Not the main sponsor

The previous post in this series named three failure modes for standards bodies. The third one is mine to answer.

Capture by founder dependency. The specification is excellent, but the project depends on a small group of founders who can be politically exhausted, commercially co-opted, or simply move on. That risk applies to every standards body whose founder also runs a commercial entity in the same market, including The Gathering.

This post states what I am doing about it, with the trigger conditions written down so they can be checked later.

The commitment

Two things, both binding.

First, Digital Domain Technologies Ltd (the commercial entity I run, trading as CogNovaMX) will not exceed 25% of The Gathering Administration Ltd's total annual income in any year. The same cap that applies to every other Founding Partner applies to my company without exception, without transitional concession, and without a founder discount.

Second, the founder's approval on governance changes (currently held by me under the founding charter) is conditional and time-limited. The day The Gathering is fully funded by sponsorship and no longer depends on DDT Ltd subsidy to operate, that approval is relinquished. From that day, my vote on governance changes is one vote among the board, weighted no differently than any other Founding Partner.

The WordPress lesson, restated

WordPress powers somewhere around 43% of the web. The plugin directory at WordPress.org is the supply chain that keeps those sites secure. The WordPress trademark is owned by the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit. The WordPress.org domain, the actual distribution infrastructure that every WordPress site depends on to update plugins and security patches, is owned personally by Matt Mullenweg.

In September 2024 Mullenweg used a keynote at WordCamp US to complain about a competitor's contribution levels. Within weeks, the competitor's access to WordPress.org was blocked and a hundreds-of-thousands-of-sites plugin had its slug taken over. A US court granted a preliminary injunction in December 2024 forcing the restoration. Contributors who asked for governance reforms had their WordPress.org accounts deactivated.

The technical specification of WordPress did not change during any of this. The governance did, because the infrastructure was owned personally and the foundation that owned the trademark had no operational control over the infrastructure that owned the supply chain.

If I funded The Gathering's standards body, owned its registry implementation, held a founder's veto on its governance changes, and made the standards body operationally dependent on my commercial entity's subsidy to keep the lights on, I would be reproducing the WordPress shape with a different name. The names of the entities would not save the architecture.

The cap: 25%, no founder exception

The Gathering's funding model already specifies that no single funder may exceed 25% of total annual income. That figure sits in the sponsor-and-funding SSOT and will be in the articles of association so it cannot be quietly relaxed.

Today the rule is in mechanical breach because there are only two Founding Partners, DDT and IDHL, each carrying roughly half the partner pool. The transitional clause binds the cap from the end of 2027, with an explicit target of at least five Founding Partners by that date.

The commitment from DDT's side is simple. When the cap binds, no exception applies to me. The transitional clause is not a back door for the founder's entity to remain dominant after the binding date. Recruiting at least three more Founding Partners by end of 2027 is now the highest-priority work between The Gathering's current state and a defensible structural position.

If that recruitment does not happen, the founder's entity does not get to ignore the cap. DDT will reduce its contribution to fit, or other emergency funding will be found, or the standards body will operate at a lower level than planned. Founder convenience does not override the structural rule.

The veto: conditional, time-limited

The founding charter currently says governance changes require founder approval and community notification. I hold that approval as Founder.

That power is conditional. The trigger that removes it: The Gathering is fully funded by sponsorship and operating without DDT subsidy. On that day, I sign the change to the charter that converts the founder's approval into a single board vote. From that day on, governance changes need board approval (not founder approval) with community ratification via the existing 14-day public review.

The trigger condition is checkable. The Gathering publishes an annual transparency report (per the funding model) listing total income, total expenditure, and funders by tier. If income from sponsorship covers operating expenditure without a DDT contribution being load-bearing, the trigger is met. Anyone reading the transparency report can check.

Why not relinquish the veto today

The honest answer is that I do not want to create a different kind of single point of failure while solving for this one.

While The Gathering depends on DDT subsidy to operate, the founder has both the responsibility of last resort and the accountability of last resort. If something goes wrong with the standard while the standards body cannot self-fund, the founder is the one who has to step in. Removing the veto before the financial dependency is gone hands governance authority to a board that cannot guarantee the lights stay on.

The trigger condition pairs the right and the responsibility. When the body can self-fund, the founder is no longer the last-resort backstop and the veto is no longer earned. Until then, the veto remains, and the founder's job is to make the trigger condition arrive as fast as possible by recruiting the sponsors that make it possible.

What this asks of every other founder

If you are founding a standards body and your commercial entity sits next to it in the same market, the buyers who matter to you will eventually ask the questions the previous post listed. Three of them apply to you specifically.

What percentage of the standards body's income comes from your commercial entity? If the answer is more than a quarter, you have the WordPress shape.

What governance power do you hold personally? If you can veto a governance change without board agreement, you have the WordPress shape.

What is the trigger condition under which you give either of those up? If the answer is "I have not thought about it" or "when I feel comfortable", you have the WordPress shape, and the day will come when you are asked to defend it without notice.

The structural protection is naming the cap, naming the trigger, and publishing both in a place a sceptic can find without your help. Doing that does not eliminate the risk. It puts a deadline on it that survives the founder's personal preferences.

What this does not fix

This commitment is not a complete answer to the founder-dependency failure mode.

It does not address the personnel overlap between The Gathering and DDT, where I am founder of both and Doğu Abaris helps run The Gathering. Even after the veto is relinquished, the people who built The Gathering and the people who run DDT will know each other personally and read the same drafts. That kind of social proximity is real and worth naming.

It does not address the case where DDT becomes commercially dependent on the standard succeeding. If REGINALD's verifier-side revenue becomes material to DDT's survival, DDT has a financial interest in the standard not changing in ways that hurt REGINALD's competitive position. The structural protection against this is the same protection that applies to every other Founding Partner: the cap, the public minutes, the conflict-of-interest declarations, and the multi-sponsor governance.

It does not address the case where the entire founding cohort fails to grow. If The Gathering never reaches five Founding Partners, the trigger condition never arrives, the veto never relinquishes, and the structural risk stays where it is. That outcome is possible. The honest answer is that the cohort growing is the work, and if it does not happen the question of governance will become academic.

What this commitment does is set up the conditions under which the founder becomes optional, write them down, and publish them. The rest of the work is making the conditions arrive.