Start a community

A community exists once its Charter is ratified: the founding document that names the community, states its principles and guaranteed rights, and lists its founders. Until then, phones can pair and look around, but governance and disputes have nothing to stand on.

This page is the organizer’s half. The operator’s half, standing up the station and pairing phones, is Run a station.

Choose your founders

Founders matter beyond ceremony. Standing is earned through vouches and trade, which takes time. To avoid a dead zone where nobody can vote or sit on a jury, a young community runs in bootstrap grace: while fewer than three members are established, the electorate is the founders plus whoever is established. Your founders are the functioning government of the early community.

Three to five trusted people is a good shape for a pilot of around twenty. Fewer, and one absence stalls everything. More, and the ceremony drags.

Write the Charter

The Charter has three kinds of content:

• A community id. A short, stable name like maple-street-commons.
• Principles. What the community is for. “Mutual aid before profit.” “Decisions in the open.”
• Rights. What no vote can take away from a member. “Any member may call a vote.” “Any member may contest a transaction.”

Keep it short. A Charter is hard to change on purpose: amendments chain to the version they replace, need a higher bar than ordinary rules, and are frozen entirely during an emergency. Put durable values here and leave details to statutes.

Run the signing ceremony

There are two ways to found. Use the second.

Solo bootstrap. One command at the station makes the station’s own wallet the sole founder. Quick, and fine for a technical trial. But it makes the operator the whole grace-period electorate, which is not a founding story a real community should tell.

The founding ceremony. Founders keep their keys on their own phones and sign there. The operator opens the ceremony from the station, declaring the community id, principles, rights, and each founder’s rrn1… address. Each founder then opens the app, Community → Governance, sees “Sign the founding charter”, reads it, and taps Sign. The Charter publishes by itself once three quarters of the declared founders (rounded up) have signed.

Read the Charter aloud before anyone signs. It must say exactly what was declared; a founder who finds a typo should refuse and the ceremony is reopened.

The exact commands are in the operator’s runbook under Found the community.

The first weeks

• Vouch for everyone you actually know, and encourage members to vouch for each other. Vouches plus trade are what lift people to established, which is what ends bootstrap grace.
• Trade something real early. A community with an empty ledger has no standing anywhere. Even play-stake trades build the history that governance depends on.
• Set up social recovery, both for members and for the station. The operator arms the station’s recovery with a few trusted members as holders. Founders are natural candidates.
• Read the phase warnings. This is pilot software with no independent audit. Say so in your first meeting.