Position
GROUNDWORK is organizing infrastructure. Infrastructure is never neutral — every tool teaches a politics. We owe organizers and members a clear, public statement of what this register will and will not be used for, so nobody has to read between the lines.
No initiative whose explicit or operational purpose is to degrade, exclude, or dehumanize people on grounds of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, or migration status will ever be admitted to the register. This is a constitutive limit — written into the cornerstone, not subject to a board vote.
GROUNDWORK is built so that capture — by a founder, a faction, or a state — is visible and resistible from below. We will not lend a legible storefront to projects whose governance design hides beneficial ownership, hands founders a veto over substantive decisions, or marches in step with state coercion.
We do not belong to any party, sect, or movement. We belong to the conditions under which legitimate, member-governed institutions can form at all: identity, disclosure, accountability, and the unconditional right of members to recall the people who govern them.
An honest 'founder-controlled' initiative — one that says plainly what it is — is more welcome here than a project performing democracy on its homepage while concentrating power in a back room. The register rewards legibility. It does not reward the appearance of solidarity.
Enforcement is a public act
Concerns about an initiative on these grounds can be filed through the report channel on every initiative page — by any member, at any time. Reports are reviewed by the cooperative's stewardship committee, and outcomes are written into the public changelog of the initiative concerned. Nothing about enforcement is settled in private.
