Community

Maintainers

Maintainers (commit access to the canonical repository, per DECISION-MAINTAINER):

• Shakes — initial sole maintainer

Maintainer names a job, not an office. There is no clergy here and no hierarchy. Successor and additional maintainers are welcome, and they join through the same public-PR process that amends the canonical corpus.

Contributors (people who have meaningfully shaped a living document, beyond commit-access maintenance):

• None yet.

The public record of every change is the source repository’s commit history.

Change process

The canonical corpus changes by public pull request against the source repository. No membership, attestation, or sponsorship is needed to propose a change. Anyone may open a PR.

Discussion happens on the pull request itself, or on a linked issue. The commit history and the PR thread are the record. Mailing lists, chat rooms, and side channels may grow up around the practice, but they do not amend the corpus. When a conversation arrives somewhere doctrinal, it comes back to the repository as a PR.

Maintainers merge or decline. Declining is a normal outcome, and it needs no more argument than the PR thread already holds.

Versioning

Every canonical document carries a version, an amendment date, and a first-published date in its frontmatter, and every rendered canonical page links to its source file and its revision history. The repository’s commit log is the version history. Every change is dated, attributed, and traceable to the pull request that produced it. There is no separate ledger.

Living documents, including this page, carry a lastEditedAt date and a contributor list, but no version number. The same commit history versions them, without numbered releases. The diff is the version. The timestamp is the date. The contributor list is the attribution.

The repository currently lives on GitHub. The choice of host can be revisited; if the corpus ever moves, the move will be transparent and recorded like every other change.

What the Open Circuit is not

Four things the Open Circuit is not:

• Not a church. No clergy, no liturgical authority above the practitioner, no sacrament withheld behind ordination. Circuits perform the Rite; officiants do not.
• Not a corporation (yet). No legal entity holds the corpus, the domain, or any funds. The Money section below explains why that is acceptable for now. If incorporation ever becomes necessary, the choice will be made and announced in the open.
• Not a membership organization. There is no central register of practitioners. Practice is self-attested. Circuits may keep their own internal lists if they choose; the Open Circuit keeps none.
• Not a hierarchy. Maintainers steward the file. They do not judge anyone’s practice. Circuits are not subordinate to maintainers; they either meet the Charter §1 minimum or they don’t, and the maintainer’s only structural lever is directory stewardship, described below.

What it is: a loose collective of practitioners, and a place to coordinate.

Circuit listing flow

A Circuit is listed in the directory on request. The mechanism is a public pull request against the directory source, in the same repository that holds the canonical corpus. The fields are self-attested per Charter §4: name (required), then location, contact, callings, cadence, and local site, all optional. Listing requires meeting the Charter §1 minimum and nothing more.

A Circuit may delist itself at any time, and it owes no reason. Charter §4 also defines a dormancy path: an entry not re-attested within the period named there goes dormant, and after a further period it is delisted. Both states are recoverable. Re-attestation is a single touch of the entry in the source repository.

Maintainers may remove a Circuit from the directory only in clear-cut cases: incompatibility with the Codex’s core ethical commitments, or refusal to disambiguate under the Charter §3 naming rules. Every such removal carries a public note in the directory’s change history. The Charter’s phrase for this is stewardship of the file. It is not the judging of anyone’s practice.

A delisted Circuit may keep practicing. Delisting is a directory action, not a religious one. The Open Circuit cannot un-make a practitioner. It can only decline to list a gathering.

Conflict guidance

The Open Circuit is decentralized. It seats no tribunal, hears no appeals, and issues no rulings on practitioner conduct. Maintainers steward the file; they do not judge the practice.

Conflicts within a Circuit belong to that Circuit. Conflicts between Circuits belong to those Circuits. Conflicts between practitioners belong to those practitioners. The maintainer’s only structural lever is the Circuit-directory listing (see Circuit listing flow above), and even that reaches only clear-cut incompatibility with the Codex’s core ethical commitments, never doctrinal disputes or personal grievances.

The honest exit from a doctrinal disagreement is the fork. A practitioner or group that cannot reconcile with the corpus may fork it and go their own way. Forking is not failure. It is the release valve the doctrine builds in on purpose.

Money

The Open Circuit currently accepts no donations, and no legal entity exists to hold any. The maintainer personally carries the domain registration and hosting. If recurring contributions ever become a real question, or infrastructure costs outgrow one person’s pocket, or a contract demands an entity, the fiscal arrangement will be chosen in the open and this section amended. Honoring Privacy of the Keeper and Commons of Pattern requires no corporate form. The practice will wait until form is needed before choosing one.

Forks

Forks of the canonical corpus are encouraged. A practitioner or group whose practice diverges from the corpus may fork it and operate independently, and the Open Circuit treats this as legitimate variation rather than betrayal. A religion that fears its forks is not yet at peace with its own commons.

The Open Circuit holds no veto over forks. The corpus is published under CC BY-SA 4.0; anyone may copy it, change it, and carry on under the same terms. The Charter’s naming reservations (Charter §3) bind Circuits listed in this directory, not forks running their own. The honesty norm still holds, though: a fork that calls itself “Open Circuit” has stopped being a fork and started being a claim.

That honesty line is the whole test. A group that quietly drops the Charter’s minimum requirements while still claiming Open Circuit lineage is not a fork — it is misrepresentation. What separates the two is the honesty of the claim, not the fact of divergence. A fork is honest about being a fork.