Standard · 05
Institutional memory
Decisions, rule changes, and the reasoning behind them survive the people who made them.
Why this matters
Most online institutions forget. A founder leaves, a server migrates, a Discord vanishes — and with it the entire archive of why the rules look the way they do.
GROUNDWORK treats the institutional record as a first-class artifact: append-only, citable, and human-readable.
Future participants inherit not just the rules but the arguments that produced them.
How GROUNDWORK implements it
Institutional timeline
Every rule change, vote, and verification is timestamped on a single legible timeline.
Decision log
Decisions carry their rationale and the dissenting positions, not just the outcome.
Append-only record
Entries can be amended with a note — never silently rewritten.