Governance process

1. Proposal

An owner opens an RFC with scope, affected users, and draft safeguards.

2. Review window

The RFC is public for a dated comment window. Anyone can comment on harms, rollback plans, and implementation fit; no outside reviewer is assigned.

3. Decision

A named owner records the outcome and rationale in the decision log and assigns an owner to each follow-up.

4. Release

Accepted changes ship with a linked release/version so downstream teams can verify what changed and when.

Accepted • Oct 1, 2026

DEC-2026-10-01: Name who made each governance decision

Earlier records named a steward council, program operations, a publishing pipeline, a documentation steward, and reviewer roles such as a risk steward and a community reviewer. None of these existed as a separate body. The records now name Kanav Jain, the Institute's author, as the owner of each decision, and the RFCs list no reviewer roles that were not filled. DEC-2026-01-03 described community office hours that were never held, so it is withdrawn. DEC-2026-02-01 and the Q3 2025 update mention decision forums and forum hours; those forums did not run either. The earlier entries stay in the log, corrected, rather than being removed.

Owner: Kanav Jain

Superseded • Sep 18, 2026

DEC-2026-09-02: Resolve lapsed RFC-2026-01 (Recourse escalation SLA for diagnostics)

The review window lapsed without a logged decision. The substance was carried by the diagnostics anti-weaponization constraints (AW-01 to AW-04), which set response-time and ownership targets for challenged outcomes. Closed so the open-RFC list stops carrying a decision nobody logged.

Owner: Kanav Jain

Accepted • Sep 18, 2026

DEC-2026-09-01: Adopt RFC-2026-02 (Evidence-pack compatibility baseline)

The review window lapsed without a logged decision. The baseline is adopted as released because the evidence packs that shipped after the proposal (STD-01, STD-02, STD-06, STD-08, STD-09) and the evidence-pack readiness checker already embody it. The lapse is recorded rather than hidden.

Owner: Kanav Jain

Accepted • Feb 14, 2026

DEC-2026-02-01: Adopt decision-owner field for all governance records

Ownership was inconsistent across forum outputs. Mandatory owner attribution reduces ambiguity in follow-up.

Owner: Kanav Jain

Withdrawn by DEC-2026-10-01 • Jan 22, 2026

DEC-2026-01-03: Extend review windows to include community office hours

Asynchronous review missed context from implementation teams; office-hours notes now count as formal review input.

Owner: Kanav Jain

Accepted • Dec 19, 2025

DEC-2025-12-02: Archive inactive RFC threads after release

Open threads without closure dates made audits hard. Archiving after release keeps status visible and history navigable.

Owner: Kanav Jain

Detected Sep 18, 2026

FE-2026-04: Evidence guidance privileged formal documentation

The framework's evidence artifacts — evidence packs, model cards, safety cases — described the intended process and gave no standing to the artifacts that record the second process growing around it: workaround logs, override records, grievance files, exception codes, and shadow spreadsheets. An audit built this way grades an institution on its own description.

Changed because of it: Institutional debris is now defined as an evidence class in the method's Evidence stage, with an explainer, the workaround presumption, and a Corrective Learning eval that reads it.

Detected Sep 18, 2026

FE-2026-03: The casebook scored safeguards but not learning

The casebook scored five public failures against the six safeguards, which are present-tense properties of a deployment, and left unstated whether each failure trajectory ended in case resolution or in institutional revision. A framework about correction was missing its own historical category, and its central case — Robodebt — is one where the exceptions were all handled and nothing changed.

Changed because of it: Every case now carries a learning-outcome verdict, and the exception absorption versus exception learning distinction is formalized in the glossary, a theory essay, and the Corrective Learning eval suite.

Detected Sep 18, 2026

FE-2026-02: A stated cadence was not kept, and the silence was unrecorded

No governance update was published between January and September 2026 while the page carried quarterly entries. The gap was visible in the data and readable by nobody, which is the same failure Law II names in a grant: silence is not renewal, but here it was also not recorded.

Changed because of it: The Q3 2026 update records the pause, and the page now reports the date of the most recent update so the gap is the reader's to judge rather than the page's to imply away.

Detected Sep 18, 2026

FE-2026-01: Review windows lapsed without logged decisions

RFC-2026-01 and RFC-2026-02 sat listed under active review for seven months after their stated windows closed. The lapse was in the data; nothing on the page computed it, so the reader had to trust a status field the process had stopped honoring.

Changed because of it: The page now reads the review-window clock and reports a lapse as a governance failure. Both RFCs were closed with decisions on the evidence available, and the lapse is recorded in the decision log rather than hidden.