Governance

Status: Proposed governance for the v0.1 Public Draft
Current operating state: Transitional founding stewardship; no committee is represented as seated unless listed in LIVE_VS_PLANNED.md

This document is normative for project decision-making. It does not claim that the proposed bodies are already staffed or independent. The Independence and Institutional Firewall is the controlling activation boundary for any future real-person assessment, result, tier, credential, or independence claim.

1. Objectives

Governance exists to protect:

construct and measurement quality;
release integrity and reproducibility;
candidate privacy, correction, accommodation, and appeal;
independence from employers, training, platforms, sponsors, and personal relationships;
transparent contributions and change history;
controlled official cases and anti-gaming protections;
accurate public claims and disclosed limitations.
separation of benchmark authority from training, employment, staffing, sales, and sponsor influence.

2. Transitional v0.1 governance

LockedIn Labs is the founding steward during v0.1. Until the bodies below are seated:

interim specification and repository decisions are made by the founding steward and recorded publicly;
no decision may activate official numeric scoring, verified profiles, certification, or high-impact employment use;
no future human result, tier, or credential may be activated before an external-majority Commission and the institutional firewall are operational;
outside organizations must not be described as governing, endorsing, signing, or validating the project;
sponsor funding must not confer a vote or privileged access;
a training, employment, staffing, recruiting, or services pathway must not be represented as the benchmark or receive candidate-private benchmark data by default;
unresolved conflicts and missing independent review must be disclosed.

The first governance milestone is not a claim of independence. It is a published roster, selection rationale, conflict register, terms, decision rules, and meeting record.

3. Proposed bodies

3.1 FDE Benchmark Commission

The FDE Benchmark Commission is the proposed protected decision authority for future human measurement and credentialing. It owns the construct, intended-use, official scoring, tier, credential, release-claim, structural-independence, and aggregate appeal-policy boundaries defined in the Independence and Institutional Firewall.

Before it may authorize an official human output, the Commission must have seven to nine voting members, an externally independent majority, an externally independent chair and measurement lead, a public-interest or affected-person representative, and field and enterprise expertise. LockedIn Labs and its controlled affiliates must remain a voting minority. The Commission is not seated merely because this design exists.

3.2 Technical Steering Committee

The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) owns public specification releases, ontology, schemas, reference implementations, RFC decisions, and the technical roadmap, subject to Commission approval when a change affects a protected construct, interpretation, official scoring, tier, credential, or public-authority boundary.

It does not decide individual results or access candidate-private evidence merely by virtue of membership.

3.3 Evaluation Integrity Committee

The Evaluation Integrity Committee owns controlled-case policy, contamination response, fraud and integrity procedures, evaluator release gates, and official-result verification requirements. It recommends or exercises authority delegated through a public Commission charter; it cannot override a protected Commission decision.

Its public reports may withhold details that would compromise controls, but must disclose the category of control, material incident impact, and remediation status where lawful.

3.4 Measurement and Fairness Advisory Group

This group provides independent advice on job analysis, psychometrics, industrial-organizational measurement, statistics, accessibility, accommodations, employment law, subgroup analysis, and longitudinal validation.

Advisory findings and management responses should be public. Advice does not substitute for accountable governance votes.

3.5 Domain Working Groups

Time-bounded working groups may propose domain packs, scenarios, mappings, and research. They cannot alter the vendor-neutral core or approve their own proposals.

3.6 Community maintainers

Maintainers review contributions, operate public infrastructure, and implement approved decisions. Merge authority does not grant unilateral authority over the construct, official results, or appeals.

3.7 Appeals panel

An appeals pool must be organizationally and procedurally separate from original reviewers. A person who participated in the disputed decision cannot decide the appeal.

4. Membership and terms

When a body is established, its charter or roster must state:

member name, role, organization, and relevant qualifications;
appointment date, term, and voting status;
required conflict disclosure;
selection and removal process;
meeting and attendance expectations;
confidentiality obligations where controlled material is involved.

Voting TSC and Evaluation Integrity Committee terms should be two years, staggered where possible, with a maximum of two consecutive full terms unless a public exception is approved. Membership should include more than one organization before the project describes governance as multi-organizational.

Paid sponsorship cannot be a qualification for voting membership. Employment by the founding steward does not disqualify a contributor, but the composition and conflicts must be visible.

Commission membership, appointment, removal, compensation, independence, and term rules are stricter. A member counts toward the external majority only after a public determination under the Independence and Institutional Firewall. Once seated, LockedIn cannot unilaterally remove an external member. The initial 24-month affiliation lookback is a project policy, not a claim about a universal legal definition of independence.

Founding Commission appointments require confirmation by the temporary, fully external Founding Appointments Panel defined in the firewall; LockedIn may convene the open process but cannot sit on that panel or override its decisions. Once seated, the Commission appoints successors through an external-majority nominations committee, a two-thirds Commission vote, and an affirmative majority of eligible external members. Vacancies do not convert external seats or create founder appointment rights. A Commission below seven occupied seats may use only the firewall's limited interim continuity quorum; protected decisions and new official outputs remain paused.

Fixed, market-reasonable ordinary Commission compensation may be paid without making an otherwise eligible member affiliated only under the firewall's advance approval, uniformity, disclosure, noncontingency, scope, and anti-retaliation conditions. Other material compensation remains subject to the affiliation lookback and conflict rules.

5. Quorum and voting

Once seated:

quorum is a majority of eligible, non-recused voting members;
ordinary decisions require a majority of votes cast;
benchmark major releases, charter changes, and changes to constitutional scoring safeguards require two-thirds of eligible, non-recused voting members;
abstentions do not count as votes cast but do count toward quorum unless caused by recusal;
a tie fails;
proxy votes are not permitted unless a body-specific public rule authorizes them.

