Governance overview
Governance
ATAH is governed by a public Charter with eight core commitments. The Charter is the load-bearing document for what the protocol is and what it commits to over time.
The Charter
The Charter is a public governance covenant. It defines the entrenched commitments of the protocol — those that require a supermajority amendment process to change — and sets out the structure of governance, partner participation, conflict-of-interest handling, and the protocol's relationship to its operational implementation.
The Charter is published in full on GitHub. The summary below describes its main features.
Eight core commitments
Charter Part One sets out eight entrenched core commitments. They anchor the protocol's character against future drift toward commercial capture.
- 01
Open specification
The protocol is published under Apache 2.0. Anyone may implement, fork, or extend.
- 02
No commercial weighting in matching
Matching logic carries no commercial weighting at any point. Partner integration fees, professional registration fees, AI platform relationships, enhanced verification fees, and review platform integration arrangements have no influence on whether or how a professional is returned in a match result.
- 03
Provenance always visible
Every data point in every response is sourced, dated, and verification-status-tagged.
- 04
Open MCP endpoint
The ATAH-operated reference MCP endpoint is free to query for AI platforms (subject to authentication, rate limits, and abuse controls). No per-query fee, no licensing fee, no commercial gate.
- 05
Privacy floor
End-user personal data is transient. ATAH does not retain, profile, or derive insight from end-user data. The encrypted-vault model with crypto-erasure on retrieval is structural, not policy.
- 06
Compliance gating floor
No professional category is surfaced in matching before its compliance annex is approved.
- 07
Founder's role and compensation
Defined and constrained. No veto rights. Conflict-of-interest disclosure and recusal rules apply. Any founder-affiliated entity participates on terms equally available to others.
- 08
Operational independence and protocol-layer governance
The protocol-layer governance body is, or transitions to, an independent not-for-profit or equivalent public-interest entity. Operational service providers (including any founder-affiliated entity) are non-exclusive, replaceable, and operate under terms equally available to others.
Three governance layers
The Charter distinguishes three governance layers that describe who runs what on what terms:
- Protocol governance body. Holds the specification, conformance marks, partner admission rules, transparency rules, and neutrality audits. Form is mandated: independent not-for-profit or equivalent public-interest entity.
- Reference registry operator. Runs the canonical operational endpoint. Form is constrained but not mandated: may be commercial under strict neutrality, auditability, and structural-separation constraints.
- Third-party conforming implementations. Other registries that meet conformance requirements. Form is unconstrained.
How to engage
Charter changes follow a published amendment process. Issues affecting governance are filed in the GitHub repository or addressed through the published governance channels. Conflicts of interest are disclosed; related-party transactions are declared.
If you want to engage with the protocol's governance — proposing a change, raising a concern, or joining the founding-period advisory group — see the GOVERNANCE.md document in the repository.