The Protocols
Five documents that decide what we will not do.
Gigets is governed by five internal Protocols, written before the product existed. They apply to founders, contributors, community leads, advisers and investors alike. Adherence is a condition of participation, and conduct incompatible with them ends the relationship.
Each governs its own domain, and together they leave no significant part of conduct, decision or performance ungoverned.
The full text is internal, because a governance document that has to be written for an audience stops being a governance document. What follows is the part that concerns you, published because you are entitled to know the standard we hold ourselves to before you decide to trust us with anything.
01 · Security
People, systems, and member data
What Gigets owns is the trust between its members, so security is the condition of the product working at all.
Access to member data is granted per person, for a stated reason, and revoked the day it stops being needed. Every access is itself logged. Member data never passes through a tool we have not approved, however useful that tool is. Any suspected breach reaches the founder within the hour, and concealing one is treated more seriously than causing one.
Three lines that are about you. Your data is yours: never sold, never brokered, never used for advertising. Exchange conversations are read only for safety, disputes and aggregate signals. Erasure and export are proven end to end, vector stores included, before members are admitted, because an untested deletion path does not exist.
02 · Communication
Internal flow, the record, and external voice
Density inward, discipline outward.
Inside, information is shared generously, the most junior person speaks first in any review, and the founder speaks last. Every significant decision is written down with an owner and a date. Verbal agreements do not exist here.
Outward, one authorised person speaks to each audience, and no claim is made that cannot be substantiated. Anything written inside may one day be read outside, so the rule is to do nothing that reads badly in daylight. We argue a philosophy, how reciprocity works and why it pays, rather than how good our product is. Philosophy travels. Promotion has to be bought.
03 · Integrity, Transparency and Accountability
Conduct, the product, and counterparties
We intend to get the best out of people and situations, never to profit from wrongdoing or weakness. No revenue is ever taken from exploitation, addiction or anyone's difficulty. No decision turns on sex, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, orientation, age, disability or background.
Four rules that are built into the product itself.
Price Exchanges, never people. No per-person rate exists in the schema, in the API, or in a conversation. No leaderboards, no ratings, no score on a human being.
The system mediates, it does not replace. Every automated output ends in something two people do together.
No advertising. Attention is not the business model and no third party pays to reach a member.
Explain every output. Every match and every price carries a reason a member can read. What cannot be explained is not shipped.
Where a conflict of interest would cost credibility, a permanent wall separates the two functions, the founder's included: whoever prices an Exchange never gains from its price. Capital of unverifiable origin is refused. When something goes wrong, transparency goes up, not down.
04 · Governance
Authority, loyalty, and decisions
Clear authority liberates. When everyone understands who decides what and why, effort goes into building instead of into working out who decides.
Final strategic authority rests with the founder, and control is designed to stay there through the financing path, disclosed in full to anyone asked to rely on it. Every opinion is heard, and the better-founded opinion on the specific matter carries the decision. Expertise, not rank.
Constitutional invariants. Closed-loop currency. Exchanges priced, never persons. No advertising. No leaderboards. An explanation on every output. None of these is traded away for convenience, and changing one requires a signed founder decision.
Evidence decides. Reversible decisions are made fast and corrected faster. Irreversible ones get thought proportional to how permanent they are. Every open question has an owner and a date, because doing nothing is itself a decision and usually the worst one available.
Reciprocity is practised internally, deliberately and visibly. A company cannot sell reciprocity it does not run on.
05 · Excellence
The will to build, craft, and culture
We do not compete inside an existing category. We build the one where competition stops mattering.
Simplicity is earned, and it takes a long time. Complexity that reaches the member is a failure of craft, so the experience is designed first and the technology is built backwards from it. Shipped work compounds and perfect work that never ships does not.
Ideas are fought over hard and impersonally. Attacking a weak idea is an obligation, not an aggression. Everyone owns their output entirely, the credit and the consequences both. Nobody waits to be told.
Perfection is reached when nothing more can be removed.
Why this is public
Three reasons.
You are being asked to put real needs, and sometimes private ones, into a product run by people you have never met. The standard we hold ourselves to is relevant information, and withholding it while asking for your trust would be a strange way to start.
Anyone considering working with us, advising us, funding us, or bringing a circle here should be able to see how decisions get made before they commit, not after.
And a promise that is written down where everyone can see it is much harder to quietly abandon later. That is mostly the point.
Questions about how Gigets is governed: [email protected]