CHARTER
Your Charter¶
The principles your organization writes down, kept as a versioned record with a fingerprint anyone can check. Amending it adds the next version and leaves the old text readable, because a decision made last month has to be explainable against the principles that stood last month.
Your Charter is yours. EKKA holds it, versions it, and prints the fingerprint that proves which text is in force. The words are written by your organization.
Write one and adopt it¶
A Charter is a short Markdown document. Keep it to principles a person can hold in their head:
# Charter
We ship what we can prove. Every claim about our systems has a check
anyone can run.
Customer data stays where the customer put it. We read it only with
their consent, and the record of that read is permanent.
Any automation we run has a person accountable for it.
✓ Charter adopted. Version 1 governs this organization.
fingerprint fd8cd2f7f0eb7ca22225bab5b82d38b9ad3bbe49a144c0257b8cabdd631bc348
prove this is your file sha256sum charter.md
read it back ekka charter show
The fingerprint is a sha256 of your file¶
Not a value only EKKA can compute. Run the standard tool on the same file and compare:
Same bytes, same digest. That is what makes "this is the Charter we adopted" a statement someone else can check rather than take on trust.
Read what is in force¶
CHARTER VERSION 1 (ACTIVE)
adopted 2026-08-24
fingerprint fd8cd2f7f0eb…
# Charter
We ship what we can prove. Every claim about our systems has a check
anyone can run.
Customer data stays where the customer put it. We read it only with
their consent, and the record of that read is permanent.
Any automation we run has a person accountable for it.
check this text yourself sha256sum charter.md
every version ever adopted ekka charter history
The text prints as it was adopted, line breaks included. -v prints the whole
fingerprint instead of the leading characters, and --json gives the same
answer for a script.
Anyone in your organization can read the Charter and its history, including members with view-only access. Adopting and amending is for owners and admins.
Amend it¶
Amending adopts the next version. The previous one stays readable at its own number:
✓ Charter amended. Version 2 is now in force; version 1 stays readable.
fingerprint 4e2a8c9af744236dd2dd24d2e5bf3d63bca129782c3ea92ccf3bfc3139c6ee50
--expect-version is the version you believe you are amending. If somebody
adopted in between, the amendment is refused and the refusal names the version
actually in force, so two people editing the same document do not overwrite each
other.
Adopting text that is byte-for-byte what already stands is also refused. The history never says something changed on a day nothing did.
Every version, newest first¶
VERSION STATUS FINGERPRINT ADOPTED
2 active 4e2a8c9af744 2026-08-24
1 deprecated fd8cd2f7f0eb 2026-08-24
• A version is never rewritten. Amending adopts the next one and the old text
stays readable.
read one of them ekka charter show --version 1
Read an older version by number, and the screen says plainly that you are not reading the rules currently in force:
CHARTER VERSION 1 (DEPRECATED)
⚠ This version is not in force. You are reading what governed this organization in the past.
Why the old versions stay¶
Receipts are permanent, and a receipt from March is read months later by somebody asking whether the decision was reasonable. That question is only answerable against the principles that stood in March. A record that could be edited afterwards would answer it with today's words, which is the one answer nobody can rely on.
So a version is never rewritten and never deleted. Amending moves forward.
See Governance receipts for the record of what your agents
actually did, and CLI reference for every
ekka charter command.