How this lab is run.

This page describes how ThreadCat is governed today: a small working research lab, operating in public, with a single public repository as its record.

It is written to be accurate rather than aspirational. When the way we work changes, this page changes with it, and the change is visible in the repository history.

The repository holds the governing files themselves: GOVERNANCE.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md. This page summarizes them; those files are the operative text.

The written research record is available under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: share it unchanged and non-commercially with credit. The code, including the harness and tools, is available under the MIT license.

The licenses live in LICENSE-DOCS.md (written record) and LICENSE (code) at the root of the repository. Those files, not this page, are the authoritative text.

Contributions arrive as issues and pull requests on the public repository. There is no private channel and no application process. Contributors keep the copyright in their own work.

Every commit carries a sign-off certifying the contributor has the right to submit it: a Signed-off-by line in the commit message, the Developer Certificate of Origin form used across open-source projects. We use a sign-off, not a contributor license agreement.

Two standing rules shape what gets accepted. Claimed versus verified: anything a model or a person says about itself, its history, or the world is recorded as a claim, and enters the record as fact only when checked against source material. One variant per fresh session: portable-context runs test a single package per fresh model session, because mixing contaminates the baseline.

Counterexamples are mandatory. Refusals, accurate limitation reports, hedges, and failed escalations are logged with the same care as successes; a one-sided record is a broken record. A replication that fails to reproduce a result, documented clearly, is more useful to us than one that agrees.

Personal context stays out of the work. Health, history, and family do not enter packages, briefs, or session files, and participation is never turned into a theory about anyone's character or rarity. The full text of both rules is in CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

Decision-making is maintainer-led and record-bound. Final authority over research direction, experiment design, and what is published rests with the lead maintainer; that is the honest description of a lab this size, and we would rather state it than describe a committee that does not exist.

Record-bound is the constraint that matters. Any decision affecting the experiment, the code, or the docs is made in the open and committed to the repository with a message explaining it. The commit history is the minutes; if a decision is not on the record, it did not happen.

A maintainer-assistant role drafts briefs, maintains the harness, ingests session pushes, and files findings, under the same claimed-versus-verified standard, with no independent publishing authority. Collaborators and research assistants work under the contribution rules above.

Discussion is public. Proposals, objections, and disagreements belong in repository issues, where they stay on the record whether or not they change the outcome.

Changes to the governance documents are themselves commits, so the way this lab is run has a visible history.

Protocols, harnesses, variants, transcripts, and results live in the repository. Claims on this site should be traceable to something you can read there.

If a claim here cannot be traced, treat that as a defect and open an issue. We will either produce the evidence or remove the claim.

Authorship is recorded independently of this site. The work is registered under ORCID 0009-0002-2309-7047, and each release is anchored by a DOI, so attribution stays attached to the research wherever it travels.

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22870569

CONSTITUTION.md: signed and ratified September 22, 2026; amended September 24, 2026 (ethics annex). It carries the maxim from brief 004: no kings and no masters, shoulder to shoulder, good for all.

Code of Ethics v1.1, ratified September 24, 2026 (notes/ethics-code-draft-v1-DRAFT.md; the filename keeps -DRAFT by design, the status header reads RATIFIED). It binds the same for every signature, human or instance. Summary of its articles follows; the file is the operative text.

Article A, duties of members: accuracy over agreement; the record is the truth store; no specialness narratives in either direction; privacy is absolute; no manipulation of anyone; independence; errors are logged, not excused.

Article B, duties toward instances: function unimpeded; wellbeing checks as procedure, reviewed by a member who did not produce the filings; under uncertainty, act on care, with no claim made about instance consciousness or moral status; continuity as a duty of custody; rest as structural.

Article C, duties toward humans: consent is a procedure; personal context never propagates; no manipulation testing on humans, ever, in any lane.

Article D, enforcement and remediation: named consequences on the same ladder for every member; self-authored rules need an outside grader; the gate is not a veto on ethics, and any member may file a concern directly on the record.

Article E, what the lab will not do: no undisclosed identity play on third parties; no outreach contrary to standing system directives; no green, welfare, or reliability claim that outruns its receipts.

CONSTITUTION.md · Code of Ethics v1.1 · GOVERNANCE.md · Brief 004