Constitution and Protected Principles

Draft 0.1 — 2 August 2026
This is a proposed network constitution. It has no legal force until adopted through a declared ratification process and implemented by the relevant legal entities, contracts, products, and repositories.

Preamble

ANUKA exists to make productive opportunity more open, contribution more visible, quality more measurable, and trust more portable.

The network coordinates people, companies, products, communities, and AI agents. It must therefore constrain its own power before asking participants to trust it.

This Constitution establishes protected principles, participant rights, governance duties, amendment limits, and the boundary between the network and actual legal institutions.

Constitutional scope

This Constitution governs claims made in the name of ANUKA and the shared network layer, including:

• Foundation documentation;
• shared protocols and registries;
• official network services;
• ANUKA-controlled trademarks and certification claims;
• network-level councils and delegations;
• resident status and conformance rules;
• common identity, evidence, reputation, consent, governance, and economy infrastructure.

It does not automatically govern every independent company, product, contract, or person using an open ANUKA component.

A resident product must publish which constitutional version it adopts and any permitted exceptions.

Article I — Voluntary participation

1. Participation in ANUKA is voluntary unless a separate valid contract states otherwise.
2. Participants may leave the network and revoke optional permissions.
3. Exit must not erase valid obligations, payments, legal records, security evidence, or the historical fact that an event occurred.
4. ANUKA must provide reasonable export and portability for participant-controlled identity, credentials, contributions, and consent records.
5. No participant may be forced to purchase a token, disclose unrelated personal data, or surrender all private records merely to access basic community participation.

Article II — Human dignity and contextual reputation

1. ANUKA must not create a universal score of human worth, obedience, morality, or social acceptability.
2. Reputation must remain evidence-based, contextual, purpose-limited, and contestable.
3. People must not be permanently reduced to past errors when correction, expiry, rehabilitation, or changed context is relevant.
4. Protected traits, sensitive personal data, and unrelated surveillance data must not be used as hidden reputation inputs.
5. High-impact employment, credit, housing, insurance, education, immigration, or healthcare decisions require separate legal and fairness architecture.

Article III — Consent and data minimization

1. A verifier requests named claims, evidence, or permissions—not the entire Passport by default.
2. A holder may approve all, selected items, a less revealing alternative, a shorter duration, one-time presentation, or nothing.
3. Consent must identify requester, purpose, requested items, duration, audience, retention, and onward sharing.
4. Permission at one layer does not override denial at another layer.
5. Revocation must stop future access where technically and legally possible.
6. Public availability does not automatically remove privacy, copyright, contract, or context obligations.

Article IV — Evidence and truth

1. Cryptographic verification may establish integrity, provenance, issuer, holder, timing, or status.
2. Cryptographic verification does not automatically establish truth, causation, completeness, issuer competence, or suitability for a decision.
3. Public claims must identify what was verified and the method used.
4. Material claims must support correction, dispute, revocation, supersession, and expiry where relevant.
5. Negative and neutral results must not be hidden merely because they are commercially inconvenient.

Article V — Open participation without compulsory token ownership

1. Core identity, contribution, reputation, discussion, documentation, and conventional payment functions must work without a speculative token.
2. Governance rights concerning privacy, correction, appeals, constitutional protections, and identity must not depend on wealth or token ownership.
3. A resident product may adopt a lawful token for a narrow purpose only after publishing rights, transferability, risk, governance, and legal analysis.
4. Tokens, badges, points, and attestations do not create equity or legal ownership unless valid legal instruments do so.

Article VI — Open standards, portability, and forkability

1. Shared protocols should be openly documented and versioned.
2. Reference implementations should use OSI-approved open-source licenses unless a documented exception is necessary.
3. Foundation documentation should be available under a suitable open content license, subject to trademarks, privacy, and third-party rights.
4. Participants and resident products must be able to export legitimate records in documented formats.
5. Open code and documents may be forked under their licenses.
6. Fork rights do not automatically include ANUKA trademarks, private data, hosted services, contracts, payment accounts, or legal-entity assets.

Article VII — Product autonomy and network boundaries

1. Resident products remain independent unless a legal relationship states otherwise.
2. Network governance should define shared commitments, not micromanage product roadmaps.
3. Product founders and operators retain declared reserved powers subject to applicable law, contracts, stewardship grants, and published product charters.
4. Network-wide rules must be limited to matters that genuinely require shared coordination.
5. A product may exit or fork while preserving obligations and avoiding false affiliation claims.

