moderation & council

Specifies the Ecumenical Council and the Jury procedure through which Aevia's distribution-layer decisions are governed. The Council is a twelve-seat body with four-year terms that holds veto authority over protocol parameters affecting persistence, distribution, and the Pool. The Jury is the subset of Council members that reviews contested Risk Scores and individual content-level disputes on a rolling basis.

The Council exists to resolve a structural tension. Token-weighted governance converges on plutocracy at scale. Person-weighted democratic governance is vulnerable to Sybil attack at the identity layer. Aevia deliberately chooses neither. The Council is a fixed-size plural body: twelve individuals with publicly declared theological, philosophical, and professional perspectives, no single tradition holding a majority, each with a one-time-per-term veto on parameter proposals they judge incompatible with the protocol's stated values.

Every deliberation, vote, veto, and dissenting opinion is published to the Trust Ledger, a Merkle-anchored log on Base L2. Any party — creator, Provider Node, Operator, regulator, journalist — can audit the protocol's moderation history from it.

• exactly 12 seats, 4-year terms, staggered rotation
• plurality constraint (MUST): no single declared tradition may hold more than 4 of the 12 seats
• recognized traditions (v0.1): Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Reformed, Evangelical Non-Reformed, Pentecostal/Charismatic, Jewish, Muslim, other monotheistic, secular/non-affiliated, other (Buddhist, Hindu, indigenous)
• seats held by real individuals, not organizations or DAOs
• mandatory recusal on material conflict of interest
• removal-for-cause by ≥9/12 (supermajority) — veto does not apply; causes: fraud, public AUP violation, sustained inactivity, felony conviction related to the protocol

Canonical workflow (MUST) for every Council-governable parameter change:

1. proposal submission with ≥500-word justification on the Trust Ledger
2. 21 days of open comment period (any DID may comment)
3. 14 days voting (≥7/12 simple majority; ≥9/12 for governance-rule changes)
4. 48h for any member to exercise per-term veto (one per term) with ≥500-word justification
5. Operator implementation within 7 days (parameters) or 30 days (contract deployment), with transition period when applicable

Not council-governable: AUP absolute exclusions [b] and [c], RFC 8 §7 invariants, Council composition rules themselves (except ≥9/12 + 90 days comment), native-token prohibition (RFC 8 INV-8).

Append-only log of governance events, DID-signed, Merkle root anchored on Base L2 via LedgerAnchor.sol per-epoch (default weekly). Discoverable via:

• aevia.network/transparency — human-readable
• public REST/gRPC API at trust-ledger.aevia.network
• direct Merkle tree queries via the LedgerAnchor contract

Event kinds: council_induction, parameter_proposal, parameter_vote, parameter_veto, jury_convened, jury_decision, jury_dissent, risk_score, risk_contest, election_result, etc. Each event is signature-verifiable offline from its canonical JSON (RFC 8785) and the signer's public key.