Governance

Immutable purpose

The Carrot Foundation exists to build a circular, low-carbon economy. This purpose is permanent — it cannot be changed by any governance decision, leadership transition, or structural evolution of the ecosystem. Every rule, methodology, and operational process in the Carrot Network traces back to this commitment.

Stewardship model

The Foundation acts as steward of the Carrot Network — not as its owner. Ownership implies discretion over the asset; stewardship implies obligation to the mission. The Foundation Council can evolve how the ecosystem operates, but it cannot alter what the ecosystem exists to do.

How the ecosystem is governed today

The Carrot Foundation is responsible for the direction of the ecosystem — including protocol development, approval of new methodologies, operational compliance, and resource allocation.

Decisions are made by the Foundation Council, composed of founding members and advisors with experience in product, technology, operations, environment, legal, and finance.

This structure ensures agility and clear accountability during the current stage of development — when execution speed and technical consistency are critical for ecosystem growth.

Progressive community participation

As the ecosystem matures and the participant base grows, the Foundation will progressively expand participation mechanisms — enabling integrators, methodology developers, and other active contributors to take on defined roles in the protocol's evolution.

This transition follows three phases:

Engagement

Open, structured participation in discussions, feedback, and technical alignment. Contributors build shared vocabulary and evaluation standards with the existing ecosystem community.

Consultative

The community produces structured technical analyses and recommendations that support internal curation decisions. This includes reviews of submitted proposals, identification of auditability gaps, and recommendations for improving frameworks and verification applications.

Deliberative

Formal transfer of defined responsibilities to qualified community members. This phase introduces explicit roles, decision-making processes, quorums, and safeguards. Participants are vetted and authorized to exercise specific functions within established governance procedures.

The criteria for participation levels, permissions, and deliberative processes will be documented as the community structure consolidates.

Integrity safeguards

Even as community participation grows, the Carrot Foundation maintains a fallback guarantor role to preserve transparency, reliability, and process continuity. This includes:

• Preservation of audit trails and versioning for every governance decision
• Evidence packages that remain intact and queryable regardless of who makes the decision
• Response mechanisms for integrity risks

Governance evolution and evidence integrity move together. Changes to decision-making processes do not reduce the auditability of outcomes — decisions, methodology changes, and verification results remain explainable and auditable.

Compliance and auditability

Regardless of the governance structure, the Carrot Network is designed to be auditable by any party:

• The verification code (MvA) is open source (LGPL-3.0) and publicly inspectable
• All verification results are recorded on a public, immutable blockchain
• The Carrot Explorer enables tracing any credit back to the physical event that originated it

Transparency does not depend on who governs — it is built into the architecture of the system.