No body may lower quorum by ignoring required recusals. If recusals make quorum impossible, the decision is deferred or assigned to a properly constituted independent panel.

For a Commission protected decision, externally independent members must remain a majority of the eligible, non-recused members and of the affirmative votes. Official scoring, tier, credential, structural-entity, charter, and independence-claim decisions require two-thirds of eligible, non-recused voting members. A loss of independent quorum defers the decision.

The vacancy and interim-continuity rules in INDEPENDENCE_FIREWALL.md do not lower those thresholds. When fewer than seven Commission seats are occupied, the limited interim quorum may maintain continuity and fill vacancies but cannot make a protected decision or activate a new official output.

6. RFC and change process

The normal path is:

Issue or discussion
  → RFC with motivation and evidence
  → Public review
  → Technical, measurement, security, privacy, and conflict review as applicable
  → Recorded accept, revise, defer, or reject decision
  → Implementation behind a version boundary
  → Tests and calibration where required
  → Release vote and changelog

An RFC must identify:

problem and intended population;
proposed normative change;
evidence and alternatives;
scoring, privacy, security, accessibility, fairness, and gaming effects;
migration and versioning impact;
conflicts and contributors;
validation plan and rollback path.

Material normative proposals should receive at least 14 calendar days of public review. Charter amendments require 30 days. A release decision must explain how substantive objections were resolved.

7. Release authority and gates

The TSC may authorize a public-draft release only after required documentation, schemas, tests, status disclosures, and claim checks are complete.

An official-scoring, official-tier, or credential release additionally requires:

written clearance from the Evaluation Integrity Committee;
a protected Commission decision with external-majority quorum;
a published structural-entity decision;
operating role, data, funding, recusal, correction, and appeal controls under INDEPENDENCE_FIREWALL.md;
published measurement review, privacy, security, accessibility, and legal/use approval; and
every activation gate in SCORING.md.

Until those conditions pass, public materials may state that official scoring is disabled but may not call a benchmark, score, tier, credential, or governance body “official” without qualification. “Reviewed release” and “project-authorized public draft” do not mean independently governed, validated, certified, or accredited.

A calendar target cannot waive a release gate.

Released benchmark versions are immutable. Emergency corrections create a new patch release and a public notice.

8. Conflicts, recusal, and independence

All decision makers must follow CONFLICT_OF_INTEREST.md.

At minimum:

a person cannot review or appeal their own result or a direct report’s result;
original reviewers cannot decide an appeal;
a sponsor cannot influence scores, thresholds, hidden cases, individual outcomes, or appeals;
founder and executive results require external review;
employment, training, and platform relationships must be disclosed where relevant;
training, staffing, recruiting, sales, engagement, and customer-success personnel cannot control an affected assessment, result, credential, or appeal;
compensation and commercial targets cannot depend on pass rates, tier distribution, issuance, or appeal outcomes;
a recused person receives no private materials and does not participate in deliberation or vote.

The Commission must retain external-majority quorum after recusals. Disclosure alone does not make a conflicted person eligible.

Funding may support maintainers, research, accessibility, security, infrastructure, documentation, verification operations, and independent review.

Funding must not purchase:

governance votes or committee seats;
favorable roadmap decisions;
lower thresholds or result changes;
hidden-case access;
candidate or competitor data;
appeal influence;
endorsement or signatory language.

Material funding sources, restricted purposes, and in-kind contributions should be disclosed through a public funding register before sponsor programs launch.

Before real-person operation, the Commission must control enough protected budget to select non-conflicted reviewers and appeals personnel and to operate measurement, accessibility, privacy/security, correction, and incident functions. LockedIn funding is permitted but does not support an independently funded claim or control over protected decisions.

10. Decision records and transparency

The project must publish, subject to privacy and integrity limits:

governance rosters and terms;
conflict disclosures and recusals;
agendas, minutes, votes, and decision rationales;
accepted and rejected RFCs;
release manifests and changelogs;
aggregate appeals and integrity reporting;
material funding relationships;
limitations and known incidents.

Private deliberations may be necessary for security, personnel, legal, candidate, or hidden-case matters. The reason for confidentiality and a non-sensitive outcome summary should still be recorded.

11. Emergency changes

A security, privacy, legal, or integrity emergency may justify temporary suspension, revocation, access restriction, or a shortened patch process.

Emergency action must be:

narrowly scoped and time-limited;
approved by at least two authorized, non-conflicted people where feasible;
recorded immediately in a protected audit log;
publicly summarized when disclosure is safe and lawful;
reviewed through the normal process within 30 days.

Emergency authority cannot silently change a person’s score or permanently alter the benchmark construct.

12. Governance evolution

A separate foundation, consortium, affiliate, or certification body is not required for the synthetic-only v0.1 Public Draft. Separate incorporation is also not presented as a universal scientific or legal requirement.

Before any official human assessment, result, tier, or credential launch, however, the Commission must publish a signed structural-independence decision comparing a hosted autonomous program, separately governed affiliate, independent nonprofit or consortium, and external qualified certification-body path. The decision must address legal accountability, accreditation strategy, appointments and removal, protected authority, funding, staffing/training conflicts, data custody, appeals, IP, liability, continuity, and residual control. Qualified legal, measurement, privacy/security, and credentialing review is required.

Changing legal structure does not by itself establish independence. Remaining within LockedIn does not by itself make impartial operation impossible. The actual authority, funding, appointments, contracts, data, conflicts, and public records control the claim. See INDEPENDENCE_FIREWALL.md.