Article VIII — Bounded authority

1. Every material authority grant must identify scope, powers, limits, duration, review, and termination.
2. Titles such as steward, council member, maintainer, or delegate do not imply legal authority beyond the actual grant.
3. Sensitive actions require multi-party approval or an equivalent control.
4. Authority must expire or be reviewed rather than continue indefinitely by silence.
5. Conflicts of interest must be disclosed and managed through recusal, independent review, or another proportionate safeguard.

Article IX — Human accountability for AI

1. Every AI agent acts for an identified accountable principal.
2. AI agents receive only scoped permissions and data.
3. Material AI actions must be logged and attributable.
4. AI may advise, draft, summarize, simulate, and execute authorized reversible actions.
5. AI must not receive unbounded constitutional, treasury, security, moderation, employment, or legal authority.
6. A human or legally accountable organization remains responsible for consequential deployment decisions.

Article X — Due process

1. Material restrictions, suspensions, reputation consequences, payment holds, or resident-status changes require a reasoned basis.
2. Affected parties must receive notice unless immediate notice would create a documented security or legal risk.
3. Evidence and decision criteria should be available to the affected party to the extent permitted by law and security needs.
4. The affected party must have an opportunity to respond.
5. Reviewers must disclose conflicts and recuse when independence is materially impaired.
6. Appeals and correction procedures must exist for consequential decisions.
7. A dispute must not automatically become a negative reputation event.

Article XI — Transparency with legitimate confidentiality

1. Shared rules, proposals, decisions, budgets, role grants, conflicts, and amendments should be public by default.
2. Confidentiality is permitted for personal data, security vulnerabilities, legal privilege, contract restrictions, private business information, personnel matters, and protected negotiations.
3. Private decisions affecting public rights must later publish an appropriate explanation when safe and lawful.
4. Confidentiality must not be used to hide conflicts, capture, self-dealing, or retroactive rule changes.
5. Meeting records and decision artifacts should be durable and searchable.

Article XII — Honest legal language

1. Network State does not mean present sovereignty or governmental authority.
2. Resident does not mean citizenship, immigration status, or legal residency.
3. Passport does not mean a government travel document.
4. Steward does not automatically mean owner, employee, director, officer, partner, agent, or fiduciary.
5. Verified must identify the property and method verified.
6. Escrow, bank, wallet, investment, equity, certified, and similar regulated or trust-sensitive terms must be used only when accurate.
7. Network decisions do not automatically bind legal entities or third parties.

Article XIII — Security and emergency powers

1. ANUKA may authorize temporary emergency actions to protect people, funds, data, credentials, services, or network integrity.
2. Emergency powers must be necessary, proportionate, logged, time-limited, and reviewable.
3. Emergency actors may pause capabilities, revoke credentials, restrict access, preserve evidence, or disable compromised services within their charter.
4. Emergency powers must not permanently amend this Constitution, confiscate assets without lawful authority, create undisclosed surveillance, or settle unrelated political disputes.
5. A public post-incident record must be produced when safe and lawful.

Article XIV — Non-retroactivity and reliance

1. New rules should apply prospectively unless a documented security, legal, fraud, or integrity reason requires otherwise.
2. Material retroactive effects require explicit notice and heightened review.
3. Existing credentials, grants, contracts, and product promises must state how later rule versions affect them.
4. A protocol may deprecate an unsafe version, but migration and appeal paths should be provided when practical.

Article XV — Economic clarity

1. Compensation terms must be declared before substantial work begins.
2. Work performed, accepted, released, measured, attributed, and paid are separate events.
3. Extensive unpaid speculative work is prohibited by default.
4. Feature sponsorship must distinguish donation, pledge, refundable sponsorship, pre-order, purchase, and investment.
5. Internal balances must identify their legal and accounting nature.
6. Customer, sponsor, contributor, platform, and payment-provider funds must not be casually commingled.
7. Network reputation must not substitute for payment or lawful compensation.

Article XVI — Equality of access to process

1. Any affected participant should be able to discover applicable rules and processes.
2. Participation interfaces should be accessible and usable without specialized legal or technical knowledge where practical.
3. Requirement language, deadlines, decision criteria, and appeal routes should be understandable.
4. Translation and accessible formats should be added as the network expands.
5. Influence may be contextual and earned, but access to notice, correction, and appeal must not depend on wealth or popularity.

