How merit is earned
Merit is a scalar on 0 to 100, and every input to it is chosen for the same property: it is hard to fake and easy to check.
| Input | Why it is merit |
|---|---|
| Trust rung | the movement's own published criteria, already audited on promotion and demotion |
| A confirmed published corpus — a repository of structured records the install can machine-check | the single hardest thing to fake: work anybody can read and re-derive for themselves |
| Verified completed actions | things done and corroborated, not things claimed |
| Corroboration by other trusted citizens | the Established rung's own criterion, carried forward as a continuous value |
| Tenure with sustained contribution | the difference between a good month and a record |
| Accuracy over time — how their past readings held up as the record filled in | the purest merit signal available, and the one that most deserves to compound |
The corpus input, specifically
The strongest single thing a citizen can do is publish a machine-checkable body of work: structured records, in a repository, that the install can read and re-derive without asking anybody's permission.
It is the hardest input to counterfeit because counterfeiting it requires actually doing the work. You cannot buy it, and you cannot get it by being liked.
Accuracy over time
The most interesting input is the slowest. When a citizen makes a reading — this challenger is promising, this record has a gap here, this bill does not close what it claims — the world eventually supplies an answer. Whether their past readings held up is the closest thing available to a ground truth about judgment.
It compounds deliberately. Somebody who has been right for five years should be heard differently from somebody who arrived last week, and this is the only input that can express that without falling back on credentials.
Flat is the fallback, not the default
Where no merit scores exist yet — a new install, a new community — the weighting mode is flat: every vote in a layer weighs the same, and the record notes that it did.
So the arithmetic is well defined on day one and becomes meritocratic as the ladder fills. Nothing depends on a bootstrap that has not happened.