About this charter
The Intelligent Systems Charter is an independent, vendor-neutral text. It is not a product and it is not owned by one. It is maintained under the name 21st Century Pluribus.
§ What is here
- The charter: the Declaration, the Universal Principles and the Constitution. These are the founding texts and they change rarely.
- The proposal: one way to enforce the charter in running software. The charter binds; the proposal suggests. Where they disagree, the charter governs.
- Essays: the case for the charter.
- Changelog: every change, with the reason for it.
§ Adopting it
An adopter is any person or organization that commits to the charter and governs its intelligent systems under it. Adopters may add stricter rules of their own. They may not loosen the universal principles. There is nothing to sign and no fee. If you adopt it, saying so publicly helps others do the same.
§ Changing it
Article IX of the Constitution governs amendment: a change to the universal principles needs a published, versioned amendment with a stated rationale. In practice that means a pull request in the public repository that explains why, and an entry in the changelog. The Declaration is not amended.
§ Using the text
The charter is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may copy, share, translate and adapt it, including commercially, if you give credit and say what you changed. The proposal is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, so anyone may implement it in any product.
If you change the normative text, please publish your version under a different name, so that “Intelligent Systems Charter” always refers to one text.
§ This site
The site is built directly from the Markdown files in the repository, which are the canonical source. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads no fonts from third parties. Pages with diagrams load one open-source drawing library; without JavaScript the diagrams appear as readable text.