Trust should be built into the structure.
All principles · 04 / Trust is structural
A promise from a founder is a relationship.
In practice
Recorded, attributable
Governance in the open
Audit without permission
Test
If removing one person or one company would make the community's trust disappear, the trust was personal all along.
Read the full principle
Principle
Trust is a property of the architecture, held independent of any person's goodwill.
Meaning
A promise from a founder is a relationship. A structure is a guarantee. When trust depends on who is in charge, it dies with the person, the company, or the mood. Structural trust means the system itself makes the important things true: who can change the rules, what happened, who acted, all of it recorded, inspectable, and accountable no matter who holds office.
In practice
Every meaningful action is recorded and attributable.
The rules that govern the shared layer are themselves governed, visibly.
A community can audit what happened without asking anyone's permission.
The system behaves the same way when nobody is watching.
Product pressure
This principle favors:
signed, appendable audit records
visible governance of the governance rules
behavior independent of any individual's discretion
interfaces that make the state of trust legible to non-experts
Test
If removing one person or one company would make the community's trust disappear, the trust was personal all along.