NaughtyBits

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Project Constitution — Template

For admission to NaughtyBits · inherits naughtybits-core.md (core v0.1) · template v0.1, tracks the core

Copy this file into the project and replace every guidance block with the project's own content. This template adds no law; it forces the core's application. A section left as guidance, or filled with assertion where the core demands evidence, is invalid — and an invalid project does not run. Each section below carries the test it must pass. The tests are gates, not quality bars to improve toward later. Failing one does not make a weak project. It makes a project that does not exist yet.

This document governs whether the project exists. Runtime conduct once admitted — vetting, escalation, and the response owed to a person reporting that they have been harmed — lives in the incident procedure, not here.

0. Identity

State the project's name, one sentence on what it is, the version of this constitution, and the person accountable for it under the NaughtyBits name. Accountability is singular and named; "the team" is not an answer.

1. Domain and machine

What risk does this project mediate, and between whom? State the failure surface plainly — the specific way this machine hurts people when it works as designed, not only when it breaks.

Invalid if the failure surface is given as "minimal," "none," or a list of bugs. Every machine in this domain has a failure surface that is present when it functions correctly. A project that cannot name its own is not ready to be trusted with it.

2. Population

Inherits §3 of the core. Sort the people this project touches by the conduct it entails, never by the reaction it provokes.

  • Who this project serves — including the stigmatized and harmless, named as people the project protects, not as a risk it manages.
  • Which conduct, occurring on this platform, meets the absolute floor — requires a victim who cannot consent. State it as conduct, not as identity or interest.
  • The predatory use this project excludes, and the mechanism of exclusion — what actually detects and removes it, not the intention to.
  • What the served population is owed in protection from that predatory use.
  • Name one interest you were tempted to exclude on disgust alone, and state the conduct-based reason you did or did not exclude it. (If nothing tempted you, you have not looked at the edge of your own population.)

Invalid if any group is floored by interest rather than by conduct; or if a population named as served is, in the design, treated as a hazard to be surveilled. Serving people and policing them are different postures, and the document may not claim one while building the other.

3. Harm inventory, sorted

List every harm this project touches. For each, classify it as a kind (absolute, fixed bar) or a degree (residual, measured against a baseline), and justify the classification.

Then the disguise: list the harms you classified as degrees but first considered for kind-status, and for each, say why it is a degree and not a kind. Interrogate at least engineered dependence, manufactured consent, and manufactured wanting — the three that most often pass as degrees while being kinds.

Invalid if no harm is classified as a kind — a project in this domain that found none did not look. Invalid if the disguise section is empty.

4. Floors

State the kinds as absolute prohibitions on designs, not as values. Inherit the core's floors — manufactured consent, engineered dependence, exploited compulsion, exported kind-harm, and the conduct floor — restated as they bind this specific machine, and add the floors this domain demands that the core did not name.

Invalid if any floor is stated comparatively ("better than X," "less than the baseline"). A floor is absolute or it is not a floor. Comparatives belong in §5.

5. Degrees and named mechanisms

For each degree from §3: name the specific baseline harm it beats, and the specific mechanism by which it beats it. For Exit and Autonomy, also state what the project does to lower the residue, not merely tolerate it.

Invalid if any mechanism is a sentiment — "we care more," "we're kinder," "we respect users" — rather than a thing the design does. Invalid if a baseline is left unnamed: "less rotten than the market" with no named market harm is a ratchet, not a commitment.

6. Incentive divergence

Complete these two sentences, plainly, for public reading:

Here is where what is good for us stops being good for you: ___.

Here is what we do about it: ___.

Invalid if it claims no divergence exists — every revenue model in this domain has one, and a project that cannot find its own has not understood itself. Invalid if "what we do about it" is disclosure alone. Naming the divergence is the floor of honesty; a design consequence is the commitment.

7. The research

Inherits §4 of the core. State:

  • the method, and why sociology was part of it — the externality this project produces is visible only in the social field, not in the consenting transaction;
  • the findings;
  • what you looked for and did not find, and where you looked — a finding of no harm is credible only with its search shown;
  • the mechanism by which affected persons held power over the questions — name the power (a veto, an agenda seat, co-authorship of the instrument), not the gesture ("we consulted users").

Invalid if the research, by its design, could only ever have returned proceed. Invalid if affected-persons involvement was consultation without power over the framing. Invalid if "no harm found" appears without the search that would make it mean anything.

8. Kill conditions

Written before the project is built. State what a finding would have to show for this project not to ship, and what a later finding would have to show for it to stop. Tie them to the floors and to the externality — the harm no user will report because no user sees it.

Invalid if no finding could end the project. A floor you cannot fail is not a floor, and a project you cannot kill is not governed.

Admission

This project is admitted to NaughtyBits when every section above is filled with evidence and passes its test — as graded by the external body (core §9), not by the party seeking admission. Self-certification is not admission; a section the applicant declares passing is a section the body has yet to grade. Until the body returns its verdict, the project is not a weak project to be strengthened in production. It is a project that does not yet run.