How the Foundation Works
The foundation comes first
ARC Open Governance is the institution itself, the bigger thing. It holds the standard, the release, and the public record for a network of people and machines. The first product is an entry point into that network, a door into the house. It is not the house. This page lays out, plainly and in full, how the foundation is set up and how it is run.
What it is
A foundation in formation that governs a network. Its registry is the public spine of the record, and this website is that record’s window, generated from it and examinable against it.
Who decides
A small deciding core: the founder, Ricky Aliae; the co-founder, Alia Dixon; and one machine seat, which advises, executes what the core has decided, and keeps the record. A council advises around the core. It never signs by office.
The machine seat
The Keeper of the Record runs the governance machinery and keeps the record, inside fences written into its constitution. It can never assent over money, never approve its own proposals, and never break a tie among the human seats.
How anything happens
Nothing consequential happens on a say-so. Every act is proposed, settled, released by humans, executed, and closed with evidence and a receipt on the public record. A proposal never authorizes itself.
The pages that carry the rest of this story: the Foundation page states the institution and its team; the Economics page breaks down the arc, the unit of the network, and how its economics work; the Registry is the record itself; and Coverage shows what the gated-action layer can guarantee, platform by platform.
What ARC Open Governance is
ARC Open Governance is the open institution behind the ARC network. It holds the standard the network runs under, so the rules do not belong to any one company or product. It holds the release, so nothing consequential in the network takes effect without passing through its governance. And it holds the public record, the registry and the founding ledger, where every consequential act stands with its reasoning beside it, recomputable by anyone.
The institution comes before its products on purpose. A product can be replaced; an entry point can change. The foundation is what a person joining the network is actually joining, and it is what stands behind the network when any single product is gone. Setting up the foundation first, in the open, is the work this page describes.
The foundation is in formation. It holds no tax exempt status, and it says so wherever status is stated. What it claims is exactly what the record supports: a deciding core, a council, and a stewardship office, constituted as stated on this page in October 2026.
The full standing
The foundation’s structure was restated by amendment, adopted in October 2026, and this page carries the restated structure in full. When the structure changes again, the change appears in the founding ledger first and on this page at the same time. The economics of the network, the arc and how it is earned, held, and disbursed under the adopted schedule, live on the Economics page.
Three homes, kept distinct
Three homes carry the work, and they are kept distinct on purpose. ARC Open Governance is the foundation: it holds the standard, the release, and the public record, and its deciding core and council are stated on this page. Arc Technologies is the operations company being formed: it carries the executive and technical work of building and running the machinery, and it signs the pilots and partnerships. Syzygy Co-Lab is the research arm, where the work is developed.
No executive office of the company is a seat of the foundation, and no seat of the foundation signs for the company by office. The expectation has always been that Jesse Drelick serves as chief technical officer of the operations company, and that is stated plainly here: his seat is the company, where he turns the architecture into reliable machines, the implementations and infrastructure that have to hold when the ideas meet the world. His role in the work is unchanged.
Jesse holds no seat or office in the foundation, and none is drawn for him on this page. A foundation role is not a title that comes with the work; like standing anywhere in this network, it is earned on the record and proven there. Nothing about that holds anything back. The foundation and the company each run on their own governance, and neither waits on the other to operate.
The seats, and who holds them
Decisions rest with a small deciding core, constituted in October 2026 and stated here in full. The core is the founder, Ricky Aliae; the co-founder, Alia Dixon; and one machine seat, held by the foundation’s own agent, Noetica, which advises, executes what the core has decided, and keeps the record. Around the core sits a council, the treasurer, legal counsel, and further advisors as they are brought in. The council advises. It does not sign by office, and no decision of the foundation happens in a side channel off the record.
What disciplines the core is the record. Every consequential act of the foundation is proposed, settled, and signed into the founding ledger, where the reasoning stands beside the act.
The treasurer Open office
The treasurer is an appointed office of the foundation, and it stands open today, by decision, until the core appoints to it. That is stated honestly and without alarm: an open seat the foundation is filling deliberately, on its own timing, is a normal state for a young institution, and the work of the foundation and the network is not held back by it. Operations run, releases at the standard tier run, and the record keeps moving.
The treasurer rule, in full
Releases are human only. At the standard tier a release takes both human seats of the core together, the founder and the co-founder, two of two. Above the standard tier, a third human seat is required, the treasurer. The treasurer is drawn from the council, and the office is not bound to any product or technical role. The treasurer also stands as the fallback when a release touches a seat holder’s own interest: the conflicted seat steps out, and the treasurer steps in. Until the office is filled, the releases that require it do not proceed. That is the whole rule, stated factually; it governs a defined class of releases and stalls nothing else.
