The Charter
What safeguards the alliance.
An alliance meant to represent its members must be hard to take away from them. Communities like ours have been captured by their sponsors, bought by their vendors, and quietly abandoned by their organisers. We would rather write the safeguards down on day one, while there is nothing here worth taking, than negotiate them later, when there is.
These are the rules we run by, from the start:
1. Transparency
We work in the open. Our finances, our funders, our decisions, and our membership count are published as they happen, dated, where anyone can check them. When we get something wrong, the correction is attached to the original, and we say what changed our mind. The ledger is live now.
2. The commons stays free
What we build together is open to all, forever, including to people who never join. It will not be paywalled, and members do not get it earlier or better than anyone else.
3. The roll is never merchandise
Who our members are is not for sale, not for rent, and not for sharing. Joining IFA will never make you someone's lead.
4. Disagreement is safe here
Criticising IFA, in public, in any words, will never cost a member their standing. That protection is for dissent, not for harm: how members treat people is a different matter, and the community will hold its own standards of conduct against abuse and malice. Disagreeing with us is a right. Attacking people is not.
5. The alliance is not for sale
IFA belongs to its members and to no one else. It is not a startup, it has no exit, and it will not be sold, converted, or handed to any sponsor, vendor, or buyer.
6. Membership costs nothing until it has earned otherwise
Volunteering to help build and grow IFA is always welcome, and always a choice. But membership will never require money, resources, or any other concrete contribution until two things are true: the alliance can demonstrate, concretely, the value it gives its members, and the members themselves have approved the change by vote. Not one without the other.
Until the community's mechanisms exist
IFA is young. The mechanisms that should really enforce all of the above (elections, votes, formal rules, an incorporated body) do not exist yet, and defining them too early would mean deciding on behalf of a community that is still growing and evolving.
So here is the honest interim arrangement: for now, decisions are made by the founder, in the open. Every decision of consequence is logged, dated, and public. Nothing in these documents is ever edited silently. And when the alliance reaches real mass, the members will define the governance mechanisms themselves, adopt them by vote, and these safeguards will be moved from a promise on a page into foundations that no one, including the founder, can quietly undo.
That is the whole arrangement. It depends on trust, and it is meant to be checked.
Version 0.5 draft · 2026-08-09 · every change dated and published