Mycelix — Governance Mechanisms and Rights

Governance: Mechanisms and Rights

Every section below distinguishes implemented protocol behavior from proposed governance rules — the two are not the same maturity level, even when described next to each other.

Who has power today?

Current authority: Mycelix is presently designed and maintained primarily by its founder. Profile dimensions, weights, thresholds, and constitutional proposals have not been ratified by an independent community. No public institution or civic population has delegated governing authority to the system.

Who can change the code?: The maintainer, and anyone with a merged PR — there is no separate approval body. Current project governance
Who can change scoring parameters?: The maintainer, unilaterally, today. Current project governance
Who decides which evidence is valid?: The maintainer's own internal review, disclosed on this site — not independently audited. Current project governance
Who can approve a real-world deployment?: No approval process exists; none is recommended today. Proposed — missing
Who handles appeals?: No appeals process exists for participation-profile decisions today — a disclosed gap, not a hidden one. Proposed — missing
Who can disable dangerous functionality?: No deployment-wide suspension, rollback, or community-controlled emergency mechanism is currently specified. Proposed — missing
Who is accountable when the system causes harm?: No deployment accountability framework exists today. The maintainer is responsible for the project's current design, publication, and research decisions. Any real deployment would additionally require a named operating entity, applicable jurisdiction, incident response, appeal, remedy, insurance or liability arrangements, and clear responsibility for local operators. Proposed — missing

Multidimensional Participation Profile

An experimental, four-dimensional profile — Identity (25%), Reputation (25%), Community (30%), Engagement (20%) — that this protocol uses to gate governance-tier capabilities. This profile is not a validated measure of consciousness, moral worth, or a person's civic value. Its dimensions are design choices, not discovered natural facts, and a global composite score should not be treated as authoritative. It was renamed from "Consciousness-Gated Participation" because that name implied a settled measurement this protocol doesn't actually make. Implemented

Research status This mechanism is not validated for real-world civic governance, public elections, employment, healthcare, credit, access control, or allocation of legal rights. It is an experimental simulation and protocol-design mechanism. The risk isn't only the old "consciousness" label — any unilateral multidimensional score controlling political participation can become a mechanism of exclusion, regardless of what it's named.

Role names below (Citizen, Steward, Guardian) are this protocol's internal design vocabulary, not a claim about real civic citizenship or constitutional authority — those terms are reserved for the Philosophy page unless a real legal/institutional context someday applies.

Participation tiers as currently coded — a design, not a live deployment
Tier	Min Score	Vote Weight	Capabilities
Observer	0.0	0	Read-only access
Participant	0.3	5,000 bp	Basic proposals
Citizen	0.4	7,500 bp	Binding votes
Steward	0.6	10,000 bp	Protocol rule changes (not legal constitutions)
Guardian	0.8	10,000 bp	Proposed emergency coordination — unimplemented and governance-blocked Blocked

Guardian tier — precise status No deployable Guardian emergency-power mechanism is currently approved. The public design does not yet define adequate scope, quorum, duration, audit, revocation, or appeal constraints. This blocks real-world deployment. Any future implementation would require strict scope, automatic expiry, quorum, auditability, appeal, override, conflict-of-interest controls, and independent review before being presented as available — not just designed.

This table describes the code's design, not a live deployment with real "Guardians" holding real emergency power over real people. Full risk register: Risks page.

Baseline participation rights

A reputation-gated system risks implying that all participation must be earned. These are meant as a non-negotiable floor, not something a low score can remove — a design commitment, not yet independently enforced in code. Proposed

Right to inspect decisions affecting oneself
Right to challenge evidence used against you
Right to correct identity data
Right to appeal sanctions
Right to leave
Right to export your own data
Right to fork, where legally and technically possible
Right to communicate criticism
Right not to be assigned a secret score
Right not to have unrelated domain history reused against you
Right to know which rule version produced a decision

Three Experimental Economic Primitives

Not one metric but three, each serving a distinct function that no single token can fulfill. Implemented and tested; not yet used in any real economy. Implemented

MYCEL

Non-transferable reputation credential (0.0 – 1.0)

Non-transferable by protocol design. Its value is computed from configured participation and attestation rules, which remain provisional and vulnerable to capture or gaming. Decays without activity.

SAP

Demurrage-bearing exchange medium

2% annual decay returns idle wealth to commons as compost: 70% local, 20% regional, 10% global. "Mintable against physical assets" is a prototype design, not a live asset-backed financial instrument.

TEND

Hour-denominated mutual credit

TEND is currently modeled as hour-denominated mutual credit, zero-sum. Real communities would still need to determine equivalence, accessibility, skill, intensity, care work, and dispute rules — none of that is specified yet. Cultural naming is sovereign (TEND, CARE, HOURS); protocol stays interoperable.