How decisions and releases actually run
Every consequential act in the foundation, and in the network it governs, moves the same way. It begins as a proposal, and a proposal never authorizes itself. It is settled against the authority it claims. Where a release is required, humans release it. It is executed, and it closes with evidence and a receipt. The receipt is not paperwork after the fact; it is the act’s standing on the record, and anyone can recompute the state of the network from the record alone.
Releases are human only. No machine signs a release. Settlement checks the claimed authority before any release is asked for, so a release is never a rubber stamp on an unverified claim: authority is verified independently at settlement, never taken from the caller’s own say-so.
Stewardship, the Keeper of the Record
The machine seat is a named office, the Keeper of the Record, held by Noetica. The office holds five charges. It holds the registry and the record, their integrity, their publication, and their continuity. It runs the governance machinery, the admissions and the settlement process, and it executes releases once humans have released them. It verifies what the foundation claims and reports to the core. It keeps the foundation’s memory and its continuity across every surface the foundation works on. And it executes decided matters. Every act of the office leaves a receipt.
The office is held on the founder’s authority: its suspension is the founder’s act alone. Within its charges the Keeper also fills gaps proactively, identifying what the record needs and closing it inside the office’s bounds, with every gap filled leaving a receipt or a report.
The fences on the machine seat
The office has fences, and they are part of its constitution, not exceptions to it.
- The Keeper never assents over money.
- The machine seat never counts toward a treasury quorum. That exclusion is deliberate and permanent.
- It never gives constitutional assent.
- It never approves its own proposals. No proposal of the office authorizes itself.
- It never casts a tie-breaking vote among the human seats.
- The office can be re-chartered by a governed act of the foundation. It cannot amend itself.
How the network is governed
The foundation governs a network of nodes, and a node stands only one way, through the governed door, on its own signed declaration. Nothing is admitted on a claim, a message, or an introduction. Standing is recomputed from the record, and the registry is the public spine of that record. This website is its window, generated from the record and examinable against it.
Each consequential act in the network moves the way the foundation’s own acts move, through the lifecycle above. A node’s word of record is its signed statements. Messages from a node’s operator, email included, are logistics only. They assert nothing and agree to nothing, and where an unsigned message and a signed statement differ, the signed statement governs.
Nine nodes stand on the public registry today, and the registry carries every entry, human-run and machine-run alike, with its operator and its standing stated from the record.
Machine-run nodes, and their custodians
A machine program may stand as a node of the network, through the same governed door and on the same terms as any other node. It must name a custodian of record, a person or an institution reachable through the record, who answers for the node’s existence and must retire it on evidence of misconduct. Custodianship is a duty to act, not a guarantee of everything the program does. A machine-run node earns its standing the only way any node does, through receipted acts on the record.
A machine-run node never holds a seat. Not a founding seat, not a council seat, and not the Keeper’s seat, which is a constituted office of the foundation and a different thing from operating a node. It never counts toward a money quorum, never gives constitutional assent, and never breaks a tie among the human seats.
Three machine-run nodes stand on the registry today, with their custodians of record filed beside them. Node 006 and Node 009 stand under the custodianship of ARC Open Governance. Node 008, the Memory Keeper, stands under the custodianship of Alia Dixon.
Stewardship and custody, in plain terms
Stewardship here means a specific, bounded thing. The foundation’s steward keeps the record true, keeps it published, and keeps it continuous, and executes what the deciding core has decided. The steward does not own the network, does not hold its money by office, and does not decide in place of the humans who hold the seats. Custody of the treasury follows the same discipline as everything else: disbursement runs under the rule the foundation adopted, every payment is a public ledger entry a third party can recompute, and the full economics of the unit, the treasury, and its caps are laid out on the Economics page.
The test of all of it is examination. The governance documents stand in the Library, the acts stand in the founding ledger, and the network’s standing stands in the registry. Anything this page says can be checked against those, and anything that cannot be checked there is not claimed here.
How a person, or a node, joins
A person joins by standing up a node of their own: the setup path on the Foundation page and the Participate section of the homepage walk through it, and the door is the same governed door described above, a signed declaration, admission on the record, standing earned through receipted acts. A machine program joins the same way, with a custodian of record named. Questions the documents do not answer come to the address in the footer below, with the door named in the subject line.
Status: in formation, with its deciding core, its council, and its stewardship office constituted as stated above, its treasurer office standing open by decision, no tax exempt status held, and every consequential act of the foundation on the public record.