The Open Charter

This repository is the public artifact/source archive for the published Consensus Edition 0.8.1 of The Open Charter.

The Open Charter is a constitutional governance framework for coordinating rights, safety, and accountability across biological, digital, and hybrid forms of intelligence.

The suite is structured as four interoperable documents: Core (normative constitutional text), Technical Standard (operational implementation requirements), Commentary (interpretive rationale and edge-case analysis), and Suite Map (document hierarchy and usage guidance).

This edition formalizes phased governance graduation criteria, defines founding procedures for metric legitimacy and anti-dominance protections, strengthens non-derogation and compatibility constraints, and codifies enforceable safeguards including quarantine-first containment, reversible intervention standards, auditable proof-of-effect obligations, and rights-preserving memory/identity protections.

The Charter is designed to be forkable, auditable, and implementation-ready: legally legible at the constitutional layer, technically testable at the systems layer, and adaptable under explicit anti-ossification review.

It is published as a public-interest framework for institutions, researchers, developers, and governance bodies working on advanced AI and post-human coordination.

Note

Read First (Highly Recommended)

Before reading The Open Charter, read PRAXIS:

• https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18206427 (or, https://github.com/flyingrobots/praxis)

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Canonical Release Artifacts

• Core Charter (normative): pdf/the-open-charter-core.pdf
• Technical Standard (normative, subordinate to Core): pdf/the-open-charter-technical-standard.pdf
• Commentary and Rationale (non-normative): pdf/the-open-charter-commentary.pdf
• Suite Map (non-normative guide): pdf/the-open-charter-suite-map.pdf
• Combined suite PDF: pdf/the-open-charter.pdf

Canonical Source

• Entry points: paper/main.tex, paper/charter-core.tex, paper/charter-technical-standard.tex, paper/charter-commentary.tex, paper/charter-suite-map.tex
• Shared metadata: paper/charter_meta.tex
• Structured section files: paper/parts/*.tex
• Bibliography: paper/refs.bib

Build

Requirements:

• TeX Live (or equivalent LaTeX distribution)
• latexmk
• make

Commands:

• Build all release PDFs: make
• Build Zenodo upload set (split documents): make zenodo
• Build combined source dump: make sources
• Clean build artifacts: make clean

Publication Metadata

• Version: 0.8.1
• DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18517806
• ORCID: 0009-0006-0025-7801

Citation

Please cite as:

Ross, J. (2026). The Open Charter: An Open Framework for the Recognition and Protection of Existence (v0.8.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18517806

Also available in CITATION.cff.

License

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

See LICENSE for full terms and NOTICE for preferred attribution language.

Copyright © 2025–2026 James Ross