Charter

The charter is the governing layer. It is not a technical specification and it does not describe how anything is built — it states what the movement is for, and what it has committed to. Where the charter and an implementation decision disagree, the charter wins and the implementation changes.

What it commits to

A citizen-powered decision-making platform that fixes society's problems through collective intelligence and AI-applied ethics.

Unpacking each phrase, because each is load-bearing:

• Citizen-powered — the unit of action is a person, not an institution, a party, or an editorial board.
• Collective intelligence — the bet that many people reasoning transparently beat both the raw crowd and the credentialed few. That bet only pays if influence is earned and visible, which is why meritocracy is specified rather than assumed.
• AI-applied ethics — not AI deciding ethics. A citizen writes down their own rules; the AI applies those, consistently, at a scale a person cannot.

The reference standard

Positions are compared against the social contract — for a US citizen, the Constitution and representative democracy actually working as promised. Citizens record specific instances where what government is doing appears to be out of alignment with it.

The machinery is universal even though the standard is not: record, reason from first principles, decide, optionally publish works for a citizen of any country, with that country's own contract plugged in.

Local-first is a charter commitment, not an optimisation

Individual Mode runs fully local, with everything on the citizen's own disk and nothing shared unless they choose. This is not a performance decision. A platform for challenging power that requires permission from a central server to function has a single point at which it can be turned off.

The hard rules

Some commitments are enforced by the build rather than by intention — most visibly, the rule that the app never downloads media, which a test enforces and which fails the build if violated. They are described in AI.

The pattern generalises: a commitment that lives only in a document is a commitment somebody will optimise away under deadline.

Standing tests

The charter carries checks applied to any proposed change. The sharpest one governs the four party front doors: would this still be true if the person it lands on had a different letter after their name? If no, it does not ship. The four doors are written separately and may say different things to different audiences; what none of them may do is bend a number or judge a party instead of a person.