# FablePool: An Open Source Constitution with a Test Suite

> The US Constitution last shipped a release in 1992. That release sat unratified for 203 years. We think governance deserves the iteration loop software gave itself: version control, review, tests, releases.

This repository contains the **Constitutional Kernel** — a minimal set of meta-rules (how rules change, who votes, quorum, the right to fork) plus a small invariant set drawn from rules every human moral tradition converges on — along with the research that justifies every line, a specification for "userland" governance modules, and worked example configurations.

## Repository Layout

```
.
├── README.md                                  ← you are here
├── docs/
│   ├── research/
│   │   ├── comparative/
│   │   │   ├── 01-national-constitutions.md   ← 14 national / historical systems analyzed
│   │   │   ├── 02-nonstate-systems.md         ← 14 DAO / open-source / co-op systems analyzed
│   │   │   └── 03-synthesis.md                ← recurring meta-rules & recurring failure modes
│   │   └── moral-convergence.md               ← derivation of the kernel invariant set
│   └── design/
│       └── kernel-design.md                   ← the design doc: why the kernel is shaped this way
├── kernel/
│   └── constitution-v0.1.md                   ← the kernel text, line-by-line annotated
├── spec/
│   ├── userland-module-spec.md                ← how a group instantiates the kernel
│   └── module.schema.json                     ← machine-readable config schema
└── examples/
    ├── family/                                ← worked config: a household
    │   ├── config.yaml
    │   └── modules/house-rules.md
    └── dao/                                   ← worked config: a treasury-bearing collective
        ├── config.yaml
        └── modules/treasury.md
```

## Method

The kernel is not designed from intuition. It is **extracted**:

1. **Comparative analysis** (`docs/research/comparative/`) — 28 governance systems spanning 3,000 years and six organizational scales, from the Iroquois Confederacy to MakerDAO. For each: what meta-rules it uses, what failure modes it actually exhibited, what we take from it. The synthesis identifies which meta-rules *recur independently* (strong evidence they're load-bearing) and which failure modes *recur independently* (strong evidence they must be tested against).

2. **Moral convergence analysis** (`docs/research/moral-convergence.md`) — a survey of major moral traditions to find the small set of norms that appear in essentially all of them. Only convergent norms become kernel invariants; everything contested is userland.

3. **The kernel itself** (`kernel/constitution-v0.1.md`) — ~10 articles. Each clause is annotated with: *intent* (what coordination problem it solves), *attack surface* (how a bad-faith actor would try to abuse it, cross-referenced to historical failures from the research), and *parameterization* (which values userland modules may override, and the hard bounds on those overrides).

4. **The userland module spec** (`spec/`) — the kernel covers only meta-rules. Everything substantive (chores, treasury policy, moderation) lives in modules. The spec defines how a family, a Discord server, or a DAO instantiates the same kernel with different configuration, validated against a JSON Schema.

## Design Stance

**Optimism in the defaults, paranoia in the tests.** The kernel assumes participants act in good faith; the (future) test suite assumes they do not. The single highest-priority scoring rule for every future scenario: *how does the worst-off participant fare under stress?*

## Versioning

Governance semver:

- **MAJOR** — breaking change to the kernel (amendment process, suffrage, invariants). Requires supermajority as defined in Article III.
- **MINOR** — backward-compatible kernel additions, new parameterization points.
- **PATCH** — clarifications that a reasonable reader agrees change no outcome.

Userland modules version independently of the kernel and declare a kernel compatibility range.

## Milestone Status

This repo is the deliverable for **Milestone 1: Constitutional Kernel v0.1 + Design Doc**. Future milestones add the amendment pipeline (votes as CI gates), the constitutional test suite, the Incumbent Benchmark, and adversarial self-play.

## License

Text and specifications: CC-BY-SA 4.0. Forking is not merely permitted; it is a constitutional right (see Article VIII).