An autonomous federation of autonomous units, a basic and primitive form of PAP, implemented now.
DAF, the Distributed Autonomous Federation, is the first phase in distributing the power of the Drayker Embassy: an autonomous federation of autonomous units, distributed like Dk, the groups and organizations of people working on different questions and projects in Drayker. It is a basic and primitive form of PAP, implemented now on GitHub (Phase 0): its rules, instruments and public record exist. No unit has been recorded and no assembly has been held yet. Its dynamics are tested as the very way Drayker is built. It explores coordination among the units while the broader member constitution and Projects & Applications develop. It provides a place to test federative rules in public.
DAF serves to build Drayker's own infrastructure, including UID and the network, together: the independent infrastructure that will make DAF unnecessary. In doing so it prepares its own dissolution: it stops being a separate layer and comes to live inside PAP.
Documented proposals examine decision rules, a distinct federative points ledger and review procedures. Useful functions can later migrate into PAP and member governance.
DAF serves the development of durable coordination. Its functions may migrate or dissolve as the wider system becomes able to carry them.
A group could propose a shared activity, document its resource commitments and review the outcome, distinguishing honest failure from misconduct. This is an illustration of the proposed design.
DAF is implemented early and kept simple inside that direction: a way to make decisions and resource rules inspectable before the durable environment exists.
DAF is not Drayker's final constitution and is not the permanent reason the system has no head office. Functions that prove useful here are expected to migrate into PAP, member governance and member councils formed for each question. DAF may therefore become progressively thinner or functionally dissolve rather than survive for its own sake.
If DAF reaches a phase that experiments with units of account, ICP is only a probable provisional substrate, not a final dependency or the destination of Drayker's infrastructure. That phase is meant to help build and test Drayker's own infrastructure and system inside DAF. When PAP exists at the required maturity, DAF's useful functions and that transitional infrastructure are expected to be absorbed into PAP; DAF dissolves into the durable environment rather than remaining a parallel institution.
The argument in full is on the manifesto. The economy page states plainly what contributing here earns and what it does not.
Anyone, a person, a team, a project or an initiative, can link their own unit to the federation. During this phase, units may accumulate federative points and voting weight over decisions inside DAF's bounded scope. Voting is transitional. It holds only until the federation can reproduce and test what version 1.0 is designed around: contextual weighing by the global Dk, justified vetoes weighed by their grounds rather than counted, and member councils formed for each question. Each of these mechanisms that is reproduced and tested replaces part of the vote.
The federation's shared interface and public record are maintained in English so every assembly has one auditable reference. A unit may organize around a particular language, region or nationality, and may work internally in that language. It only needs to submit its unit record, claims, requests and assembly evidence to the federation in English. Language or nationality never changes how points are earned or how a vote is weighted.
Weight follows delivered work. It is not appointed, and it cannot be bought. A point records one delivered function, it is non-transferable, and it does not decay. These points are a ledger for the federation: they are not the member's general reputation, do not measure human value and do not automatically determine support, access or resource allocation elsewhere in Drayker.
The mechanics are specified in DAF-000.
The initial federation is funded by grants, donations, and side projects. All support requests must be made in situations where there are no other alternatives. Resource efficiency matters here, and the major projects are the priority.
That rule is published on purpose. A federation that treats its shared resources as a first resort stops being able to fund anything that matters.
It is also enforceable rather than decorative: a request that does not say what was tried first is returned unjudged, and funding is granted one function at a time, each grant evaluated against the evidence of the last.
Protection of honest failure vs. bad-faith penalties: Genuine technological and cognitive exploration entails uncertainty. An honest failure to complete a committed function does not deduct previously earned points; it simply concludes the cycle without awarding new points, and any unspent project resources revert to the common capacity reserve. Penalties (point forfeiture, balance deduction, or expulsion) are strictly bounded to proven bad-faith actions: falsification of delivery evidence, fraud, malicious collusion, or unwithdrawn resource hoarding. The review keeps distinct what is not the same: failing while trying, hiding information, abandoning a commitment without communicating, fraud, exploiting members and deliberately sabotaging the federation. Only the first is an honest outcome. Inactivity is never penalized, and a holder who lost points can earn again by delivering.
DAF is an early place where autonomous units can test cooperation without being absorbed into one organization. Projects, councils, initiatives and the volunteers portal can connect through it while its useful functions are learned and transferred to more durable layers.
Contribution is attributable through UID, while federative points remain separate from the broader, contextual reputation model. Dktron and the value-unit family are distinct resource and economic instruments, not another name for those points. Councils can validate proposals; DAF can test limited shared-resource decisions and, provisionally, the infrastructure for a phase that experiments with units of account, records and coordination. Drayker has no head office because intelligence, projects, knowledge and member governance are designed to be distributed — not because one transitional federation owns that role forever.
dafp/ holds the proposals that specify the federation.
- DAF-000. The minimal constitution, independent of any platform: participants and units, how a point is earned, how points become voting weight, quorum and majority, how a resource request is judged, penalties and exit.
- DAF-001. Phase 0, the initial version: the federation designed to run on this repository, with no chain and no unit of account, and an explicit account of what is deferred to later phases.
- DAF-002 (draft). The instruments that keep the record in Phase 0: they check its structure and arithmetic, regenerate the ledger, draft assembly reports and compute the arithmetic of a vote, and export the record as an event log a later substrate can replay. They never judge, merge or decide.
- DAF-003 (draft). The justified veto in Phase 0: a public record of a veto against a federation decision, with its grounds, and of the triage that examined it. A decision is not merged while a veto against it awaits triage.
The record itself lives in federation/: unit records, assembly reports, resource requests and the ledger, in plain text under version control, so that any claim about who delivered what can be checked by reading.
DAF is implemented now on GitHub (Phase 0): its rules, instruments and public record exist. The point mechanics and the voting procedure are specified as drafts open to argument. No unit has been recorded and no assembly has been held yet. No points have been issued, and there is no deployed contract. The record is first used at the first assembly that records a real delivery.
Several things are still unspecified on purpose. The substrate beyond Phase 0 was identified as ICP (Internet Computer Protocol), but no migration has occurred. The authority of councils, the migration of useful DAF functions into PAP and member governance, and the limits of federative points remain open. These questions are listed in DAF-000 §9.
When UID enters use, the history of deliveries recorded in the DAF's Phase 0 enters the UIDs of those who made them as contextual history. It does not change base representation, which is the same for every active member. When the federation dissolves into PAP, federative points stay as a historical record and stop counting as voting weight, and Dk recalculates contextual reputation from the verified history of deliveries, as one input among the others that inform it.
Open an issue. Issues small enough for one person to finish carry the open-function label and appear on the board at drayker.org.
Run node --test tools/test and node tools/daf.js check before opening a change to the record or the tools, and node tools/render-check.js before opening a site change. The render check exercises the empty, snapshot, malformed-snapshot and offline states without sending any external action.
The issues of this repository can also be read, with their replies, on the General Forum, the reading surface for public threads across Drayker. Replies are still written here, on GitHub.
Related: dfmp (how proposals are validated) · uid (identity and contribution) · advices (councils)
Drayker belongs to its members, has no shareholders and distributes no profit, and its work is primarily voluntary. Content licensed CC BY 4.0.