Committee

Committee

The Committee maintains Living canon. It does not own the world, and it does not decide what counts as a Duela story. It maintains a recommendation.

A story written without ever consulting the Committee is still Duela. A lineage of branches the Committee never recognized is still Duela. The Committee exists to give writers who want a shared reference point something stable to build on. Nothing more.

Composition

The Committee has five seats:

• One founding seat, held by the project founder.
• Four rotating seats, held by contributors whose work has shaped what other writers build on.

All five seats vote with equal weight. The founder is one Committee member among five, not above them.

Rotating seats

Rotating seats serve six-month terms. There is no limit on consecutive terms - a contributor whose work continues to anchor the setting may hold a seat for as long as the nomination process supports it.

New seats are filled by mixed nomination: the existing Committee nominates a candidate, and the founding seat confirms. Either side can decline a name. A seat may remain open through more than one nomination cycle if no candidate is agreed on; this is not a problem.

"Contributor whose work has shaped what others build on" is not defined by a single metric. It refers to writers whose stories, characters, or settings other writers have meaningfully built on - the same standard that determines whether an entry has settled into Living canon by use. A Committee seat reflects the same principle the canon does: recognition follows what the rest of the project has been building from.

Inactivity

Committee rights lapse after two months without contribution. This is a generous threshold; it is meant to remove members who have actually stepped away from the project, not to penalize a quiet stretch.

A lapsed seat is treated as vacant for voting purposes (see Vacancy below).

A member whose rights have lapsed may return. The Committee decides case by case whether their seat is restored, whether they re-enter the nomination process as a new candidate, or whether the seat has been filled in their absence. There is no automatic restoration.

Founding seat

The founding seat votes as one of five.

It holds two additional powers, both procedural and neither overriding a vote:

• Confirmation on nominations. New rotating members are nominated by the Committee and confirmed by the founding seat. This is a check on nomination, not an appointment power - the founding seat cannot nominate, only confirm or decline.
• Final call on procedural disputes. Disputes about how the Committee operates - quorum, recording, interpretation of these rules - are resolved by the founding seat. This power covers process, not outcomes.

The founding seat also fills gaps in two specific cases described below: vacancy and recusal. These are not extra powers; they are mechanisms to keep the Committee at five votes when seats temporarily can't be filled by their normal holders.

Votes

The Committee votes on two things:

• Promotion of an entry to Living canon: requires three votes of five.
• Pruning of an entry from Living canon: requires all five votes. Pruning returns the entry to the general collection. It does not delete the story.

When uncertainty exists, the Committee biases toward keeping entries in canon. The unanimous threshold for pruning is intentional - it should be hard to remove what has already been recognized.

An entry that other stories have built on cannot be pruned if pruning would break those branches. This rule overrides any vote.

Vacancy

If a rotating seat is vacant - between terms, lapsed, or otherwise unfilled - the founding seat casts an additional vote in its place. The Committee always votes as five.

This is not an expansion of the founding seat's power. It exists so that delayed nominations or sudden departures do not stall or weaken Committee decisions. A founder uncomfortable with this concentration of votes can choose to postpone votes until the seat is filled. There is no obligation to act on an active matter while seats are vacant.

Recusal

A Committee member cannot vote on the promotion of their own work to Living canon. They are recused for that vote. The founding seat casts the recused member's vote in their place, keeping the Committee at five.

If the work up for promotion is the founding seat's, the founding seat is recused and does not cast a replacement vote. The remaining four members vote, and promotion requires three of four.

When a member is unreachable

A vote requires all members able to vote present. If a member who is not vacant or recused cannot be reached, the vote is postponed. Committee work is not urgent - nothing in the canon collapses while a vote waits.

How votes are recorded

Only the outcome of a vote is recorded publicly. Individual votes, deliberations, and dissent stay within the Committee.

This is intentional. The Committee speaks with one voice once a vote is settled. A promoted entry has the Committee's endorsement. A retained entry has the Committee's protection. The reasoning behind either is not part of the record.

The integrity rule

An entry that has been built on by other stories cannot be pruned if pruning would break those branches.

When a prune is proposed, the affected branch authors are consulted. They describe what their work depends on and what would be lost if the entry were removed. The Committee then judges whether the entry is structurally load-bearing.

The standard is not whether a branch could survive in some technical sense. It is whether the branch would lose its meaning. A story whose entire premise rests on a pruned entry is broken even if it still parses; the integrity rule protects against that.

In practice, the integrity rule means Living canon is unstable in its early life and stabilizes through use. Recognition can be withdrawn. Structural use cannot.

Scope

The Committee maintains Living canon. It does not:

• edit, revise, or rewrite stories - including stories in Living canon;
• arbitrate disputes between writers about their own work;
• approve, reject, or rank stories in the general collection;
• alter the cosmology in any way.

A story in the general collection does not pass through the Committee. It is written, and it is Duela the moment it is written. The Committee's authority begins and ends at the question of what carries the Living canon marker.

Principle

The Committee does not decide what is true in Duela. It decides what enough of us have agreed to build on.