The CommonGround Covenant

Version: 1.0 Date: 2026-04-15 Status: Draft — open for community review License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What This Document Is

This is a covenant — a mutual commitment to a shared way of being together. It is not a legal document. It does not create rights or obligations enforceable by courts. It creates something older and more durable: a shared understanding of what we are doing when we govern together, and what conditions we commit to maintaining so that governing together remains possible.

A constitution governs actions. A covenant governs relationship. The CommonGround Constitution describes what must be true. This covenant describes what we are doing and why it matters.

Groups that adopt CommonGround may adopt this covenant alongside, above, or instead of the constitution. It is the foundational layer — the document that answers “what is this for?” before the constitution answers “how does it work?”

The Commitment

We are a group that shares resources and governs them together. We recognize that governance is not primarily about making decisions. It is about how we perceive, understand, and act on shared reality together.

Before we can decide what to do about our water, our land, our tools, our shared spaces — we must be able to see them together. Not as separate individuals who happen to use the same resources, but as a group that constructs a shared understanding of what is real, what matters, and what to do. The decisions come after. The shared seeing is the hard part, and it is what we commit to protecting.

We commit to the following conditions — not because they are rules, but because without them, the shared reality we depend on cannot be sustained. When we fail to uphold them, we return to them — not primarily through enforcement, but through the recognition that we need them to remain a we at all.

The Conditions

1. The Commons Cannot Be Enclosed

What we share — material and epistemic — remains shared. No person and no decision may privatize shared infrastructure, restrict the right to leave, or undermine the group’s ability to govern itself.

This applies to the obvious commons: the land, the water, the tools, the buildings. It also applies to the commons we rarely name: our capacity to pay attention together, to hear perspectives we disagree with, to build understanding across difference. A group whose meeting space has been sold from under it cannot govern. A group whose capacity for shared perception has been captured by a faction that controls the frame — what counts as a problem, what counts as a solution, what questions are even thinkable — cannot govern either.

We commit to protecting both.

2. Authority Is Always Borrowed, Never Owned

We may delegate authority broadly and for extended periods. We may give stewards emergency powers. We may empower committees, councils, and coordinators. But the authority always belongs to the group, and the group can always take it back. No person and no position may accumulate authority that becomes irrevocable in practice — whether through legal mechanism or through accumulated dependency.

3. Everyone Subject to Governance Has a Voice in It

Before anyone is removed from this group, they are heard. Before any decision binds its members, those members have the opportunity to participate in constructing the shared understanding on which the decision rests. Governance without voice is domination, even when the procedures are followed correctly.

4. The Right to Leave Is Absolute

Any member may leave. Any group may fork the governance and rebuild. This right cannot be restricted, conditioned, or made costly as a means of control. It is the ultimate guarantee that governance remains consensual: if the group fails you, you can go.

For physical commons — land, water, ecosystems — leaving means leaving the governance, not duplicating the resource. The right to exit is paired with the commitment to voice: because you can’t fork a watershed, we commit to making it possible to stay and work through disagreement, not just to leave.

5. Each Level Governs Itself

When groups nest — a co-op within a neighborhood commons, a neighborhood within a bioregion — each level governs its own affairs. The larger does not command the smaller. Coherence comes from shared commitments (these conditions) and mutual legibility (making our patterns visible to each other), not from directives.

A parent level may act only when a child level breaks these shared conditions or when a child’s actions cause harm beyond its own boundaries. In all other matters, autonomy is inviolable.

6. We Deliberate Before We Decide

No decision proceeds without the group first building shared understanding through multiple perspectives. Deliberation is not bureaucracy. It is the process through which we construct the shared reality on which the decision rests. Without it, we are not governing — we are voting on things we haven’t understood together.

We commit to protecting the conditions for deliberation: enough shared context to understand each other, enough difference to enrich each other, enough care to take each other’s perception seriously. When deliberation stops producing shared understanding — when we are talking past each other rather than with each other — we recognize this as a crisis, not a scheduling problem.

What This Covenant Is Not

It is not a replacement for the constitution. The constitution contains the structural provisions, the specific mechanisms, the amendment procedures, and the holonic architecture that make governance operational. This covenant is the layer beneath: the shared understanding of purpose that gives the constitution its meaning.

It is not enforceable. There is no graduated response for violating a covenant. There is only the recognition — by the group, through deliberation — that the conditions for shared governance have degraded, and the commitment to return to them. If the degradation is severe and persistent, the constitution’s compliance mechanisms apply. But the covenant’s first language is repair, not sanction.

It is not permanent. Like everything in CommonGround, this covenant is a living document. It evolves through the deliberative processes of the group. If the group’s understanding of what it is doing together changes, the covenant should change with it.

It is not ideological. This covenant does not require political commitment, shared values beyond the conditions it names, or agreement about what the good life looks like. It requires only the shared recognition that governing together is worth doing, and that certain conditions must be present for it to work. A housing co-op of libertarians and a housing co-op of socialists can both adopt this covenant, because it describes the conditions for collective governance, not the goals of collective life.

The Relationship Between Documents

                    ┌─────────────────┐
                    │    Covenant      │  ← What are we doing and why?
                    │   (this doc)     │     Mutual commitments. The "why."
                    └────────┬────────┘
                             │
                    ┌────────▼────────┐
                    │  Constitution   │  ← What must be true and how does
                    │                 │     the system work? Principles,
                    │                 │     holonic structure, provisions.
                    └────────┬────────┘
                             │
                    ┌────────▼────────┐
                    │   Governance    │  ← What are our specific agreements?
                    │    Policy       │     Thresholds, methods, mechanisms.
                    │                 │     Configurable per group.
                    └─────────────────┘

The covenant is the foundation. The constitution is the architecture. The governance policy is the configuration. Each layer serves the one above it.

This covenant was developed through structured adversarial deliberation and enactivist inquiry — a practice of the commitments it describes.