# Fractalish Constitutional Governance

Status: ACTIVE GOVERNANCE DRAFT
Version: 0.1
Date: 2026-08-09

## Governing Principle

The Fractalish Constitution is canonical-candidate but living.

> OPEN TO CHALLENGE. RESTRICTED IN RATIFICATION. PERMANENTLY VERSIONED.

Anyone may propose a refinement. Ratification requires designated Fractalish constitutional steward review.

## Change Requirements

A constitutional change must include:

1. the exact language proposed for addition, replacement, or removal;
2. rationale for the change;
3. affected definitions and project surfaces;
4. affected claim boundaries;
5. distinction between conceptual clarification and empirical discovery;
6. review by designated constitutional stewards;
7. version increment or explicit no-version-change rationale;
8. preserved prior version history;
9. confirmation that historical artifacts are not silently rewritten.

## RFC Path

Substantive candidate ideas should mature through the RFC directory before they become constitutional language.

RFCs are allowed to be exploratory. Ratified constitutional changes are not.

## Protected Surfaces

The following files and folders should require constitutional steward review before merge:

- `/CONSTITUTION.md`
- `/GOVERNANCE.md`
- `/rfcs/`
- `/docs/canonical/`

No CODEOWNERS file is created in this pass because no repository team or user handle was supplied for the constitutional stewards. Recommended GitHub configuration:

- create or identify a real steward team or individual account;
- add CODEOWNERS entries for the protected surfaces above;
- require CODEOWNERS review on the default branch;
- require the site validator to pass before merge;
- prohibit force-pushes to the protected branch.

## Historical Lineage Rule

Current pages may recontextualize the program. Historical artifacts remain historical. Later constitutional language must not be inserted into dated papers, frozen experiments, or archived records in a way that implies the formulation existed before August 2026.

## Namespace Rule

Identically spelled states are not automatically equivalent. The repository maintains separate project vocabularies for epistemic status, Cognitive Basin action, Natural Math process operators, first-verb hypotheses, Specificity posture, and related project-specific states.