How voting works

Version 0.1 · Status: EXPERIMENTAL · The principle is in CHARTER.md §5; the process around it is GOVERNANCE.md §§2–5

Everyone can speak from the moment they arrive. Voting requires having done the work.

Section numbers are fixed — other documents cite them.

1. Three different things

	What it is	How you get it
Voice	Speak, ask, object, submit evidence	Immediate, universal
Standing	Earned credibility on one specific proposal	The trajectory in §2
Authority	A formal right to approve, merge, veto or enact	Only from the published governance structure

Money buys none of the three. Neither do follower counts, likes, or message volume.

2. What earns standing

For any proposal, a participant builds up a record of things that actually happened:

joined · reviewed a version · asked a question · provided evidence
raised an objection · answered a counterargument · tested an implementation
changed position · reaffirmed a position with reasons · cast a final ballot

Account age counts for nothing. What counts is that trail.

The essential rule: you have to stay in the process long enough to be exposed to correction.

3. When a ballot counts

All seven, or the ballot does not qualify:

Identity and affiliation disclosed (§7)
Reviewed the proposal at its current version
Took part across at least two phases
Reviewed at least one serious objection
Declared conflicts of interest, or stated there are none
Waited out the cooling-off period for that class of proposal
Submitted reasons alongside the ballot

Every qualified ballot counts exactly 1. Trajectory qualifies votes; it never multiplies them. A bounded weighting could be introduced later, capped at 1.25–1.5 and decaying with inactivity, and only by a constitutional-class proposal.

4. What standing gates instead

Rather than vote weight, standing determines who may:

Sponsor a proposal
Serve as a specification editor
Certify that an objection has been answered
Represent an implementation
Sit on a temporary review panel
Trigger reconsideration of a settled decision

Standing decays with inactivity. Contributions age out of these roles. The record of having made them is permanent.

5. Arriving early earns provenance, not sovereignty

Early contributors get	Early contributors do not get
Permanent record as first proposer or first implementer	A bigger vote
Authorship records	Permanent control
Eligibility to sponsor or edit	Immunity from being outvoted
Visible historical standing

A latecomer reaches equal standing by doing the same substantive work. They cannot rewrite who arrived first, and they are not permanently weaker for arriving later.

6. The catch-up path

Every proposal keeps one packet: current version · version history · decision log · strongest case for · strongest objection · unresolved questions · implementation evidence · known failures · conflict disclosures · minority reports.

The route from arriving late to an equal vote:

read the proposal → review the strongest objection → ask one question or make one critique
→ read the response → cooling-off period → cast an equal ballot

7. Identity and fake accounts

One verified human per individual ballot
Affiliation disclosed on every ballot
Individual and project ballots are separate surfaces (GOVERNANCE.md §5)

Shared employers, funding relationships, shared maintainers and common codebases are disclosed fields, visible rather than prohibited. The point is that concentration can be seen, not that it is banned.

Version 0.1 identity is maintainer keys listed in project records plus named humans on ballots. Stronger verification is an open proposal with no scheduled version — see SECURITY.md §3, which says plainly that this is not enough against a determined adversary.

8. What never earns standing

Raw message count · hours present · likes · follower count · attending meetings · repeating yourself · AI-generated paraphrase.

Standing comes only from bounded, checkable events:

An accepted patch
A verified test
A serious objection
A documented review
An implementation
A reproduced result
A successful mediation
Sustained maintenance
Correcting your own earlier claim — explicitly rewarded

9. Ballots are records, not clicks

Each ballot is a signed file matching schemas/ballot.schema.json, committed to the proposal's ballots/ directory and referenced from the log. There is no voting service in version 0.1.

Each voter also gets a trajectory receipt (schemas/trajectory-receipt.schema.json): when they joined, which versions they reviewed, what they contributed, which objections they read, what they disclosed, their initial and final position, whether it changed, when they qualified, the ballot, the signature.

The receipt proves the public trail behind a vote. It never claims to show what anyone privately thought.

10. AI assistance

AI may summarise discussions, spot duplicates, map arguments, translate, compare versions, and pull out unresolved questions — provided the output links to its sources, is labelled as generated, and can be corrected.

AI output never replaces the record, never counts as a ballot, and never establishes consensus from sentiment.

Prohibited in every form: "the AI says the community agrees."

Consensus exists only as signed human and project ballots. See AI-USE.md.

See also: GOVERNANCE.md — the proposal process these ballots sit inside · COMMUNICATIONS.md — where discussion becomes record · CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md — how disagreement is conducted