Responsibility first. Charters later.
All strategy · 05 / 08
Stewardship starts as clear responsibility. Formal governance structure comes later, once there is trust worth structuring.
Early expectations
At first, stewardship means:
the founder, who owns and runs the company today, logs every owner decision in public
an outside adviser can veto an investor's entry and the licence price
the handover to the community happens at a measurable point, written down in advance
the shared record stays a shared asset
These are promises about who holds what and how that can change. The charter grows out of them.
What changes later
At the handover, the owner rights pass to a representative the community elects and can recall, and the community sets its own procedures. As more communities depend on the layer, the structure can formalize further. The direction is already legible: control moves toward the communities that depend on the record.
The test
Can a community today see, in plain words, what the company controls, what the community controls, and what the process is for shifting either? If it cannot, the stewardship model is still a company model with a community word added.