What Remains Open
Governance is the least settled part of CORPUS. The other pages in this chapter describe what we want to achieve and the directions we are exploring. This page is an explicit list of what we have not yet decided.
Most of what follows is not under-developed by oversight. It is under-developed because some of these questions should not be settled by the team that runs CORPUS today; they should be settled with the contributor community whose work and interests they govern. Listing them here is part of the commitment to make that visible.
The organizational form itself
The legal shell for CORPUS is not decided. A cooperative, a company with an institutional guardian, and a transitional company that converts into a cooperative later are all under evaluation. See The Foundation for the options and their trade-offs. This choice governs whether CORPUS can raise investor capital, whether it can ever be sold, and how contributor control is anchored.
The legal form of CRPS
CRPS, the participation rights contributors accumulate alongside royalty points, needs a legal vehicle. The candidates currently under evaluation include Genussrechte under German law, tokenised securities under Swiss DLT legislation, and hybrid structures combining cooperative membership with participation rights. The choice has implications for tax treatment, transferability, and the contributor's standing in the institutional layer. It is being evaluated in parallel with the organizational form rather than ahead of it.
Three sub-questions are open and shape what CRPS is actually worth: what share of a future sale CRPS represents relative to the company's shares; whether that participation is structural or depends on a buyer honoring it; and how issuing participation rights to many contributors is handled under securities and investor-protection law. Until these are settled, CRPS is a real but unquantified stake, and we will not present it as more than that.
What the protocol opens, and when
CORPUS is described as an open protocol. The honest version is that some components are best opened earlier (the scoring methodology, the audit framework, the data standards for contributions) and some require commercial maturity before they can be opened without undermining the institutional layer (the semantic pipeline). The scope, sequence, license terms, and the mechanism for independent verification are not yet fixed. They will be defined in consultation with the contributor community and with technical partners.
Federated learning infrastructure
The choice of secure compute providers, the design of the training API, the audit-logging architecture: all in active development and will be piloted with initial industry partners before being committed to as the standard path. See How Contributions Are Protected for what the current direction looks like.
The mechanisms of contributor influence
A great deal about the scoring jury is open: panel size, term length, rotation, how questions reach the panel, whether its output is binding or advisory, how its mandate extends beyond scoring. These will be worked out with the first cohort of contributors who sit on it, not predetermined and handed to them.
The venue for these conversations
The deliberation tool through which contributors will participate in these decisions is itself being built right now, alongside the protocol. The shape of the conversation (what counts as a proposal, how the community works through disagreement, when something is ready to become a decision) is being designed at the same time as the substance of the decisions themselves. This is a circular problem and we are working through it openly.
What this list is for
Listing what is open is not a confession of weakness. It is a feature of how a protocol that takes contributor governance seriously is built: the founders do not get to pre-decide the questions that should belong to the community, and writing the open questions down is how that promise becomes legible.
If any of these questions are ones you want to be part of working out, that is exactly the point. See Why Governance Matters for how this fits together, and How to Join for the first step.