Governance
How decisions are made, and recorded.
How Veraq is governed and how decisions — especially those affecting participants and causes — are made and recorded.
Governance at Veraq is the part of the system that decides how the rest of the system changes. A mechanism is committed before a wave runs; an outcome is written to the open record after it ends. The decisions behind those acts — which mechanism was approved, who reviewed it, what changed and when — are themselves recorded, so that the way Veraq is run is as checkable as anything it runs.
This page describes that process. It is not a statement of intent. Each rule below corresponds to an entry someone outside Veraq can read, and the same standard applies to the people who hold authority here as to the mechanism that decides a wave.
Principles
Recorded, not asserted
A governance decision that affects participants or causes is written down, dated, and attributable. If it is not on the record, it is not a decision Veraq will act on.
Mechanism before moment
No mechanism reaches a live wave without being committed to the open record first. Review happens against the published artefact, never against a description of it.
One change at a time
Changes are made discretely and individually, so that each can be reviewed, dated, and reversed on its own. Bundled changes hide which part did what.
Reversible by default
Decisions are superseded, not erased. A later entry overrides an earlier one and cites it; the earlier record stays readable so the history of a change survives the change.
Participants and causes first
Where a decision touches how participation works or where a defined share flows, the burden is on the decision to show it is safe — not on the participant to discover that it was not.
The same standard, applied inward
Oversight roles are named and their scope is published. Authority at Veraq is a documented position, not an informal one.
How a mechanism is committed
- 01
Proposed
A change to the selection mechanism — a new version, or a revision to commit-reveal-v1 — is written up as a concrete artefact: the method, its parameters, and what it changes from the version in use. The proposal is logged.
- 02
Reviewed
The proposal is reviewed against the open-record format and the seven entities it must produce — Wave, Mechanism, Participant, Participation, Outcome, Contribution, Cause. Review covers whether outcomes remain verifiable end to end and whether the published commitment can be checked after a wave.
- 03
Committed
On approval, the mechanism version is committed to the open record before any wave uses it. The commitment is what a participant reads first and proves against later; nothing material runs ahead of it.
- 04
Run and revealed
Waves run against the committed mechanism. After each, the reveal is written to the record. A mechanism in use is a mechanism already published — there is no live version that was never committed.
- 05
Superseded
When a newer version replaces an older one, the change is recorded as a supersession that cites the version it replaces. Both remain readable, so any past wave can still be checked against the mechanism that actually decided it.
Roles and oversight
- Proposer
- Brings a mechanism version or a governance change forward as a written artefact. Anyone in scope may propose; a proposal is a record entry, not a conversation.
- Reviewer
- Checks a proposal against the open-record format, the seven entities, and the requirement that outcomes stay verifiable. Review is recorded against the proposal it examined.
- Committer
- Holds the authority to commit an approved mechanism to the open record before a wave. The commit is dated and attributable; a committed mechanism cannot be quietly swapped.
- Oversight
- Reads the decision record after the fact and confirms that what ran matches what was committed. Oversight is a published role with a published scope, not a private veto.
The decision record
Every governance decision lands in one place: a dated, append-only record of what was proposed, who reviewed it, what was committed, and what it superseded. It sits alongside the open record of waves and contributions and is read the same way.
Because entries are superseded rather than deleted, the record is also a history. You can read not only the rule in force today but the sequence of rules that led to it — when each took effect, and which earlier decision each one replaced. A change you cannot find in the record is a change Veraq did not make.
Provisional decisions
Some decisions are made to let work continue before every condition is settled. Those are marked provisional on the record, with the conditions that would confirm or revisit them stated plainly alongside.
Marking a decision provisional is not a hedge. It is an exact claim: this is firm enough to act on now, these are the open questions, and here is what would change it. When a provisional decision is confirmed or replaced, that follow-on is recorded too, so a reader can see which decisions were always tentative and which became settled.
Raising a concern
- 01
Check the record first
Most questions about why a wave resolved as it did are answerable from the open record and the decision record. Read the committed mechanism, then the reveal, then the entry that links outcome to contribution and cause.
- 02
Raise it in the open
If something does not reconcile — a wave that does not match its committed mechanism, a contribution that does not reach a named cause, a decision missing from the record — raise it. A concern about verifiability is treated as a defect in the system, not a complaint about it.
- 03
Disclose responsibly
For issues that could affect participants if made public before they are fixed, use responsible disclosure rather than an open channel, and allow time to remedy before wider publication.
The way Veraq is run is held to the same rule as a wave: committed, recorded, and open to anyone who wants to check it.