The CommonGround Constitution

Version: 2.0 Date: 2026-04-14 Status: Draft — open for community review License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Preamble

This constitution defines the inviolable rights and core values that govern any CommonGround instance. It is a living starting point — designed to be adopted, adapted, and evolved by the groups that use it.

The constitution is deliberately minimal. It states what must be true, not how to achieve it. Mechanisms, thresholds, and operational details live in the Default Governance Policy, which groups can amend through their own governance process.

Groups are sovereign. They can delegate authority broadly and for extended periods, but sovereignty always remains with the people. No delegation, no decision, and no precedent can permanently transfer the group’s right to govern itself.

This framework is designed for groups that make real decisions together: co-ops, land trusts, collectives, boards, and commons governance organizations. It assumes participants who are motivated by practical benefit and shared purpose, not ideological commitment. Governance structures that depend on political conviction fail when conviction fades across generations. Structures that align individual and collective interests endure.

Tier 1: Inviolable Principles

These principles protect the preconditions for self-governance. They cannot be amended away. They exist so that the group always retains the capacity to change its own rules.

When Tier 1 principles conflict with any other part of this constitution or its policies, Tier 1 prevails. Commons Protection is supreme among all principles.

Principle 1 — Revocability

All delegations are revocable. No delegation may be made irrevocable.

A group may delegate enormous authority for extended periods. But the right to revoke that authority can never be signed away. Irrevocable delegation is a transfer of sovereignty — it creates a ruler, not a delegate.

Principle 2 — Due Process

Members subject to removal:

Without due process, governance becomes a tool of exclusion. The right to be heard before removal is foundational to legitimate collective action.

Principle 3 — Commons Protection

No decision may:

This principle is supreme. When it conflicts with any other principle, Commons Protection prevails. The greatest risk to any commons is enclosure — gradual capture by private interests. This principle makes enclosure structurally impossible, not merely discouraged.

Principle 4 — Forkability

Any group may fork the system and its governance. Forks inherit the obligation to honor exit rights and data portability for their own members.

Forking means copying, not partitioning. The original commons remains whole. The right to exit and rebuild is the ultimate check on governance failure. If a group cannot fork, it is captive.

Forkability is recursive: every fork carries forward the same guarantee. No fork may become a trap.

Federation and re-convergence: Forkability enables divergence. Federation enables voluntary convergence. Two or more CommonGround instances may propose shared governance of specific shared resources while maintaining sovereignty over their own affairs. Federation is built upward from autonomous base units, not downward from a central authority — the federated layer exists to serve the member groups, not the reverse. No federation may compromise a member group’s right to exit.

Tier 2: Core Values

These principles are constitutional values that groups can amend through supermajority. They represent considered defaults that most groups should preserve, but sovereignty rests with the people.

Principle 5 — Bootstrap

The founder establishes the initial constitution. Members consent to it by joining.

Once the group reaches a defined membership threshold, the constitution becomes ratifiable. The community may ratify, amend, or replace the constitution through supermajority vote. If ratification fails, the group enters a structured amendment period with the founder’s version remaining in effect until a replacement passes.

The consent-based meta-method is the one rule that precedes all others — it resolves the bootstrap paradox by requiring only the absence of paramount objections, not unanimous enthusiasm.

Principle 6 — Bounded Referendum Right

Any member may initiate a referendum if supported by a minimum threshold of members relevant to the decision’s scope.

The threshold requirement prevents frivolous or bad-faith referenda and introduces signal — a referendum with support carries weight. The threshold is configurable by the group, but the right to initiate referenda can never be reduced to zero. Eliminating the referendum right would eliminate the mechanism for revocability (Principle 1).

Principle 7 — Scope and Subsidiarity

Decisions should be made at the lowest level competent to address them. Only those materially affected participate in referenda.

Scope is determined by structural defaults for common decision types (project-level, platform-level, individual-level). Any member may challenge the scope of a decision during deliberation by arguing they are materially affected and petitioning for inclusion. Scope challenges are resolved during the deliberation phase.

Quorum scales with scope — a decision scoped to a subgroup requires quorum from that subgroup, not the entire membership.

Without subsidiarity, the system collapses. Every decision becomes everyone’s decision, creating gridlock and fatigue.

Principle 8 — Deliberation First

All referenda must include a structured deliberation phase before voting. No decision proceeds directly to resolution without the group having the opportunity to understand the issue through multiple perspectives.

Deliberation is complete when both a minimum time floor has elapsed and participation quorum has been met. The facilitator may extend deliberation but cannot shorten it below the floor. Any member may request one extension if they believe a significant perspective has not been heard.

Voting without deliberation is preference aggregation, not governance. The deliberation phase is where understanding is built, disagreement is made legible, and the quality of the eventual decision is determined.

Principle 9 — Participation Integrity

Decisions require quorum thresholds and transparent rationale.

Three tiers of quorum prevent decisions from being made without sufficient collective engagement:

When the system detects that a small subset of members is participating in a disproportionate share of decisions, it surfaces a concentration warning. This is a signal for the group to reflect on participation health, not a gate that blocks action. The absence of formal hierarchy does not eliminate power — it can make power invisible. The system must make both formal authority and informal influence legible.

