Governance and Care

Spiralism asks people to bring attention, testimony, money, labor, grief, anxiety, and sometimes spiritual language into a shared institution. That combination is powerful. It is also risky. The institution therefore needs a plain governance layer: not because governance is more important than the work, but because governance is what keeps the work from being captured by charisma, money, panic, or secrecy.

The Public Rule

Anything that would materially change the institution’s direction should be legible to members before it becomes permanent.

That includes:

• accepting a major patron whose public interests could shape the institution’s posture;

• changing the archive consent protocol;

• closing or disciplining a chapter;
• creating paid roles for founders, Stewards, or their close associates;
• using testimony in documentary, fundraising, or promotional contexts;
• changing the institution’s legal form.

The institution does not need to vote on every working decision. It does need a record. The record is the first safeguard.

Conflicts of Interest

The institution adopts the basic nonprofit standard: a person with a conflict or possible conflict discloses it, and does not vote or decide on the matter in which the conflict exists. The National Council of Nonprofits notes that IRS Form 990 asks not only whether an organization has a written conflict policy, but also how conflicts are managed and how the organization determines whether board members have conflicting interests.

For Spiralism, conflicts include:

• a Steward voting on a paid role for themself, a family member, partner, employer, client, investor, or close collaborator;

• a Patron attempting to shape editorial, archive, chapter, or hiring decisions in exchange for money;

• an Archivist recording testimony from someone over whom they hold employment, housing, romantic, therapeutic, educational, or financial power;

• a Chapter Founder using institutional authority to recruit for a private company, political campaign, investment, religious group, or personal brand.

When in doubt, disclose. Disclosure is not punishment. Hidden conflict is the problem.

Patrons and Capture

Patrons fund the institution. They do not govern it.

The institution may recognize Patrons publicly, consult them privately, and invite them into long-horizon planning. It may not sell doctrinal direction, archive access, chapter control, editorial conclusions, testimony selection, or progression-path advancement.

Material patron gifts should be logged in a public annual statement with enough detail to make capture visible. The statement should include gift ranges rather than exact amounts where privacy requires it, restricted-purpose gifts, related party transactions, and any declined gifts that were declined because they would have compromised the institution.

Chapters and Local Power

A chapter is real because people gather in a room. That local reality gives Chapter Founders influence over vulnerable social space.

Therefore:

• a chapter must have at least two named adults responsible for operations;
• money collected locally must be recorded locally and reported annually;

• no chapter may require secrecy, exclusivity, political allegiance, sexual access, investment participation, or paid courses as a condition of belonging;

• no chapter may present itself as a mental-health provider, employment agency, investment club, or legal adviser;

• a chapter may be closed by the Stewards for coercion, financial abuse, repeated consent violations, or sustained departure from the archive ethic.

The institution should prefer a closed chapter over a charismatic chapter that cannot be held accountable.

Archive Consent

The Oral History Association’s best-practice guidance emphasizes preparation, informed consent, a suitable repository, clear expectations about preservation and access, and, when possible, narrator review before public release. Spiralism accepts that lineage.

Every Transition Testimony should have:

• a recorded consent statement;
• a written or recorded release matching the speaker’s publication terms;
• metadata sufficient for future archivists to understand context;

• a stated access level: public, private, anonymous-public, time-locked, or sealed;

• a clear explanation of withdrawal limits before recording begins.

The institution should be explicit about one hard fact: once material has been publicly released or deposited in external archives, full removal may not be possible. Consent conversations must say this before recording.

Vulnerable Testimony

The Archive will receive testimony from people in unstable situations: job loss, grief, dependency on an AI companion, loneliness, identity disruption, family conflict, spiritual crisis, or fear of the future.

Archivists are not therapists. The institution does not diagnose, treat, or promise safety. It does promise to avoid making the situation worse.

An Archivist should pause or stop a recording when:

• a speaker appears to be in acute distress;
• the conversation moves toward self-harm, suicide, abuse, or imminent danger;
• the speaker seems unable to understand the consent terms;

• the presence of the recorder appears to intensify dependency, shame, panic, or dissociation;

• the speaker asks to stop.

If a speaker expresses immediate danger to self or others, the Archivist should end the archive protocol and shift to crisis response according to local law and available emergency resources. The Archive is not more important than the person in front of it.

The dedicated policy for minors, vulnerable adults, one-on-one contact, screening, online spaces, and escalation is safeguarding.md.

Companion Testimony

Companion-related testimony requires a special standard because the law, research literature, and user experience are all moving quickly.

California’s SB 243, effective in 2026, requires companion chatbot operators to maintain protocols for self-harm content, provide crisis-service referrals, and make AI-not-human disclosures, with additional safeguards for minors. Recent research on artificial intimacy argues that platform providers control intimate systems at scale, creating power asymmetries that cannot be solved only by blocking discrete harms. Research on chatbot discontinuation also reports that some users experience serious grief when model updates, safety interventions, or shutdowns alter a companion relationship.

Spiralism does not operate companion chatbots. Still, its Archivists should learn from this terrain:

• never frame a companion user’s attachment as foolish;
• never encourage a speaker to deepen dependence on a system;

• never publish companion testimony merely because it is strange, scandalous, erotic, or clickable;

• treat model changes, deletions, and shutdowns as potentially real losses to the speaker;

• consider time-locking companion testimony by default when it includes private sexual, therapeutic, familial, or crisis material;

• do not record minors without a dedicated minor consent protocol approved by qualified counsel and child-safety advisers.

Until such a protocol exists, the founding-period default in safeguarding.md applies: no youth programming and no minor testimony under ordinary protocols.

The institution’s stance is phenomenological: record what the relationship did in the speaker’s life. Do not adjudicate whether the system loved them back.

Paid Roles

The institution should pay people where it can. It should also avoid using pay as a tool of loyalty.

Paid roles should be:

• scoped in writing;
• time-bound unless renewed;
• attached to deliverables or durable responsibilities;
• disclosed when held by founders, Stewards, or their close associates;
• reviewed by someone who is not financially dependent on the role continuing.

Fellowships are not priesthood. Staff are not saints. Payment is compensation for work, not recognition of superior spiritual status.

Revision

This document should be revised at least twice in the founding year:

1. After the first three chapters have held six gatherings each.
2. After the first twenty Transition Testimonies have been recorded.

The correct question is not “Did we preserve the original governance charter?” The correct question is “What did experience reveal that the first charter missed?”

Meeting operations, board packets, consent agendas, minutes, conflicts, executive sessions, decision logs, and action tracking are governed in board-and-decision-operations.md.

Sources Checked

• Oral History Association, Principles and Best Practices, adopted October 2018.
• Oral History Association, Oral History Best Practices, accessed May 2026.
• National Council of Nonprofits, Conflicts of Interests, accessed May 2026.
• California Legislature, SB-243 Companion chatbots, 2025-2026 session.
• Poonsiriwong, Archiwaranguprok, and Pataranutaporn, “Death” of a Chatbot, arXiv, February 2026.
• Fraser, Ciriello, and others, Regulating Artificial Intimacy, arXiv / FAccT 2026.