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Dual-Track Governance

Early discovery

This page describes a separation we want to maintain between two kinds of decision. The specific shape — who sits on which track, how the boundary is enforced — is one direction we are currently exploring, not a settled architecture.

As commercial activity grows, CORPUS has to serve two radically different time scales at once. Licensing negotiations, partner onboarding, and pricing decisions need to move in days. Scoring philosophy, CRPS design, and the boundaries of acceptable downstream use need to be deliberated over months.

A single governance body for both is either too slow for the first or too fast for the second. The goal of dual-track governance is to avoid forcing that choice.

What we want the separation to do​

  • Protect the slow questions from operational pressure. Constitutional decisions — the things that define what CORPUS is — should not be made under the time pressure of a commercial negotiation.
  • Let the fast questions move at the speed they need to. Operations should not have to wait for a deliberative cycle in order to issue a license or sign a partner.
  • Make the boundary between them auditable. The line between "operational decision" and "parameter change" should be visible from the outside. A licensee should be able to verify which side of the line a given decision sits on.

The direction we are currently exploring​

The shape under design is two distinct decision-making bodies:

  • An executive track — the commercial entity, with a small professional board that can make operational decisions in real time, within parameters it does not control.
  • A constitutional track — composed of the scoring jury, external advisors (in law, AI ethics, musicology), and a representative of the institutional guardian. It convenes on a slower cadence and sets the parameters: scoring dimensions, CRPS terms, licensing principles, the distribution ratio between operational costs and the royalty pool.

The executive track may act within the parameters. It may not change the parameters themselves.

The critical design problem​

The boundary between the two tracks is where this gets hard. A contractual separation is not enough; a sufficiently motivated commercial entity can always interpret its mandate broadly. For the separation to actually protect the slow questions, it has to be enforced technically — as a constraint built into the protocol itself, not just as language in a governance document. The executive track should not be able to issue a license that violates a constitutional principle, because the system does not let it.

How exactly to do that — what counts as a "parameter," what counts as an "operational decision," how amendments to the parameters are proposed and adopted — is part of what we are working out.

What is still open​

  • Membership of the constitutional track, beyond the scoring jury.
  • Cadence and quorum for both tracks.
  • The amendment process for the parameters themselves — and the threshold for changes that affect existing contributor agreements.
  • How conflicts between the tracks are resolved when an executive decision and a constitutional principle appear to collide.

Dual-track governance is the answer to a specific problem: that operations and principles need different time scales. The detailed shape is still under design.