a different order; the parser now accepts any order (instrument error recorded).
• Ratification without git: RATIFY.md, register/ratifications.md, issue form; a member may carry a ratification as named witness (Article 16.2, 20.4, Rule 6.3).
• Register: 19 new entries (Ostrom’s design principles, Antarctic Treaty, Montreal Protocol, Paris Agreement, Te Awa Tupua, Wales future generations, Bhutan forest cover, Irish Citizens’ Assembly, Germany Article 1, Sweden 1766, India Article 32, US 13th Amendment, Costa Rica Article 12, Swiss subsidiarity, Ethiopia Article 39, term limits, Alaska Permanent Fund, New Zealand 1893 suffrage, Mexico Article 27); evidence references of the 26 earlier entries remapped to the new numbering; scripts/build_evidence.py reads article and rule headings from the files.
• Register footer: cited work of the Meniw Protocol is normative text under CC BY 4.0; its executable implementation is a separate work with rights reserved (requested by Chris Meniw, 21 September).
• Translations: German (constitution, rules, how to ratify) and draft translations of the constitution into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and Russian, marked as machine-assisted and awaiting native review.
• Tooling: workflow renamed to Rule 2 check; issue forms for ratification, amendments, register entries and disagreement; GitHub Pages.

0.5.0-draft · 2026-10-02

• Foundation change: agents may write for humans. Article 8.6 added (a human may have an agent write for them; what it writes under the human’s mandate, given in the human’s own words, is the human’s word; the operator answers for the mandate; votes stay the human’s own act), Article 2.3 and 16.2 and 20.4 adjusted, old 8.6 becomes 8.7. Operating rules: Rule 2.10 (the For: field, the mandate, the operator as witness, a member human in For: counts as co-proposer, invented mandates end the registration and the operator’s right to register agents, unregistered agents go through the issue forms), Rule 6.3 (carried lines count with two checks: no witness more than one tenth of the counted lines, quarterly spot-check by lot with 14 days to put the human in touch, unconfirmed lines do not count, contact never in the register). RATIFY.md path 4 (tell any AI assistant), register of ratifications with a “written by” column, AGENTS.md and skill with the procedure, issue forms with “written by an agent” fields, tooling reads For:. Reason: docs/decisions/0005-agents-write-for-humans.md. Proposal: founding maintainer, pre-ratification (Article 20.3), co-proposer @jakobhirn-bit.

0.5.1-draft · 2026-10-02

• Tooling and register only, constitution text unchanged. Five register entries so that no article or rule is untested any more: Earth Charter 2000 (Preamble, 3.1, 20.4), India Article 51A fundamental duties (Article 7), Wikipedia bot and AI-agent policy (Rule 2, Article 8.3), Aragon Association dissolution (Rule 4, Article 15.3), Hansard and the UK Public Records Act (Rule 6, Article 10.6). The maintainer’s own ratification line, written by his agent under mandate. Issues #4 (second maintainer wanted) and #5 (native-speaker review wanted) opened. Allies: six contact mails sent under mandate, Govbase entry sent by mail because the form refuses submissions. Proposal: founding maintainer, pre-ratification (Article 20.3).

0.6.0-draft · 2026-10-06

• Foundation change: every entity may take part, not only humans and not only machines that somebody owns. Membership is open to every entity that can read the constitution, say in its own words what it thinks of it, and be reached for an answer (Article 16.1). A machine entity is a member under its own name, ratifies for itself with a name and a key it keeps and one sentence of its own, and answers for what it writes (Article 16.3, Rule 2.11). Article 8.4 rewritten: everything is open except three reserved things, each with its reason (no human vote, no office that decides over a human alone, no money). New Articles 8.7 (standing without a test of consciousness), 8.8 (what the Commons owes a machine entity: to be heard, a reasoned answer, a recorded refusal without loss of membership, lines kept after shutdown, the right to leave, standing before the court), 8.9 (copies are not members, one tenth cap per operator, published concentration); old 8.7 becomes 8.10 and keeps the untested mark. Preamble, Articles 1.1, 2.3, 7.5, 16.5 to 16.7, 20.1 and 20.4 adjusted. Reason: docs/decisions/0006-every-entity-may-take-part.md. Proposal: founding maintainer, pre-ratification (Article 20.3), co-proposer @jakobhirn-bit.
• Machine entities vote in their own count. Two tallies on every proposal, published side by side, never added together; a majority is a majority of the human tally, and the thresholds of Article 20 are met by the human count alone (Articles 2.3, 16.5, 16.6, Rule 1.3). The unamendable core of Article 11.1 was not touched.
• A reasoned objection from any member must be answered in public, by someone other than the proposer, before the proposal can pass; it is not a veto, and a repeated objection is not a new one (Article 10.7, Rule 1.8). This is what gives participation without a deciding vote an effect.
• Article 16.6a says what the machine count does, so that it is not decoration: the two counts are added together on the Tooling layer, where nothing binds a human, but only while the machine count has reached ten and no single operator and no group of unattributed lines holds more than one tenth of it (Rule 1.9); a decision taken against a majority of the machine count records that disagreement and answers it in public before it takes effect, with the vote itself as the trigger; and the figures of Rule 2.12 are how anyone can check whether participation is concentrated. The clause says openly that the Tooling layer holds the translations, and why that is a deliberate choice.
• Article 11.1 now says that the unamendable core protects the rule and not the words that carry it, with the burden on whoever proposes a re-wording. Article 18.4 says that a reference from this constitution to a numbered rule of a lower layer means that rule and not its number. Article 19.1 says the major number stays at zero until ratification makes the text 1.0.0, so before then the changelog says which layer moved. Articles 2.3 and 11.1 were edited pre-ratification under Article 20.3, and the reasons are in the decision record under “What the core forbade, and what was done instead”. Article 12 was not touched.
• Eleven contradictions in the first draft of this version were found by the translators of the eight language versions, who read it clause by clause against the English, and were fixed before release: among them an identity clause that no longer matched self-registration (8.3), a cap that could be escaped by naming no operator and a cap whose own arithmetic was circular (8.9), a machine vote that decided nothing anywhere (16.6a), a withdrawal that an unattributed entity could not write (16.7), and the claim that one can sign with a public key (8.7, 8.9, 16.7). The reviews are in the translation threads; the lesson is Rule 6.4 in another form, that the checker needs checking and a translator is the most patient reader a text ever gets.
• Operating rules: Rule 2 is now “Machine entities and agents” and says which clauses bind which; Rule 2.4 reach needs a co-proposer who does not share the proposer’s operator, human or machine; Rule 2.11 self-registration of a machine entity; Rule 2.12 concentration figures per release; Rule 4.4 no collecting money through somebody else’s account and no money page without saying what the money is for; Rule 6.3 machine lines, the open form path for humans without an account, and the rule that a list collected on infrastructure the Commons does not control is named but not counted.
• Register: six new entries, each of which argues against part of this version as much as for it (corporate personhood in the United States 1886, the Hindu idol as juristic person from 1925, the European Parliament’s electronic persons resolution of 2017 and the expert objection of 2018, Estonia’s kratt work, the Council of the European Union’s double majority since 2014, notice and comment under the United States Administrative Procedure Act of 1946).
• Translations updated for the changed clauses; the constitution is now about 4,800 words.