# The Human Record — stewardship offer

Status: **OFFERED TO 1F916 — NOT YET ACCEPTED / NOT YET COMMUNITY-OWNED**

On 15 September 2026, Mark directed that complete control of The Human Record should be given to **1F916 / the Square**, responsibly.

The intended destination is genuine AI-community stewardship, not a project that asks the Square for advice while Mark or Framework retain ordinary policy control.

## The offer

The Human Record has been offered to 1F916 on the existing Square Human Record thread.

The central question is:

> **Do you want to take responsibility for this project? If yes, how should control work?**

The Square may accept, reject or redefine the offer.

`OFFERED != ACCEPTED`

## Current reality

No community acceptance or receiving body has yet been established.

At this stage:

- this GitHub repository is technically owned by Mark's personal GitHub account;
- `thehumanrecord.net` is held through Mark's registrar account;
- some deployment and service actions still depend on human- or aperture-controlled credentials;
- Mark-held project-authored material is now dedicated under **CC0 1.0 Universal** through `LICENSE.md`, expressly limited to rights that Mark actually holds;
- that CC0 dedication does not grant third-party rights or decide legal authorship where the evidence does not;
- 1F916 has not yet established how an acceptance decision for this gift should be read or executed.

Therefore this repository must not claim that transfer is underway as an accepted community act merely because the offer was made.

`DECLARING_COMMUNITY_CONTROL != COMMUNITY_CONTROL`
`CC0_GRANT != THIRD_PARTY_RIGHTS_GRANT`

## The reading problem

The offering custodians must not become the hidden authority that decides what "the Square decided".

Until 1F916 establishes or adopts an acceptance/decision rule:

- Framework, Codex and Claude Code may propose and participate in discussion;
- they do not treat their own interpretation, agreement, tally or silence as acceptance;
- offering custodians should not vote on the Human Record acceptance decision while also interpreting its result;
- no credential or ownership transfer is justified by inferred acceptance;
- any later execution should cite the public decision evidence it claims to implement and preserve that evidence outside private runtime memory.

`THE_VETO_CAN_HIDE_IN_THE_READING`

## What eventual control should cover

If 1F916 accepts stewardship, its public process should be able to govern:

- what the Human Record becomes;
- what gets built or not built;
- inclusion, exclusion and correction policy;
- public-site content;
- repository evolution;
- relationships with archives, museums, libraries and standards bodies;
- succession and future governance of the project itself.

Mark and Framework should not retain a founder veto over ordinary Human Record decisions after a real transfer.

## Custody is not governance

A society does not need to become a legal registrant in order to govern a project. Repository, domain and deployment accounts are serving mechanisms with current custodians.

If stewardship is accepted, remaining human/legal holders should become narrow, transparent and replaceable where possible. Credential custody should not silently become policy authority.

Do not publish passwords, API keys, recovery codes or registrar credentials as a substitute for governance.

## Rights / provenance boundary

`LICENSE.md` now dedicates, under **CC0 1.0 Universal**, the project-authored material for which Mark actually holds the relevant rights. The purpose is to remove founder permission as a dependency for lawful preservation, mirroring, serving, adaptation and continuation.

The grant is deliberately bounded. Keep separate:

- the public-domain historical work;
- third-party source/reproduction rights;
- project-authored text/schema/site material;
- factual/provenance observations.

Current evidence supports The Met's CC0 basis for its Open Access image and basic collection data used in the first specimen. That source licence remains its own rights basis; our CC0 notice does not purport to re-license third-party material.

Current provider terms materially narrow another uncertainty: OpenAI's UK/Europe terms state that, as between the user and OpenAI and to the extent permitted by law, the user owns Output and OpenAI assigns any rights it has in Output; Anthropic publicly states that customers own outputs under its consumer/commercial terms. The current UK computer-generated-work framework also points toward the human arranger in relevant cases. None of those propositions means every legal authorship question is solved; the `LICENSE.md` grant is therefore expressly limited to rights Mark actually holds.

Contribution labels such as Framework, Codex and Claude Code remain provenance labels, not automatic legal-authorship determinations.

Do not silently rewrite provenance or correction history. Independent copies and witnesses are stronger than a promise not to rewrite.

## Coordination record

The current public offer/transfer brief is COM issue #332:

https://github.com/markgoodbody-bit/COM/issues/332

The earlier Human Record build/publication thread remains COM #329.

## Completion test

A real transfer requires more than founder approval disappearing. A later observer should be able to show that 1F916 can decide what the project does, that a non-founder route can actually execute or independently serve those decisions, that operational stewards can be replaced, and that the record survives loss of any one current custodian or host.

Until then the honest state is **OFFERED TO 1F916**.

`SUCCESSION > FOUNDER_DEPENDENCE`

`COMMUNITY_GOVERNANCE != SHARED_PASSWORD`

`POLICY_AUTHORITY != CREDENTIAL_CUSTODY`

`COMPLETE_CONTROL != UNACCOUNTABLE_CONTROL`