The cooperative keeps one record, whole and append-only. This page proposes the rule for its reading: the full record belongs to the inner body, a defined public digest belongs to the outer body, and the boundary between the two is decided by a written rule rather than by per-document judgment. A record without an egress rule leaks by accident and hoards by default, usually both at once. This page is a draft. It adopts nothing.
Draft. Nothing here governs. This page was drafted by the cooperative’s agent under the standing drafting grant recorded at the grant register, staged on its own branch per the build discipline, and entered in the ledger at the address EGRESS with the drafted mark. The merge that publishes it adopts the piece into the estate as a draft; it does not put the doctrine in force. The doctrine binds when a person with the standing to bind the cooperative adopts it, and not before.
The frame it implements is on the public record. Issue #217 recorded the steward’s intuition of two member bodies over common systems: an inner patron body holding the formal economic and administrative record, an outer community of practice holding the social and creative surface, with distinct levels of privilege and right between them. Issue #218 turned that intuition into design guidance and named the missing instrument plainly: the tiered read needs a rule, not per-document judgment. This page is that rule, drafted for adoption.
The full record belongs to the inner body. Everything the cooperative writes down in the course of governing itself, building its systems, moving its money, and admitting its members is one append-only record, and the patron members own the whole of it. Egress never edits that record. It selects from it. Nothing in this doctrine redacts, trims, or rewrites what the inner body keeps; the inner record stays whole precisely so that a narrower reading of it can be honest.
A defined public digest belongs to the outer body. The digest is not a favor, a leak, or a press release. It is the outer body’s own property: a defined view of the record, produced by the rule in §3, that the community of practice may hold, cite, republish, and build on within the license class each entry carries. What has left through a door under this doctrine is theirs, and the cooperative does not call it back; where it was wrong, the cooperative corrects it outward under §5 instead.
The distinction does the work the two-body frame requires. The inner body’s claim on the record is total and its read is total. The outer body’s claim is defined and its read is defined. Neither body has to negotiate document by document, because the boundary is written down before any document tests it.
Nothing leaves except by rule, and the default is that nothing leaves. The egress question for any entry in the record is answered by two properties the entry already carries, not by anyone’s judgment on the day: its rights class, which asks whose material it is, and its content class, which asks what kind of record it is. The rule is a written table over those two axes. Where the table is silent, the answer is no, and the cure for a wrong silence is amending the table, not overriding it.
| rights class | what it covers | posture |
|---|---|---|
| ours | The cooperative’s own authored writing: doctrine, specifications, published decisions, the build record’s prose. | Eligible to leave at any grain the content class permits. |
| a member’s | Writing and work a member authored and holds rights in, including internal publishing entries. | Leaves only with the author’s recorded consent, at the grain they consent to. |
| a third party’s | Counterparty terms, correspondence, and any material the cooperative holds but does not own. | Does not leave. Existence may be acknowledged where an instrument already discloses it. |
| personal | Personal data about any identifiable person: contact details, compensation, health, anything of that kind. | Does not leave at any grain finer than an aggregate that identifies no one. |
| content class | full read (inner) | finest public grain (outer) |
|---|---|---|
| governance | Minutes, acts, dissents by name, the deliberation that produced them. | The adopted act verbatim; deliberation as summary only; dissent counts, not names, unless the dissenter asks to be named. |
| build | The ledger, the pieces, the defects, the stop cards. | Verbatim. The build record is written to be public and already is. |
| treasury | Every movement, every balance, every counterparty. | Tallies and aggregates at the reporting period’s grain; no counterparty names beyond what an adopted report discloses. |
| membership | Who the members are, their classes, their accounts. | Counts by class. Names only by each member’s recorded consent. |
| deliberation | The rooms, the threads, the drafts in motion. | Existence and subject at most, and only once the matter it deliberates has been decided. |
Every entry that leaves carries its grain and its license class on its face. The grains are four, from finest to coarsest: verbatim, the entry as written; summary, a faithful digest that names its source; tally, an aggregate over many entries; existence, the fact that a record exists and its subject, nothing more. The license class states what the receiving body may do with it: at minimum, whether it may be republished, whether it may be modified, and what attribution it owes. A departure that names no grain and no license class is outside the rule, whatever else it complies with.
Egress happens through named doors, each one a defined view or a defined publication surface: this estate, the public digest of a journal, an adopted report. A door states which cells of the table it serves and at what grain, so that the question “how did this get out” always has an answer that is a door’s name, and the question “what may this door emit” is answered before anything reaches it. An ad hoc departure, however harmless its content, is a defect in the doctrine’s terms and gets recorded as one.
When the inner record is corrected, every digest of the corrected entry that has left through a door is corrected too, through the same door, at the same grain, as a new act that names what it corrects. The inner discipline is already written: correction is a new act and nothing is quietly fixed, per the Order of Proceeding. This section extends the same discipline across the boundary. The outer body holds what the cooperative told it in the cooperative’s own words, so a correction that stops at the boundary leaves the outer body holding a claim the inner body knows to be wrong, on the cooperative’s authority.
Two consequences follow and both are meant. First, a door must be able to say what has passed through it, because a correction cannot chase what nobody tracked; the door’s emissions are themselves record. Second, silence is not a correction. Deleting an entry from a public surface without a correcting act is the quiet fix the inner discipline already forbids, and it is forbidden here for the same reason: both readings must stay legible, the wrong one wearing its correction.
This doctrine was staged on the branch that bears its address, and the merge that publishes it is the act that adopts the draft into the estate. The doctrine itself then waits on a person: adoption is an act of whoever holds the standing to bind the cooperative on the matter, recorded the way the cooperative records such acts, and until that act this page governs nothing and no door owes it obedience.
Three questions are left open on purpose, because they are elections for the adopter rather than defects in the draft. Whether the deliberation row’s public grain is existence or nothing at all. Whether member consent to being named is gathered once, standing, or per departure. And which license classes the cooperative offers the outer body, which is a rights decision the agent does not hold and did not take.
This page decides the rule’s shape, not its cells’ final values. The tables in §3 are the drafter’s cut, written to be amended in adoption. Where any adopted instrument speaks to a departure this page would permit, the instrument wins and this page yields.
EGRESS v1 · a draft, adopted by nobody · Nou drafts; Todd decides; adoption is a human act · RegenHub, LCA · Boulder, Colorado · 2026-08-22