# Hexagram-Community Charter — version 0.1

> **Open consultation.** This first charter is published for community discussion. It is a governance direction, not a substitute for contribution agreements, licences, access conditions, or legal advice required before sensitive use or a formal partnership.

## Our mission

**Hexagram-Community** develops an open epistemic commons around the Value Hexagram. Our purpose is to bring knowledge, values, tensions, and worldviews into dialogue, so that people, collectives, and organisations can explore complex decisions in a more plural, explainable, and responsible way.

We do not seek to produce a universal map that dictates meaning. We are building a federated infrastructure that connects partial maps, documents their sources, and preserves productive disagreement.

## Our two founding principles

> **Epistemological sovereignty.** Every person and community retains meaningful oversight over how its knowledge is named, contextualised, interpreted, shared, corrected, withdrawn, or used.
>
> **Epistemological subsidiarity.** Decisions about knowledge are made at the level closest to the community, practice, and context that give it meaning. The global level coordinates interoperability, archiving, equity, and mediation only where needed, without absorbing local decision-making.

These principles draw on work on knowledge commons, epistemic justice, and community data governance [1] [2] [3].

## Our commitments

| Commitment | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| **Plurality of knowledge** | A tension may be understood differently across languages, practices, disciplines, and traditions. We make divergence visible rather than hide it behind false consensus. |
| **Right to context** | A contribution is never only a word or a data point. Whenever possible, we document its source, language, author or community, context, status, and reuse conditions. |
| **Consent and collective benefit** | Openness is not automatic permission for appropriation. Communities may define conditions for sharing, attribution, reuse, withdrawal, or collective benefit. |
| **Traceability and reversibility** | Additions, translations, interpretations, objections, and corrections must be versioned. A contribution must never silently become a system truth. |
| **Portability and non-capture** | Code, data, schemas, and archives must be exportable, verifiable, and reusable beyond any single platform, cloud provider, index, or LLM. |
| **AI as facilitator** | LLMs may help search, connect, and explain. They do not decide whether knowledge is valid or whether a tension has been resolved. Every proposal remains subject to human and contextual review. |

## Contribution and access regimes

Contributions are explicitly classified so that hypotheses, validated content, and sensitive knowledge are never confused.

| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| **Proposed** | Submitted contribution; not yet checked. |
| **Documented** | Source, context, language, and contributor have been recorded. |
| **Plural-reviewed** | Relevance, translation, and risks have been examined by several competent reviewers. |
| **Integrated into the shared core** | Connected to the common schema, versioned, and usable in public tools with provenance. |
| **Restricted or contextualised** | Sensitive, locally governed, or usable only under stated conditions. |
| **Withdrawn or contested** | Error, withdrawn consent, or unresolved controversy; not used in normal workflows. |

We use four access regimes: **open and reusable**, **open with mandatory attribution and context**, **available on request or within a trusted circle**, and **referenced without reproduction**. Knowledge attributed to a community must never be extracted, summarised, or used for model training as though it were freely available by default.

## Governance

Hexagram-Community seeks **federated and polycentric** governance. Knowledge circles — linguistic, territorial, professional, disciplinary, or organisational — may govern their own contributions. A stewardship circle maintains the coherence of the shared core, the quality of public releases, provenance standards, and first-level mediation. An epistemic-justice body will be developed to prevent erasure, appropriation, and structural bias.

Agreements with organisations, cloud providers, model providers, or licensed technologies must be transparent in their principles: no exclusivity over the shared core, exit rights, portability, confidentiality rules, attribution of contributions, and publication of generic improvements.

## Our relationship to technology

The self-contained HTML file, the data corpus, versioned archives, and open formats are the first building blocks of a shared capability. Hugging Face is a valuable public gateway, but it must not become a single point of dependence. The community will develop mirrors, documented exports, and a multi-model strategy.

Any future integration of proprietary or licensed components — including **DEMS®**, a registered trademark of Global Data Excellence — must be clearly distinguished from the open core, subject to applicable agreements and licences, and accompanied by interoperable export capability.

## How to participate

You can contribute a source, concept, translation, tension, objection, research octant, integration analysis, or use case. A quality contribution makes its context and limits explicit; it does not seek to silence other perspectives.

During the initial consultation period, comments can be submitted through the corpus repository or sent to the community. Significant feedback, responses, and version decisions will be recorded in a public governance log.

## Links

| Resource | Access |
|---|---|
| Application | [Value Hexagram](https://huggingface.co/spaces/Hexagram-Community/hexagramme-de-valeur) |
| Corpus and integration analyses | [Value Hexagram Corpus](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Hexagram-Community/value-hexagram-corpus) |
| Citable archive | [Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20811054](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20811054) |

## References

[1] [Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons](https://knowledge-commons.net/)

[2] [Sylvia Schmelkes, “Epistemic justice and the knowledge commons”, UNESCO, 2023](https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/epistemic-justice-and-knowledge-commons-lifelong-and-lifewide-learning)

[3] [Global Indigenous Data Alliance, *CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance*](https://www.gida-global.org/careprinciples)

[4] [Cecilia Rikap, *The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud*, Verso, 2026](https://www.versobooks.com/products/3259-the-rulers)