Article XVII — Governance separation and subsidiarity

1. Decisions belong at the lowest level capable of handling their effects safely.
2. Network governance must not assume authority over independent products or legal entities without a valid basis.
3. Legal entities retain the authority and duties assigned by law and governing documents.
4. Product communities govern product matters subject to their charters and shared commitments.
5. Working groups govern only their declared scope.
6. Escalation is appropriate for shared risk, protected rights, common infrastructure, shared funds, or irreversible network effects.

Protected principles

The following principles receive the highest amendment protection:

• voluntary participation and meaningful exit;
• no universal human social score;
• holder-controlled granular disclosure;
• separation of cryptographic verification from truth;
• due process for consequential restrictions;
• human accountability for AI;
• tokenless access to core network participation;
• portability and forkability of open components;
• honest legal language;
• separation of network, product, and legal-entity authority;
• emergency powers that are temporary and reviewable;
• prohibition on undisclosed retroactive rule changes.

Participant rights

Subject to applicable law, valid contracts, security, and other people’s rights, participants should have the right to:

• know which rules apply;
• understand who made a consequential decision;
• inspect relevant public evidence;
• control optional data disclosure;
• correct or contest inaccurate records;
• receive declared compensation;
• export portable records;
• leave the network;
• propose changes;
• register a formal objection;
• appeal eligible decisions;
• use open components under their licenses;
• refuse unrelated data requests.

Participant responsibilities

Participants are expected to:

• act honestly;
• disclose relevant conflicts;
• respect permissions and confidentiality;
• avoid fraudulent evidence;
• follow security requirements;
• honor accepted commitments;
• distinguish fact, inference, opinion, and simulation;
• correct known material errors;
• avoid harassment and retaliation;
• respect applicable law and third-party rights;
• avoid representing personal views as official network decisions.

Constitutional amendment tiers

Tier A — Clarification

A change that improves wording without changing rights, powers, thresholds, or substantive meaning.

Minimum process:

• public pull request;
• seven-day review;
• approval by designated Constitution maintainers;
• no unresolved substantive objection.

Tier B — Ordinary constitutional amendment

A change that modifies institutional design but does not remove a protected principle.

Minimum process:

• published proposal and impact analysis;
• at least 30 days of public review;
• responses to formal objections;
• approval by at least two relevant governance bodies;
• at least two-thirds approval among the eligible constitutional electorate;
• implementation and transition plan.

Tier C — Protected-principle amendment

A change that weakens, removes, or materially reinterprets a protected principle.

Minimum process:

• explicit identification as a protected-principle amendment;
• independent legal, security, privacy, and affected-party review as relevant;
• two separate public review periods;
• at least 90 days between initial publication and final decision;
• at least three-quarters approval among the eligible constitutional electorate;
• separate approval by any legal entities whose governing documents or assets are affected;
• documented exit and fork options before effectiveness.

No threshold guarantees legitimacy when participation is manipulated, conflicts are hidden, or affected parties lack meaningful notice.

Ratification proposal

The founding version should not become Ratified merely because it was merged into GitHub.

Ratification requires:

1. a declared eligible electorate;
2. a public review period;
3. a record of objections and responses;
4. publication of legal-entity implications;
5. approval by the designated founding bodies;
6. a signed ratification record;
7. versioned adoption by resident products and services;
8. an effective date and transition period.

Until then, the document remains a founding draft.

Constitutional review

A constitutional review should occur:

• at least annually during the founding phase;
• after a major security or governance failure;
• before introducing mandatory financial instruments;
• before creating a certification program;
• before transferring core trademarks or registries;
• before substantial cross-border expansion;
• when a protected principle repeatedly conflicts with implementation reality.

Review does not imply that every principle should change. It tests whether practices still match the declared Constitution.

Sources

• ANUKA Network State Declaration
• W3C Process Document
• Apache — A Primer on ASF Governance
• Apache Board Charter
• RFC 7282 — On Consensus and Humming
• NIST AI Risk Management Framework
• NIST Privacy Framework

Verification record

• Sources opened and checked: 2 August 2026
• Status: Founding draft
• Ratified: No
• Legal implementation review required: Yes