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Establish the CAMSAI governance documents - #2
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Charter, governance rules, steering roster, custody of the name and marks, and code of conduct, as an interim pre-incorporation draft for review. The Steering Committee has seven seats allocated by constituency rather than by organization, which is what makes the neutrality claim checkable. Seats are placeholders: no name or affiliation is recorded without the written consent of the person concerned. Governance documents are versioned by date tag (YYYY.M.D-N). Pushing one renders the documents into a single consolidated PDF and publishes it as a release, so reviewers and counsel can circulate a fixed, citable snapshot without cloning the repository. Every other run builds the same PDF as an artifact, so a rendering failure surfaces before a version is ratified. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Signed-off-by: Timur Bazhirov <timur@exabyte.io>
Independent review of the drafts scored them well for open science but identified friction that laboratory, university, and enterprise legal teams would hit. Each of those is now answered in the documents rather than left to be discovered in review. Terms of participation, in the Charter: - Contributions, IP, and publication (§5): DCO with no CLA and no copyright assignment; what employer and institutional rights a contributor must clear first, with students and postdocs called out because a personal sign-off does not displace an institution's ownership claim; patents limited to the Apache-2.0 §3 grant and nothing beyond it; an explicit guarantee that nothing restricts publishing research. - Antitrust (§7): the topics that must not be discussed in any CAMSAI forum, the duty to halt a discussion that approaches them, and the statement that no participant is obliged to deal with any other. - Export control (§8): what CAMSAI will not accept — classified, CUI, ITAR material, anything needing a licence — and that the contributor's own institutional release process governs, since publishing cannot be recalled. - Funding and support (§9): no dues; who bears the operating costs; and that support buys no governance rights, which is the point rather than an oversight. - Interim status (§11.2): what happens if no fiscal sponsor exists by the end of 2027 — the Charter continues, seats do not lapse, and the question must be put to a recorded vote by 30 September 2027. Composition and process, in GOVERNANCE.md: - The founding period is defined (§3.1): who the Convener is, what founding participants are, and that the cohort is open — a late appointment carries the same standing as the first, and no expression of interest may go unanswered. - Constituency drift is separated from a member moving (§3.3): a company growing past the startup threshold does not cost the member their seat mid-term, because the alternative makes that seat a liability to accept. - An Advisory Council (§5) gives organizations that commit substantial resources a standing non-voting channel — agenda items answered on the record, advance notice of amendments, written positions filed with decisions — without putting seats up for sale. - The one-seat rule is explained rather than merely stated (§1.1): it caps seats, not maintainership, Council participation, or support. - Seat 6 spans open-weight developers and hosted services, which have different interests, so the seated sub-constituency is recorded and alternates across terms. Seat 2 now covers non-degree-granting research institutes; seat 1 covers non-US national laboratories. Also: a Code of Conduct path for reports concerning the Chair or the Steering Committee itself, including an external reviewer where recusals leave no one able to decide fairly; SUPPORTERS.md as the public register of costs, supporters, and the Council; SECURITY.md for this repository; the commercial effect of the naming rule stated plainly in TRADEMARKS.md §4.1; and a reviewer's index in the README mapping the questions counsel actually asks to the sections that answer them. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Signed-off-by: Timur Bazhirov <timur@exabyte.io>
An audit of the documents against each other, and against the actual state of the camsai organization, found rules that could not be followed and claims nothing backed. The documents could not lawfully start. Charter §12 conditions every amendment on a two-thirds Steering Committee vote, and there is no committee; nothing said how a first version takes effect. §12.1 now supplies that: the Convener records adoption with the seats then filled, after which §12 governs and the subsection is spent. Until that record exists the documents are declared operating practice, not a ratified instrument. Quorum is now 51% of the seats currently filled, so vacancies never block the Consortium from acting. That scaling has a consequence — early on, one or two members carry every threshold, including amendment — and §4.2 now states it outright rather than leaving it to be discovered, along with what constrains it. Other rules that described a CAMSAI that does not exist: - Terms were "staggered" with nothing establishing the initial stagger, so all seven seats would have expired together. §3.2 splits the first round. - Nothing said what happens if seats are unfilled when the founding period ends. §3.1 lapses the Convener's appointment power at the deadline and requires a quarterly public progress note, so a stalled founding is visible in the record rather than only in the silence. - Four repositories were listed Active, which §8 defines as admitted by a vote that never happened; an audit found all five fail six of the eight intake requirements, each has a single commit author, and no workflow