General
Our version of the foundation won’t give way to politicians and talkers, and no one will be able to buy influence. It’ll be a “proof of work” organization, not a proof of stake powerhouse.
The interests of donors are represented in other ways:
In this stage, we can’t allow roles representing narrower interests to outnumber the votes of the critical roles on the board.
The foundation is co-founded by and tailored to its BDFL, Samuel Smith. We do this not because we’re his fans but because we understand that foundations that are disconnected from their original visionaries and gatekeepers in the past were less successful than the ones that managed to keep them happy and on board. Ideally, a BDFL is a two-way commitment.
So authorities can audit, and the board has to decide on changes?
A Utah-registered L3C, a not-for-profit organization, steers the KERI Foundation.
Processing everything into articles of association is very static. You have to make dynamic decisions based on constantly changing insights. You want to keep adjusting.
We have two principal guidelines in this perspective:
Originally, this idea was solely to give all parties a voice and bring that together in one forum. The proposed managers of the designed board happily reserve a seat on the board for this purpose, with decision-making authority: the leader of the Advisory Board.
If anyone asks to let go of control, have you put your money where your mouth is?
The founding chairman has committed to donating to get the foundation started. So far, we haven’t seen anyone else making a similar commitment.
So, he wants to set up this vehicle to ensure that the internal processes are efficient, funds are spent effectively, and the required targets are met.
Van Cann: “I’ll stop when I think: would I leave this system alone and trust its inner workings? And only when the answer is ‘yes’”
Suppose we set this up in a reasonable, safe, and logical way to mature the KERISuite first on a small technical team. And we only then start diversifying; do you see yourself in any role at any point in time in the future? We welcome your positive contributions.
One individual has to take up various roles at the beginning of the foundation. In this perspective, anno 2025, the answer to the question is ‘to a great extent, yes’ 🙂
But bear in mind: We developed a role-based organizational chart, an Operational Agreement, and a Memorandum of Understanding. So, it’s a consensus-critical manager-managed operation in the foundation.
Without painful consequences, no single role within the foundation could dictate or veto the operation. All competence profiles have been specified and published.
Moreover, the foundation is independent of individuals, except that the BDFL role in the KERI foundation is reserved on a personal basis for Dr. Samuel Smith.
We honestly can’t take people seriously when they complain about a compact KERI foundation, which the original inventor is totally in sync with, and a two-way commitment between the foundation and founder has been established.
Donating money and donating time are two distinct things. Money donors have a say in the outcome.
Our foundation offers fine-grained benefits and influence models through donations. The website has information on direct funding, advisory boards, marketing, and events. You have a tiered say from tiered donations.
The KERI Foundation won’t be able to accept donations in kind directly. The process will be as follows: roles will be selected for assignment, candidates will be assessed, and officers will be appointed and paid for their deliverables.
We do not want a dependency on individual contributors with a greater reach than their roles, tasks, responsibilities, and deliverables.
At the start of 2025, we only have two! We’re engaging parties to bring in the leader of the Advisory Board and one of the board managers.
But we agree that we need more shoulders, eventually. First, we want to start the donation flow and complete the 5Ws to meet the adoption expectations.
Phase 2 adds more shoulders to the board. It can be prepared in a (directly funded) working group in Phase 1. Feel free to take an advance on this point.
We’ve heard of a four-manager board up to the sixteen-managers board. All good to consider in Phase 1, but we postpone establishing any solution of more than three right after delivering on Phase 1, the 5Ws.
The reason is that we want to free the crucial development from endless discussions and decision-making.
The chairman and Sam could decide independently of anybody else. To gain something, you also have to give. It would not find the support of a larger community.
It’s the community foundation supported by KERI’s inventor Dr. Samuel M. Smith. Any qualified majority in the board makes decisions on all but a few topics. These topics are reserved for the technical manager with a few veto rights for the original inventor, which conforms to the well-established BDFL model.
Having stated this, we will always strive for consensus, but by all means, avoid takeovers or stalemates.
Thus, we wish to protect the original inventor’s work and future role. Furthermore, we wish to gradually develop the Foundation into a business-like, not-for-profit, open-source foundation where takeovers by narrow interest groups are impossible.
We can do this via:
A. Statutes and organizational regulations
B. Board composition
Ad A.
Statutes tend to be rigid. We create them, put them in a drawer, respect them, and only take them out when something happens. We will flexibly adjust the organization along the lines we lay out. We’ve used a standard Utah template, “Muli-Member L3C, Manager-Managed Organization Agreement”, for that.
And that’s where anyone donating and participating in the roles, tasks, and deliverables laid out has to trust what we do for the community.
Ad B.
See the organizational chart, the competence profiles, and the Memorandum of Understanding (Start 2025: status concept)
Who do you trust more to guide this process: the KERI team, including the original inventor, or some local interest group with an urgent agenda?
We aim for the more considerable support that we expect to be given to the proof of work team, the original KERI team.
Initially, the idea was to give all parties a voice and bring them together in one forum: the Advisory Board. The founders have reserved a seat on the board with decision-making authority for the leader of that Advisory Board.
This concession isn’t necessary for the current state of affairs, nor would it be the first choice to expand the board, but the founders expressed their appreciation by bundling advice in this board vote.
It constitutes the Best of Both Worlds: A small team can act fast and finish the work (5Ws). All stakeholders get a voice, and based on consensus in the advisory board, their chairman/leader has a seat with voting rights on the board of directors to represent the common interests of the stakeholders without slowing down the operations through endless discussions and individual interests.
Some people didn’t like the way the KERI team group took over the initiative to design a KERI foundation.
The feeling of being surpassed without being heard is not a nice one. The European group may not have noticed that donation-based funding has been on the agenda of the KERI team for quite a while. What follows is a historical perspective on the communication.
Blockchainbird made its first donation to KERI development via GitHub in 2020. The KERI team wasn’t involved in the Swiss initiative, so we tried to unify both initiatives when we heard of it. We’re happy that this effort was received well.
When the first meeting was planned just after DICE 2024 by a European group that did not frequent the weekly KERI Zoom meetings of WebofTrust or TrustoverIP, the inventor of KERI clearly stated at this first meeting that the initiative to set up a KERI foundation is for those who put real money on the table.
You could argue about the talents and abilities needed to get KERI adopted by large companies and organizations, but here’s a significant fact:
KERI’s tooling hasn’t matured yet (status 2024), so selling it to larger companies makes no sense. The implementation will diverge from the reference implementation, which still needs to be completed, and the customers will abandon it with an incompatible codebase that must be maintained in an isolated manner.
We consider KERI’s inventor a hard-working multi-talent and should be supported in what he thinks it takes to keep KERI healthy and what the next steps in this process are: open-source foundations set up with the inventor’s blessing have been far more successful in the past than those that bypassed the inventor.
To confirm, the feeling of being surpassed without being heard is unfortunate. As this elaborate answer explains, we believe the experience is mutual. To work together, the KERI team has taken the lead because Blockchainbird (the donation vehicle of Henk van Cann) committed to initially donating 100K US$ to set up a foundation with the design principles mentioned here.
