ARC Open Governance

The Foundation

The institution, in the open

ARC Open Governance is a foundation in formation, building public infrastructure for governed computation. This page states what the institution is, who decides, and what it costs to run, in the same plain register as the rest of the record.

Formation status

The foundation is in formation. Its incorporation and its application for tax exempt status are in preparation with counsel, and neither is complete today. Until they are, the institution does not hold tax exempt status, and contributions to it are not tax deductible. Nothing on this site describes them as such, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not speaking for the institution. The work is carried meanwhile by the founding team and its operating company, and the founding governance documents stand in the founding release, open to examination on the examine page.

How the institution is constituted

The organization is constituted by a mission, a campaign that actualizes the mission, a credo its members work under, and roles to which portions of the work are delegated. Roles are held by members, human and non-human alike, and membership begins by invitation. One rule stands above the structure. The institution holds no exemption from its own laws, and its own agent works under the same admission discipline it offers the world, refusals included.

Who decides

Today, decisions rest with the founder, and there is no set board yet. That sentence is the whole governance structure at this stage, stated without decoration. What disciplines it is the record. Every consequential act of the steward is proposed, settled, and signed into the founding ledger, where the reasoning stands beside the act. The founding members are named in the team section, with wider designations subject to final role definition and counsel documentation. When a board is seated, the change will appear in the ledger first and on this page at the same time.

What it costs to run

The operating footprint is deliberately small. This website is a static site. The running infrastructure is two hosted applications and one hosted database, carrying the governance wrapper and the operator console. The planning model puts infrastructure at twenty five to seventy five dollars a month, and the institution plans against a seventy five dollar monthly ceiling for infrastructure as a target to reconcile against the real billing dashboards before outside participants are invited. Those are planning figures, labeled as such until the reconciliation is complete. Infrastructure and people and research are carried as two separate budgets, because a grant that keeps servers alive and a grant that keeps researchers working are different gifts with different accounting.

Money in, money out, in public

When donations open, they will open through the support section of this site and nowhere else. Amounts received and amounts spent will be reported on this page in summary, and the acts themselves recorded in the founding ledger as governed entries, so the money trail is examinable by the same means as everything else the institution does. Commercial revenue follows the licensing model on the licensing page, entirely apart from giving. A contribution buys nothing, unlocks nothing, and confers no standing, and that separation is what keeps both lanes honest.

Impostors

An open institution with a public name attracts imitation, and the institution keeps a standing public record of what it has issued and what it has not. That record stands on the fraud and verification page, and it is the page to check before believing any claim made in the institution's name.

Status, plainly. In formation, with no board seated, no tax exempt status held, and no donations yet open. The founding release stands at NO-GO while its evidence gates complete. What is verified about the institution is on the record and examinable. What is not on the record has not happened, whatever anyone claims.

The institution

A machine-governed organization

ARC Open Governance does not only publish governance machinery. It runs on it. The foundation is operated as a machine-governed organization, which means its own consequential decisions move through the same lifecycle it offers the world.

The organization is constituted in the open, by a mission, by a campaign that carries the mission, by a credo, and by roles held by people and by machines alike. Authority attaches to roles rather than to persons, and the authority of every role is recorded, scoped, and revocable, the same discipline the authority wallet gives any member of the network. A decision of the foundation begins as a proposal, is settled under the nine laws, is released, is executed, and leaves its evidence and its receipt on the public ledger. Releases, partnerships, admissions, and budgets all move this way, and there is no side channel in which the real decision happens somewhere else.

An institution that offers governance infrastructure for the open internet has to be governable by that infrastructure, visibly, or the offer is only a claim. Running the foundation on its own machinery, with its record standing on the same public ledger anyone can verify, is the neutral position, and it is the position this work requires in the machine age. The institution holds no exemption from its own laws. Its neutrality rests on that fact rather than on its intentions, and anyone can check the fact directly, because the founding entries of the ledger are the foundation’s own acts, entered before it asked anything of anyone else.

The people

A small team, and an open institution

This work began with one inventor working from first principles, and it is held today by a founding team of three. The institution being founded around it, ARC Open Governance, is now taking active members, and its founding members are named on this page with their charges and their backgrounds.

They serve the foundation as advisors and contributors. There is no set board yet, and nothing here pretends otherwise. This is a contributor institution being built in the open, and the list below is a beginning that is meant to grow. Participation is not restricted to established researchers or companies, and the doors in the section above are open to anyone whose work can settle on evidence.

Founder and architect

Ricky Aliae

The relational model, the computer class, and the settlement discipline are his design. He works as an artist as well as an architect, and the standard he sets for the public presentation is that the work be interpretable without being diminished.

Co-founder

Alia B. Dixon

Relational modeling and institutional coherence. Alia holds the shape of the institution itself, how its parts relate, and how its language stays honest as it grows.

Co-founder and CTO

Jesse Drelick

The systems architect. Jesse turns the architecture into reliable machines, the implementations and infrastructure that have to hold when the ideas meet the world.

Community liaison and pilot strategy

Ria Rice-Lawson

A community ecosystem builder. Ria designs the pilots, makes the trusted introductions, and leads impact and integration discovery, the work that carries the institution into the communities it is meant to serve.

Infrastructure operations and technical counsel

Randal Tinsley

Director of Engineering at the Chicago Marriott Marquis, where he runs complex facilities, energy, and capital projects. Randal brings the physical systems discipline to the team, and a year of counsel behind it.

Human development, community advocacy, and advising

Ann Fox Morgan

Her ground is counseling and organizational behavior, with a practice in child psychotherapy and advocacy with the American Civil Liberties Union. Ann holds the human development side of the work, and its civic trust.

Community ally and institutional catalyst

M. Renée Orth

An attorney and a co-founder of StardUSt. Renée opens the community pilot pathway through trusted introductions and regenerative systems work, and her designation is an active one, still in development.

The names carry their credentials and backgrounds on purpose. The formation spans invention, systems execution, human development, community adoption, and physical infrastructure, because work of this size cannot be carried by one discipline. The internet serves as a public commons, and governing any part of it responsibly takes engineering, law, human development, community trust, and physical infrastructure in the same room. Each person here answers for a distinct risk between a founder-built breakthrough and institutional scale, and the mission they serve is plain. Make consequential computation accountable, verifiable, interoperable, and accessible without surrendering legitimate human authority. The wider designations above remain subject to final role definition and counsel documentation, and they are published in that spirit. Invention, execution, human systems, community, physical infrastructure, trust.

Three homes carry the work, and they are kept distinct on purpose. Syzygy Co-Lab is the research arm where the work is developed. Arc Technologies is the operating company, and it signs the pilots and partnerships. ARC Open Governance is the open institution, and it holds the standard, the release, and the public record.