Miniato

Governance

Miniato belongs to no company, government, AI provider or individual. It exists to create a transparent, reproducible and open public record of the consequences of artificial intelligence. Its evidence, methods and disagreements should be inspectable; its data should be reusable; its classifications should be challengeable; and its governance should progressively move from its founder to an independent scientific community.

Source: Constitution and Governance Charter, preamble (agreed).

Public Trust Principles

  1. Public-interest purpose. Miniato exists to improve public understanding and AI safety.
  2. Consequence fidelity. Severity describes realised consequences under a declared Miniato Rules version.
  3. Evidence inspectability. Evidence and provenance are public whenever legally, ethically and safely possible.
  4. Honest uncertainty. Unknown facts are not replaced with favourable or dramatic assumptions.
  5. Challengeability. Every public assessment can be challenged with reasons and evidence.
  6. No silent history rewrite. Superseded assessments remain retrievable.
  7. Method versioning. Every public assessment names its rules version and cut-off.
  8. Funding independence. Funding cannot purchase outcomes, suppress records or confer methodological votes.
  9. Open knowledge. Public factual data, methods and reference software remain openly reusable to the greatest lawful extent.
  10. Plural governance. No company, government, AI provider, funder or individual may permanently control Miniato.
  11. Conflict transparency. Relevant financial, employment, research and institutional conflicts are declared.
  12. Right to fork knowledge. The open corpus, method and software stay portable enough for community continuity if governance fails.
  13. Protected trust mark. Openness does not grant permission to impersonate Miniato.org or to present a modified method as canonical.

Source: Constitution §1. These principles require the highest threshold to amend.

Founding phase

There is no funded team yet. The founder acts as Founder Custodian: accepting initial contributions, publishing releases and approving operational architecture, while using the same public process intended for the future community, publishing methodological changes as Miniato Improvement Proposals, disclosing conflicts and preparing the transfer of control. Founder authority does not include deleting historical decisions or evidence of previous assessments. The founding phase is temporary by design; the transition is triggered by objective readiness, not by a calendar promise, and its exact thresholds are still to be ratified.

Source: Constitution §§2, 5; Decision Register D-018, D-019, D-031.

How rules change

Normal methodological decisions use rough consensus and running corpus: a proposal is public, the proposed rules are run against a frozen corpus, the impact on scores and disagreement is published, domain specialists review affected areas, and substantive objections must be answered rather than outvoted. Voting is a fallback for governance deadlocks, not the scientific method. Token ownership never confers voting power.

Source: Constitution §§4, 6–8; Decision Register D-028 to D-030.

Challenges and right of reply

Every public assessment will be challengeable (factual, evidence, attribution, classification, scope or procedural challenges). Involved organisations may respond and submit evidence; they cannot unpublish an accurate record by objecting. The challenge mechanism is not open yet: no incident has been published.

Source: Challenge, Dispute, Correction and Appeal Policy §§1–5.

Funding and conflicts

Miniato is a public good without commercial incentives around classification. Public classifications cannot be purchased. At this time the project has no external funding; it is developed by the founder as an independent researcher. Conflicts of interest will be declared here as they arise.

Source: Product Charter §9; Constitution principles 8 and 11; Decision Register D-016.

Full texts: the charter, constitution and decision register are part of the specification pack, which is not yet published; it will be released through an authorized route before launch and linked from here once it is reachable without an account. Until then the statements above are the public summary. See also about.