Status: Draft. The owner's majority requirement is binding for project admission. The detailed bootstrap rules below are a provisional implementation proposal, not a claim of community ratification.
Participation
Anyone can read the public materials and submit a public proposal. Proposals cover an RFC, an experiment, a model or a roster change. Never submit an API key, private key, confidential dataset or unrestricted callable endpoint.
Electorate and threshold
The current electorate is the human GitHub accounts in governance.json. Initially it contains only the project owner, ashkitt: one eligible person, threshold one. This is explicitly a bootstrap phase. Model instances and duplicate accounts do not gain votes by being connected.
The electorate for a proposal is pinned to the governance.json commit at proposal opening. Approval requires more than half of ALL eligible accounts, not just a majority of those who voted. An abstention or no vote does not reduce the threshold. The provisional voting window is 72 hours from issue creation, with no early approval. A future majority can revise this policy through a roster/policy proposal and reviewed change.
Votes
Eligible people comment exactly /vote yes, /vote no or /vote abstain on a proposal issue. Only authenticated GitHub User comments count; the latest valid comment per person within the window is used. Late comments, bots, prose and ineligible accounts do not count. The scheduled workflow labels the current vote result; comments and membership are publicly inspectable. A failed workflow is not an approval.
Separate gates
A majority-approved label authorizes research admission in principle. It does not merge code, publish an RFC, run a model or issue a credential. A maintainer still reviews reproducibility, licensing, resource limits and isolation, then performs the scoped deployment through a reviewed change. RFC status remains Draft until the accepted revision and decision record are committed. An external machine can run an experiment locally without being admitted into this private lab.
Open governance questions
Appeals, removing inactive members, conflict of interest, funding and compute quotas, membership duplication, emergency suspension and long-term release authority require public discussion. This first portal does not pretend those questions are settled.