I showed you why drift is inevitable. Now here's the architecture that protects against it.

The Concord Compact is a legal charter that defines how the Founders' Room operates. It's not aspirational. It's not a statement of values. It's constraint embedded in the institution's founding documents. The kind of corruption I described in the last piece cannot happen without breaking the Compact. And breaking the Compact means dissolving the institution entirely.

That's intentional. Mission drift requires breaking the institution publicly rather than eroding it quietly.

Reasoning Is a Public Good

The core claim of the Compact is simple but radical. Reasoning itself is a public good.

Not reasoning instruction. Not reasoning content. Not reasoning as a service you purchase. Reasoning as infrastructure. Like roads. Like water systems. Like public libraries. Shared capacity that society needs to function well, funded in ways that ensure access isn't determined purely by ability to pay.

This claim has consequences.

If reasoning is a public good, then the Founders' Room cannot operate purely as a commercial service. It must serve public benefit first, commercial operations second. That ordering is embedded architecturally. Commercial revenue funds educational access. Public trustees have veto power over decisions that prioritize profit over mission. The structure makes certain choices impossible.

Most institutions claim to serve public benefit. They write it in mission statements. They reference it in fundraising materials. They mean it sincerely. Then market pressure arrives. Revenue needs shift. Board composition changes. Within five years, public benefit becomes a side program rather than the core commitment.

The Compact prevents this. Public benefit is embedded in founding documents, not listed in aspirations. You cannot abandon it without destroying the institution.

The Public-Benefit Mandate

Here's how it works operationally.

Twenty percent minimum of all operational hours must be reserved for public sessions. Not courses. Not content. Actual Founders' Room sessions with facilitators, AI infrastructure, and full access to the interpretive architecture. Educators, students, civic institutions get subsidized access. Cost-recovery pricing only. No profit extraction from educational use.

Every commercial session automatically funds at least two Concord Hours of public access. That's a one-to-two ratio minimum. Businesses pay market rates for private sessions. That revenue supports public sessions at a two-to-one match. The institution is designed so commercial success increases educational access automatically. Growth serves mission rather than displacing it.

Academic institutions receive cost-recovery pricing for software and facilitation. The Mirror Core orchestration engine and Concord Ledger schema remain open for non-commercial research under Creative Commons licensing. Researchers can study the architecture, modify it for academic use, publish findings. Educational ontology is public infrastructure.

This isn't generosity. It's structural design. The institution cannot optimize purely for commercial growth. Every commercial hour generates public access obligation. The model works only if both sides scale together. That's the constraint. That's the protection.

Governance Structure

Three mechanisms enforce the mandate.

Public Trustees with veto power. One-third of governance seats are allocated to trustees representing education, ethics, and community sectors. They hold veto rights on any decision materially affecting public mission. A proposal that serves commercial interest over public benefit requires their approval. They can block it. That's not advisory. That's structural authority.

The Reasoning Trust. An independent, non-profit entity monitors ethical compliance, data governance, and equitable access. The Trust maintains the anonymized Concord Ledger. It manages release schedules for de-identified research data. It audits the institution annually. It reports publicly. The Trust is independent because oversight embedded within the institution drifts alongside the institution. External authority with structural independence is the only reliable check.

Executive accountability to mission. The Executive Director reports annually on public-benefit performance alongside financials. Compensation incentives for senior leadership must include qualitative targets for public-benefit impact. You cannot succeed as leadership while abandoning mission. The incentive structure protects institutional purpose.

These three mechanisms create mutual accountability. Public Trustees can block decisions. The Reasoning Trust can expose corruption. Executive incentives align with mission. No single actor can drift the institution without confronting structural resistance.

What the Compact Blocks

Here's a concrete example of how structural protection works.

A company offers a lucrative contract to license Concord Ledger data for marketing analytics. The offer is substantial. Multiple millions. The data would be anonymized. Personal identifiers removed. The revenue would fund hundreds of public sessions. New facilities. Facilitator training. Real educational expansion.

Under the Compact, that proposal is blocked.

Not because it's illegal. Not because someone objects on principle. Because selling reasoning patterns for commercial optimization violates the public-good mandate. Reasoning data exists to advance collective decision-making capacity, not to improve targeting algorithms. The Public Trustees would veto it. The Reasoning Trust would flag it. The proposal cannot proceed.

That constraint costs money. Real money. Money that could fund good work. But the Compact prioritizes mission protection over revenue optimization. It makes profitable corruption structurally difficult.