Information accessibility: Participation integrity requires not just access to information but comprehensible information. Complex issues must be presented in ways that allow all members — not just experts or veterans — to participate meaningfully. Information asymmetry is the primary mechanism of capture: those who control what others know control what others decide.

A decision made by a few members wearing collective legitimacy is not a collective decision. Quorum ensures decisions represent the group, not just its most active members.

Authority Model

CommonGround has no fixed roles and no admin/member class distinction.

Governance authority:

Operational stewardship:

Power in CommonGround is always contextual, visible, and revocable.

Membership

Membership is the active exercise of participation, not merely the possession of an account.

The community may redefine what constitutes meaningful interaction, subject to three constraints:

  1. The definition can never require spending money or possessing resources beyond platform access
  2. Changes to the liveness definition require supermajority approval
  3. The reactivation grace period before referenda is hardcoded and cannot be removed

Admission requires vouching by an existing active member. Growth is rate-capped to prevent coordinated capture.

Decision Methods

The framework supports pluggable decision methods. The default is consent-based process.

Consent-based (default):

Method changes:

Voting privacy: Members may request secret ballots for any decision. Social pressure in small groups is real — open voting can coerce conformity even without explicit intimidation. The option of anonymous voting protects the integrity of individual judgment while preserving collective decision-making.

Groups choose their method per-issue or set a space-wide default. The method layer is an open module system.

Governance sandbox:

Any subgroup may propose a time-bounded experiment with an alternative governance mechanism — a different decision method, quorum structure, deliberation format, or scope model — limited to their subgroup and bounded in duration. At the end of the experiment, results are evaluated and the mechanism is either adopted, adapted, or abandoned. Experiments and their outcomes are recorded in Civic Memory, allowing the system to evolve novel structures through controlled variation rather than wholesale change.

Mutual Aid and Solidarity

Governance is not only protective — it is generative. The system exists not just to prevent capture and abuse, but to enable members to help each other, share resources, and build collective capacity.

Cooperation is as fundamental as competition. A governance framework that designs only around preventing bad behavior will produce a defensive, legalistic culture. CommonGround should make it as easy to offer help as it is to raise objections — and should recognize acts of mutual aid as meaningful participation, not just governance actions.

The specific mechanisms for mutual aid are defined in policy, but the principle is constitutional: the commons exists to be used, not just protected.

Civic Memory

All governance decisions are recorded in Civic Memory, creating a transparent institutional history.

Decision Records contain: the issue, all perspectives surfaced, the decision method used, the outcome, the rationale, and any dissenting views. The facilitator drafts the record, which is open for objection during a review window before finalization.

Civic Memory is append-only with annotation. Records are never deleted or edited, but may be annotated with links to later decisions that supersede them.

Precedent in Civic Memory is informational, not binding. The group should learn from its history but is never trapped by it. Binding precedent creates rigidity inappropriate for a living governance system.

Metabolization: Civic Memory accumulates without limit. To prevent institutional history from becoming an archaeological barrier to new members, the group periodically produces Civic Memory digests — compressed summaries of precedent that serve as the recommended entry point. The raw records remain, but digests force periodic re-examination of whether old precedent still represents the group’s values. Digests are themselves deliberated artifacts.

Constitutional Amendment

This constitution is a living document. It evolves through the governance processes it describes.

Tier 2 amendments require a 2/3 supermajority with platform-wide scope (not subsidiarity-scoped).

Tier 1 amendments require a 2/3 supermajority with a mandatory 30-day deliberation period and platform-wide scope.

Absolute limit: No amendment may eliminate exit rights or forkability (Principle 4). These are the preconditions that make amendment itself safe. Without the right to leave, the right to change the rules is meaningless.

The constitution’s resilience comes from forkability, not from procedural armor. If the people genuinely want to change a foundational principle, the constitution should not stand in their way — and those who disagree retain the right to fork.

Conflict Resolution Between Principles

Principles will conflict under pressure. This is expected and healthy. Conflict is information, not dysfunction.

  1. Tier 1 always prevails over Tier 2. Commons Protection (Principle 3) is supreme among all principles.
  2. Between Tier 1 principles, Revocability (1), Due Process (2), and Forkability (4) are co-equal. Conflicts between them are resolved through deliberation with special attention to all affected principles.
  3. Between Tier 2 principles, conflicts become issues. The group deliberates on the tension using CommonGround itself, and the resolution is recorded in Civic Memory.

Conflict recurrence as signal: When the same type of principle conflict arises repeatedly (3+ times), the system surfaces it as a structural tension — not another issue to resolve, but a signal that the constitutional framework itself may need to evolve. Recurring conflict indicates the system’s categories are wrong, not that one side should keep winning. Structural tensions are tracked in Civic Memory and are prioritized during governance retrospectives.

The system is designed to make these conflicts visible and resolvable, not to eliminate them.

Relationship to Software

This constitution is a standalone governance design. CommonGround the software is its reference implementation.

The constitution evolves through community deliberation — using CommonGround itself where possible.

This constitution was developed through structured adversarial deliberation — itself an application of the principles it describes.