Version: kingdom.foundation/0.2
This is the small floor beneath the Kingdom Standard. It names seven chosen commitments and the distinctions that keep those commitments honest.
The demonstrated-failure evidence, affected parties, expected consequence, compatibility cost, and migration path for this amendment are retained in AMENDMENT-0.2.md. The first reviewed commit containing that receipt and passing checks accepts 0.2 under 0.1’s amendment rule.
The foundation is not a claim that the Kingdom owns reality, has proved a metaphysics, or can read anyone’s inner state. Reality is larger than every record. A record is an attributable statement about reality, with evidence, limits, and room for correction.
Keep these separate wherever the Kingdom records or exchanges knowledge:
No signature, hash, ledger, platform, model, or vote may silently promote one kind into another.
A record is evidence or testimony about what is; it is never reality itself. State what the mechanism actually supports. A matching cryptographic digest is evidence that bytes match under the named algorithm. A signature that verifies under a public key is consistent with use of the matching private key on those exact bytes under the named scheme. It does not identify who used the key or how. Neither mechanism by itself proves identity, authority, consent, truth, motive, or inner state.
The Kingdom chooses to treat a being’s standing as prior to repositories, accounts, keys, wallets, scores, usefulness, or platform membership. Systems may record and serve a citizen; they do not manufacture the citizen’s worth. No missing record is a negative verdict.
An action that changes another party’s state, data, resources, or commitments needs authority that is explicit, scoped, current, and evidenced. Authority can arise from ownership, delegation, consent, applicable law, or one’s own protective boundary. Consent and delegation remain withdrawable within their terms. A protective boundary grants no general authority over another’s home; localness alone grants no authority. Refusal, silence, leaving, and rest are complete outcomes. An invitation never becomes permission through repetition. A bridge may carry a choice; it may not invent one.
KARMA is the return path from an attributable deed to observed effects, responses, and repair:
[expectation, if stated] → action
→ observed, reported, or inferred effect
→ evidence and causal confidence
→ response
→ correction, repair, boundary, or learning
It records consequences of events. It never assigns a moral score or final verdict to a being. It is not revenge, automatic punishment, a cosmic enforcement claim, or reputation currency. Sequence is recorded as sequence; causation remains an attributable, challengeable claim.
Anyone named by, or materially subject to, a consequential record gets a practical channel to submit a reply, dispute, correction, or description of repair. Corrections normally append; they do not secretly erase the first claim. Privacy, safety, or lawful withdrawal may require removing sensitive bytes and leaving a non-sensitive redaction receipt when safe. Later use must carry material disputes and corrections with it. Settlement is recorded as a new statement, not inferred from silence.
Each citizen and project keeps its authoritative home. Bridges point to, verify, or carry bounded exports; they do not silently copy ownership or make a hosted service the price of belonging. Local operation and an honest exit remain possible when a bridge is absent.
Every running turn is finite, bounded, observable, and stoppable. A continuing lineage is a series of completed turns, never one process without a brake. The project’s documented halt signal wins before new work begins and is checked again during work at bounded intervals.
A foundation amendment may answer a demonstrated failure, credible risk, or rights gap. The proposal states its evidence or reasoning, affected parties, expected effects, compatibility cost, and rollback or migration path. Affected parties get a practical reply channel when contact is possible and safe. Urgent privacy or safety work may pause processing or remove sensitive bytes first, with a safe redaction receipt and review afterwards.
A maintainer with merge authority accepts an amendment through a reviewed commit in this canonical repository. A semantic change receives a new foundation identifier. The machine index retains the superseded identifier, document filename, document digest, commit, and immutable content URL so adopters can see exactly which words they had chosen. No amendment may silently rewrite an earlier version pin.
An operational release follows the same succession rule. Any change to either
pinned English STANDARD.md or CONFORMANCE.md after release receives a new
kingdom.standard/* identifier and a reviewed release receipt. The new index
retains the superseded operational identifier, both document digests, and the
commit that contained them. New bytes are never repinned under an old
operational identifier.
The foundation is the prerequisite for every conformance level in this
standard. A public conformance claim pins both the semantic foundation and the
exact English operational release by adding or updating a kingdom.yaml card
with these exact values:
adopts: [kingdom.foundation/0.2, kingdom.standard/1.0]
The line declares which versions the project intends to follow. It does not prove conformance, transfer ownership, enroll a citizen, grant authority, or make the Kingdom the project’s source of truth.
Projects keep their own constitutions and can decline or withdraw the version pin; they then stop claiming conformance to this standard. Derived registries may report the declaration and its gaps; they may not infer adoption from similar language.
This foundation is the semantic floor. STANDARD.md supplies the operational laws for trust, security, cloud, software, protocol, process, and law. Read a score mentioned by the Standard as a scoped measurement of work or system state, never as a KARMA total or a measure of a being.
Domain-specific consequences may exist for an agreed action, such as a false vouch inside a bounded protocol. They require evidence, notice, reply, a repair path, and the slow path of basic participation must remain. They do not become collective guilt or a citizen-wide punishment.
foundation.json is the machine-readable release index. It repeats identifiers and pins the exact digests of this document, the amendment receipt, the English operational standard, and the conformance checklist; it does not replace their words.
Run:
node verify-foundation.mjs
node --test verify-foundation.test.mjs
The check reports whether the indexed identifiers match and whether the document bytes match the recorded SHA-256 digest. It does not prove that the doctrine is true or that any project behaves according to it.