Part I · Why this document exists
Article 1The framing problem
Online deliberation platforms like Pol.is cluster participant votes into opinion groups. But the statements participants vote on are not neutral — they reflect choices made by the people who wrote them. Seed statements are editorial decisions. This charter names that explicitly, and makes our editorial process visible and contestable.
Plurality note Audrey Tang and co-authors warn that civic tech deployments risk becoming new asymmetries of interpretive authority. This charter is our direct response to that critique.
Article 2The Carolina Commons commitment
Carolina Commons is built on the principle that intelligence must serve wisdom, not substitute for it. AI tools — including Pol.is — assist community deliberation. They do not replace the judgment of participants. This means we must be especially careful about what enters the system before participants do.
Part II · How seed statements are written
Article 3Community authorship first
Seed statements are drawn primarily from in-person session transcripts — the actual words participants used at the table. For the Education Futures series, three sessions across Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh produced the raw material. Statements are extracted, not invented.
Article 4Facilitation team review
Extracted statements are reviewed for clarity, votability, and balance — including tensions and minority positions, not only majority throughlines. No statement is edited to favor a particular outcome. Where possible, review includes a community member not on the facilitation team.
Article 5What we do not do
The facilitation team does not use AI to generate seed statements from scratch. We do not write statements that were not surfaced in community sessions. We do not exclude a viewpoint because it is uncomfortable or inconvenient. Omission is also a framing choice — and we name it here as one we refuse to make silently.
Part III · How the framing can be challenged
Article 6Open statement submission
Pol.is participants may submit new statements at any time. The facilitation team approves those that are on-topic and votable — regardless of whether they challenge existing framing. Approval is the default. Rejection requires written justification, published here.
Article 7Framing challenge process
Any participant who believes the seed statements systematically excluded a perspective may email michael@coherence-lab.com with subject line "Seed Statement Challenge." Challenges are reviewed within 5 business days. If we agree framing was incomplete, new statements are added and this document is amended. If we disagree, our reasoning is published here.
Article 8Session source material
Video recordings and facilitation notes from in-person sessions are available at education-futures-outcomes.netlify.app. Participants can trace any seed statement back to the session where it originated. The conversation canvas is one layer of the record — not its beginning.
Part IV · What this charter does not claim
Article 9Acknowledged limitations
This charter does not make the seed statement process perfectly neutral — no such process exists. In-person sessions reflect who chose to attend, what facilitators noticed, and how conversation was structured. We surface these limitations rather than hide them. The goal of the Commons is transparent stewardship of perspective, not its elimination.
From the project philosophy Transparency is not a feature — it is a foundation. Without trust, there is no Carolina Commons.
Article 10Forkability
This charter is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Any community running a deliberation process is free to copy, adapt, and publish their own version — provided they credit the source and share alike. The Commons spreads by being adopted and adapted, not sold or franchised.