has ever run. They are now Proposed, and §8.1 requires the first Steering Committee to decide on each within 180 days. A consortium that will hold new projects to an intake standard has to apply it to what it already carries. This repository also failed its own intake bar: no CONTRIBUTING, no named maintainer, and no commit carrying the Signed-off-by trailer that Charter §5.1 requires of every contribution. All three are fixed, and a DCO check now runs on pull requests, following the pattern already used in the q3 repository. SECURITY.md named three unguarded surfaces. The release job is now separate from the build, so only it can obtain a write-scoped token, and it refuses to publish a tag that is not an ancestor of main — closing both the arbitrary-tag and the workflow_dispatch-against-a-tag paths to a release that no merged pull request produced. The container image is pinned by digest and the actions by commit SHA, so "pinned" is now true rather than aspirational. In the consolidated PDF, every cross-document link was dead: a reader has no CHARTER.md to open. A Lua filter rewrites them to internal anchors where the target is in the bundle and to the canonical repository URL where it is not, and each page now carries the version, as a printed constitutional document should. Signed-off-by: Timur Bazhirov <timur@exabyte.io>
STEERING.md named no Convener, which left CHARTER.md §12.1 inoperable: the first version takes effect when the Convener records its adoption, and there was no one to do that. Timur Bazhirov holds the role, with his consent. The affiliation column is new and it is the point of the change rather than decoration. Mat3ra is the interim custodian of the marks (TRADEMARKS.md §2), so the same party convenes the founding period and holds the assets. That concentration is real while seats stand empty, and these documents are not entitled to ask for disclosure from everyone else and stay quiet about it. So it is stated where the roster is, with what limits it: the custodian's undertakings bind regardless of who convenes, the role carries no vote, the conflict-of-interest duty in GOVERNANCE.md §4.3 still applies to any seat the Convener separately holds, and filling the remaining seats ends it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Signed-off-by: Timur Bazhirov <timur@exabyte.io>
§12.1 said the documents take effect when the Convener "records their adoption in a pull request", which is loose enough to read as though merging any Convener-authored pull request that establishes the documents were itself adoption. What actually prevented that reading was context — the wording of the pull request that happened to be open, and the tag requirement being conjunctive — rather than the clause itself. A clause whose only job is to fix the moment a constitution comes into force cannot rest on context. Adoption now requires two steps that are visible in the repository and cannot be taken inadvertently: a pull request that says on its face that it is the adoption record and replaces the unratified notice in each document, and the date tag pushed to the merged commit. Nothing else effects adoption, whoever opens it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Signed-off-by: Timur Bazhirov <timur@exabyte.io>
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Interim, pre-incorporation drafts of the documents that define how CAMSAI governs itself, opened for review before anything is ratified.
Supersedes #1, which GitHub closed automatically when the base branch was rewritten to add DCO sign-off to every commit. Same branch, same content, plus the sign-offs.
CHARTER.mdGOVERNANCE.mdSTEERING.mdSUPPORTERS.mdTRADEMARKS.mdCODE_OF_CONDUCT.mdCONTRIBUTING.md,SECURITY.md,CODEOWNERSscripts/build-pdf.sh,.github/workflows/mainpublishes it as a release. A DCO check runs on every pull requestPoints that need a decision rather than a copy-edit
CHARTER.md§12.1): §12 amends a Charter already in force and cannot bring one into being, so the first version is adopted once, by the Convener recording it with the seats then filled. Until that record exists these are declared operating practice, not a ratified instrument.GOVERNANCE.md§4.2): 51% of the seats currently filled, so vacancies never block action. The trade-off is stated in the text: early in the founding period one or two members carry every threshold, including amendment.CHARTER.md§9.4): contributing resources buys no seat, vote, or roadmap priority. The Advisory Council (§5) is the alternative: a standing non-voting channel with agenda items answered on the record.GOVERNANCE.md§8.1): the four repos in the org predate this framework and were never admitted by a vote, so they are listed Proposed, and the first Steering Committee must decide on each within 180 days.TRADEMARKS.md§2) and non-incorporation (CHARTER.md§11), including what happens if no fiscal sponsor exists by the end of 2027.Terms institutional reviewers will look for
CHARTER.md§5 (DCO, no CLA, no copyright assignment; employer and student/postdoc rights; patents limited to the Apache-2.0 §3 grant; an explicit guarantee that nothing restricts publication), §7 (antitrust), and §8 (export control, and whose institutional release process governs). The README indexes these against the questions counsel actually asks.Notes
No person or institution is named anywhere: seats, the Convener, and the conduct contact are placeholders pending written consent and a Steering decision.
LICENSEidentifies CC BY 4.0 by SPDX identifier and canonical URL rather than embedding the full legal code.Branch and tag protection are not yet in place: the org is on the free plan and this repo is private, so rulesets are unavailable. They become available at no cost when the repository goes public.
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