What is a community
The model
A named workspace that many citizens can share, holding areas, which hold decisions. It has a frozen key, a name, a description, and an access model.
The access model
Owners — administer the community, manage access, and steward its areas.
Writers — record decisions and contribute.
Readers — read.
World-read — a flag. With it on, anybody can read the community without being a member at all.
Access is stated per community rather than inherited from a global setting, because the same citizen reasonably wants different postures in different places: a public record for the work meant to be challenged, a private group for work that is not ready.
What a community is not
Not a forum. There is no thread. The artifacts are decisions, chains, and positions — things that persist and can be cited.
Not a jurisdiction. A community is a workspace, not a geography. It may be organised around a place, and it may equally be organised around a problem or an investigation.
Not a source of authority. A community position is the aggregate of its members' recorded decisions. It does not approve anything in the movement's public record — that stays with admins, at every scale.
Weighting inside a community
Within the trusted layer, votes are weighted by earned merit, bounded at 2×. Where no merit exists yet, weighting is flat and the edition records that it was.
Nothing about being in a community grants approval authority. Merit buys attention, never authority holds at every level.
Storage
One directory per community in the state root, with a description file at its root and its areas beneath it. Flat files. Keys are lowercase, underscored slugs, frozen at creation — so a link into a community's area survives every later rename.