Governance

How the Order makes decisions — admitting members, awarding and revoking Charges, relieving members, and changing the canon — without the process rotting into politics, favoritism, or an in-group’s plaything.

The first principle

Mystery in the rites, transparency in the judgment. Every decision the Order makes — not only those that touch a person’s standing — is recorded and published as a Decision Record (DR) stating the grounds, the ruling, and who made it. DRs live in decisions/. The deliberation behind a decision may be private; the record never is. In this Order, authority always comes with more transparency, never less.

Authority is a Charge, not a rank

Serving on a council is not a promotion — it is a duty taken up, the Charge of the Council. Like every Charge, it is lateral: a councillor carries a heavy watch — deciding on behalf of others — but does not outrank anyone. Bearing many Charges does not make you a councillor, and sitting on a council does not make you more honored than any other member. This is how the Order can have a structure for decisions without a hierarchy of worth. The tiers below order decisions, never people.

Serving is earned — and laid down honorably

The Charge of the Council is elected, not given; held only while you keep it; and able to be set down or taken back. Seats carry terms and must be re-earned, and a councillor can be recalled.

But losing a seat is not a disgrace, and it is not leaving the Order. A recall costs you the Charge of the Council — nothing more. You remain a full member; you simply no longer hold that watch. Treat it like a peaceful transfer of power: whether a term simply ends or a councillor is recalled because they fell short, the outgoing person steps down with honor — never mocked, never diminished for it. People make mistakes; a misstep in office is not a stain on the person. And they owe the Order the same grace in return: they accept the collective decision and do everything to make the handoff seamless.

A recall is never a permanent ban. A recalled councillor can take up the Charge of the Council again in the future — they simply have to win their sect over and be re-elected, like anyone else.

The one exception is grave, and it is a separate matter: if a councillor also broke a moral, that triggers removal from the Order itself — the cast-out tier (see removal). Losing a seat is honorable and keeps you in the Order. Being cast out of the Order is not the same thing, and the two should never be confused.

The councils

The Order governs through councils, never through individuals.

Elected by the sect they serve — never appointed by sitting councillors. Co-optation (leaders hand-picking their successors) is how an order curdles into an oligarchy; we forbid it structurally.
Odd-numbered, minimum three. An odd seat count means a council can never tie with itself.
One council, one voice. A council reaches its position by its own internal majority, then acts and votes at its tier as a single body.

Sects and tiers

A sect is a chapter of members; each sect elects a council.

The Order begins as one body — the World Sect. Everyone who joins belongs to it, and it elects the World Council, which is at once the Order’s highest authority and, for now, everyone’s local council. There is no need to stand up empty tiers for a membership that fits in one room.

As the Order grows, the World Sect subdivides — into national, then state, then local sects, each electing its own council. The tiers come into being only when membership demands them, and the chain of authority extends downward as they do:

World → National → State → Local (sect)

So we start big and split as needed, rather than building a hierarchy before there are people to fill it.

How decisions flow — down from the top, checked from below

This is the core mechanic, and it governs every decision: morals, Charges, admissions, removals, policy.

Decisions flow down. A higher council can override a lower one. World binds national, national binds state, state binds sect. Authority descends.
The tier below can push back — collectively. The councils of a tier can override the tier above them by a simple majority of those councils. If the World Council decides X and a majority of national councils disagree, the nationals override it. States can override their nation; sects can override their state — the same way.
The membership is the floor. A sect’s own members can override their local council by a majority vote of the sect’s members. Above the local level a tier is checked by the councils beneath it; at the very bottom, the people themselves hold the check directly.
Ties favor the standing decision. Because the number of councils at a tier isn’t guaranteed odd, an override vote among them can tie. A tie fails the override — the higher council’s decision stands.

The shape of it: authority descends, accountability ascends. Nothing is imposed from the top that the levels below can’t collectively undo; nothing rules from below that the members didn’t choose.

Amending the canon

Nothing in the canon is frozen. Anything written in these docs can be changed or amended the way everything else happens here: by a Decision Record the council approves (see decisions/). Propose the change as a DR; the council with jurisdiction weighs it on published grounds; if approved, it’s recorded and the doc is updated.

Ordinary canon changes by a majority of the council with jurisdiction. The foundational layer — the morals — carries a steeper bar and runs bottom-up: it takes the 65% consent of the tier beneath the one that owns the rule (a World moral needs 65% of the nations, a national moral 65% of its states, a state moral 65% of its sects, a sect moral 65% of its members). The level that lives under a rule is the level whose approval can change it. Changing what is foundational should be hard.

Elections

Every council is chosen by direct vote of the members in its scope — a sect’s members elect their sect council, a nation’s members its national council, and so on to the World. Leaders never choose leaders.

Standing. Any member in good standing may stand. To reach the ballot, a candidate is nominated and seconded by at least two other members in scope.
Seats. Each council holds an odd number of seats, minimum three; a council sets its own size — kept odd — as its scope grows.
The vote. Members rank the candidates, and seats are filled by a ranked-choice count — so a council reflects broad support, not whoever shouted loudest.
Open and recorded. Every result is published as a Decision Record, like everything else.

Terms and recall

Terms. A seat is held for a fixed term of two years, then stands for re-election. No one serves more than two consecutive terms on the same council before sitting out at least one term — you re-earn the watch, you don’t settle into it.
Recall. Members need not wait for a term to end. A recall is petitioned by at least one-third of the members in scope and decided by a simple majority of them. It can remove a single Warden or a whole council. Recall costs the seat, never membership, and a recalled member may stand again (see the Charge of the Council).

Subsidiarity — decide at the lowest competent tier

By default a matter is decided at the lowest tier that fully contains it. A sect’s admissions, Charges, and removals are the sect’s own; a matter that spans sects rises to the state, and so on up. The World tier handles only what is genuinely Order-wide — the morals, the creed, the rites, and disputes that cross the tiers below. Authority still descends and is checked from below (above), but the first venue for any decision is as local as the matter allows. Higher tiers don’t reach down into what a lower tier can settle for itself.

Settling a decision — no endless ping-pong

Override is a check, not a tug-of-war. Once a decision is made and any override resolved, the same question is settled for one term and cannot be re-litigated in that window unless circumstances materially change. This keeps the bidirectional override from rotting into an endless reversal loop.

When the Order federates

The tiers come into being as the Order grows, on the World Council’s judgment, guided by these thresholds:

A sect that outgrows being governable as one body — as a rule of thumb, beyond roughly 20 members — may split into sibling sects, so a sect stays small enough that people actually know each other.
A higher tier forms when there are enough sects beneath it to need coordination — roughly three or more sects in a region warrant a state council; three or more states, a national council; and so on.

These are guides, not triggers; each split is itself a published decision.

What runs through the councils

At minimum: admitting members, awarding and revoking Charges, relieving members (see removal), stewarding the rites, and amending the morals and canon. Keep this surface deliberately small — the fewer decisions that require authority, the less there is to abuse. Everything else, a member simply does.

Each of these — admission, the awarding and revoking of Charges, and removal — needs a formal, written process of its own, defined in its home doc (membership, charges, removal) and producing a public Decision Record (DR) like everything else.

Checks against cliques

All structural, not trust-based:

A public Decision Record (DR) for every decision — grounds, ruling, and who made it, in the open.
Members elect; councillors never appoint their own successors.
Terms and recall, so no seat becomes a person’s identity.
Bidirectional override, so no tier — top or local — is unaccountable.
A member’s guaranteed right of reply before any decision against their standing.