Common
Governance
Every binding decision affecting a community, open to participation by all of its members.
A substrate-independent architecture for transparent, auditable, technology-supported direct governance. Not a utopia — a design problem, specified component by component, with its rationale, its open questions, and the failure modes it must resist.
On the name
Four meanings, all accurate to the system.
The contrast implicit in the name is with private governance — decisions made in closed rooms, by and for those inside them. Common Governance is the structural antidote to the enclosure of collective decision-making.
Foundational principles
Not policies. The axioms the rules derive from.
They can be revised — but only through the most demanding procedures the system provides. Any revision triggers maximum-salience notification to every member.
Every member has equal formal standing to participate in every decision. No decision is structurally closed to anyone.
All proposals, votes, deliberations, and decision-makers are recorded in a public, permanently accessible ledger. No binding act occurs in a closed setting.
A decision is valid only if it can be applied alongside existing commitments. Unresolvable conflicts must surface before taking effect.
The attention brought to a decision scales with its consequences, its irreversibility, and its proximity to foundational commitments.
Where a decision needs knowledge, that knowledge must be demonstrably acquirable by any member. No permanent class of licensed decision-makers exists.
Foundational commitments are progressively harder to revise, not impossible. The gradient is explicit and known.
The decision stack
Four levels. Authority earned through difficulty of revision.
The level sets the threshold, the deliberation window, and the salience it triggers. The deeper the level, the harder to revise — and the heavier it sits.
Ordinary decisions
Routine executive and legislative acts within an established framework.
+ quorum
Significant decisions
Substantial distributional consequences, multi-year commitments, modifying Level 1 rules.
≥20% turnout
Constitutional decisions
Institutional structures, rights, the entrenchment register, the rules of the stack itself.
2 cycles · 6 mo
Foundational revision
Revision of the foundational principles or of the decision stack itself.
3 cycles · 1 yr
// thresholds are calibrated to context — content of the register and turnout floors vary by community
The architecture
Components, each with its rationale and its failure modes.
Verified identity
A cryptographic identity held by the member, anchored to a distributed biometric factor. The state never holds the private key, and the ledger records the reference, not the biometric.
The ledger
A single source of truth: distributed, tamper-evident, publicly readable, permanently accessible, append-only. Nothing is deleted; corrections reference and supersede.
The coherence mechanism
No proposal binds until its relationship to entrenched commitments is resolved. It makes an existing authority legible and forces its exercise at the right time — even against a unanimous vote.
Salience & attention
Each proposal is scored by scope, magnitude, irreversibility, and constitutional proximity. Consequential decisions surface; salience escalates with engagement and never de-escalates automatically.
Open qualification
Technical deliberation tiers frame complex proposals — but the final vote stays universal. Qualification is an open, repeatable, publicly answered test, never a credential class.
Open voting
Votes are public and ledger-recorded as civic acts, with protected anonymity where genuine coercion risk is shown. Voting networks may advise members but never bind them.
Piloting & scale
Validate at small scale before any large political bet.
The architecture is the same at every scale; only the register's content and the thresholds are calibrated to context. A single Swiss Gemeinde already has the membership, the legal framework, and the assembly — it lacks only the ledger, the coherence trigger, and the salience engine, which drop on as one software layer.
The pilot is not a concession to practicality. It is a demonstration that the architecture is general.
A single community with the right technology and the will to try it can demonstrate the core architecture working in a genuinely binding context. That demonstration is the argument for broader adoption.