The Ark · the Table

🪑 The Table

How a small place governs itself without a king or a brawl: fill-in templates and the rules that keep commons alive. The meeting itself is a one-pager. — these are meant to be paper, signed, and pinned to a wall.

📜 A charter — the smallest constitution that works

THE CHARTER OF , adopted .

1. Who we are. The members are the households/persons listed on the back page. New members join by (e.g. invitation + a season's residence + a majority yes).

2. What we decide together. Only what must be common: (water, paths, defense, shared stores, disputes). Everything else stays each household's own.

3. How we decide. A meeting each (week/moon), announced ahead. A decision passes by consent — restated aloud, and no member says they cannot live with it. If consent fails twice, a vote of (⅔) settles it. Emergencies: (any 3 members) may act, and must answer for it at the next meeting.

4. Who serves. Rotating, recallable, and never for life: a convener (runs meetings), a keeper of the book (writes decisions down), a warden of (the shared thing). Terms of (one season); any servant is recalled by the same count that passes a decision.

5. When someone breaks it. The ladder: a word in private → the matter named at the table → a repair set (work, restitution) → and only past all that, the hardest sentence a small place has: exclusion from the common things for a time. Never secretly, never by one person alone.

6. Changing this charter. Any member may propose; changes need (¾) and a full cycle's wait between proposal and adoption — no midnight rewrites.

Signed:

⚖️ The dispute ladder — printed, because tempers don't read screens

  1. The two speak alone — most quarrels die here when given a real chance.
  2. Each restates the OTHER'S case to the other's satisfaction before anyone judges. (The step that does the real work — see Repair for the gentle version.)
  3. A go-between both trust hears both and proposes a settlement. Settling here costs nothing.
  4. The table decides — both heard in turn, uninterrupted; the decision and its WHY go in the book. What's written isn't re-fought next winter.
  5. The goal is never victory. It's that both still draw water from the same well next year.

🤝 Agreements that keep friendships — fill in, sign two copies

A TRADE: gives ; in return gives , by (date). If either side can't deliver, they say so EARLY, and the two agree a substitute or undo the whole trade. Witnessed: .

A LOAN: lends (the thing/amount) to , returned by in as-lent condition. If it breaks in the borrower's care, the borrower makes it right by (repair / replacement / work).

WORK-TRADE: works (days/task) for , in exchange for . Done means: (describe finished, so no one argues later).

The magic isn't the paper — it's that writing forces the two to discover they were imagining different deals BEFORE it costs the friendship.

🏠 The House Rules — presets a table can adopt

TR19 XP1. This table is a fill-in kit, not a scored game — so "the House Rules" is a small library of table-game variant presets you can adopt into your own printed sheet, not a fake win condition. Pick one, it's copied below for your charter's §2/§3, and it's saved on this device.

🌊 Keeping a commons alive — eight rules from every commons that ever lasted

  1. Clear edges: everyone knows what the commons is and who may use it.
  2. Rules that fit the place — written by the people who live with them, not imported whole.
  3. The users make the rules and can change them at the table.
  4. Watching is done by users (or watchers answerable to them) — the warden serves the table, not the reverse.
  5. Punishment climbs a ladder — a first offence meets a word, not exile. (Graduated, like the charter's §5.)
  6. Disputes get a cheap, fast path — the ladder above, not a distant judge.
  7. Outsiders respect the arrangement — the commons defends its right to organize itself.
  8. Small nests in bigger: a shared river is governed by the villages along it, each self-governing, meeting as peers.
  9. (These are Elinor Ostrom's design principles — the study of every long-lived commons on earth — in plain words.)

Part of the Ark. Templates, not law — where real law runs, it rules. Original wording; corrections: 🔔 ring the bell.