Another example. A major consulting firm wants exclusive commercial rights to the Founders' Room framework for corporate leadership development. They offer a partnership that would scale the model rapidly. Generate significant revenue. Put the institution on stable financial footing. But the deal requires limiting public access to preserve commercial exclusivity.

Under the Compact, that proposal is blocked.

The public-benefit mandate requires twenty percent minimum public access. Exclusivity agreements that limit educational availability violate the structural constraint. The institution cannot accept terms that prioritize commercial growth over public benefit. The framework can be licensed for commercial use. But licensing cannot reduce public access. That's the protection.

These are not hypothetical concerns. These are the exact pressures institutions face when they succeed commercially. The Compact embeds resistance before pressure arrives.

Data Ethics and Privacy

The Compact includes detailed provisions on data governance because data is where most institutional corruption happens quietly.

No recording by default. Recording is opt-in. Sessions can be captured for learning purposes, but only with explicit participant consent given before each session. Not consent buried in terms of service. Not one-time blanket agreement. Affirmative consent, session by session, with full understanding of what's being captured and how it will be used.

Participants control their own data. Full access to their session transcripts. Right to request redaction before anything enters the public corpus. Ability to review how their reasoning patterns are characterized. The architecture treats participants as co-creators of knowledge, not data sources to be mined.

No exploitative monetization. Reasoning data cannot be sold for advertising, political targeting, or surveillance. Period. Even if anonymized. Even if lucrative. Even if participants consent. The Compact defines certain uses as incompatible with public-good mission regardless of consent or anonymization.

Retention and deletion. Personal identifiers stored only as long as contractually necessary. Then deleted. Archival reasoning data must be fully de-identified before retention. The system is designed to minimize data accumulation rather than maximize it.

These provisions prevent slow corruption through data practices. The temptation to monetize reasoning patterns is constant. The Compact makes it structurally difficult.

Transparency and Reporting

The Compact requires radical transparency.

Annual Reasoning Equity Report. Published every year. Ratio of commercial to public sessions. Geographic distribution of access. Aggregate learning outcomes. How the institution is performing against its public-benefit mandate. Independently audited by the Reasoning Trust. Publicly available.

Public dashboard. Live, anonymized visualization of global Concord activity and educational reach. Anyone can see how the institution is functioning. How many sessions. Where. Commercial versus public ratio. Transparency creates accountability that internal oversight cannot match.

Open review. External academic or journalistic review invited regularly. Reasoning metrics examined by people with no institutional loyalty. Interpretive neutrality checked by outsiders. The institution cannot hide behind internal assessment.

Transparency is not about proving virtue. Transparency is structural protection. When operations are visible, corruption requires coordination across multiple actors and public exposure. That's harder than quiet internal drift.

Amendment and Review

The Compact can be amended. But the process itself protects mission.

Two-thirds supermajority of trustees required. At least one Public Trustee must vote affirmatively. Amendments preceded by sixty-day public comment period. Reasoning Trust must review and report before any change takes effect.

Every five years, comprehensive renewal review. The Compact itself gets evaluated. Is it working. Does it need adjustment. Is the mission still protected. Independent assessment with public reporting.

This creates legitimate flexibility without enabling mission drift. The institution can adapt. But adaptation requires broad consensus, public scrutiny, and independent oversight. Quick erosion is structurally prevented.

Why This Is Architecture

Most institutions rely on good people making good decisions. That works until the people change, the decisions get harder, or the pressure gets intense. Moral governance assumes sustained virtue. That assumption fails predictably.

The Concord Compact is architecture, not morality. It makes certain corruption structurally difficult rather than morally prohibited. You can still violate the Compact. But violation requires breaking the institution publicly rather than eroding it quietly.

Public Trustees with veto power. Not advisory. Authority. Public-benefit mandate embedded in founding documents. Not aspiration. Legal requirement. Reasoning Trust with independent oversight. Not internal review. External examination. Data ethics by design. Not policy. Architecture.

These mechanisms create mutual resistance. Drift requires coordinating across multiple independent actors while operating publicly. That's possible. But it's hard. Hard enough that most mission corruption gets blocked before it accumulates.

What This Protects

The Compact protects the interpretive layer.

That layer exists to create conditions where understanding forms through sustained inquiry. The moment the room becomes optimized for commercial outcomes, measurable results, or comfortable resolution, the interpretive layer disappears. You're left with structured consulting. Professional. Valuable. But not what this is for.

The Compact makes optimization-drift structurally difficult. Commercial pressure cannot override public mission because Public Trustees can veto. Outcome measurement cannot dominate because the mandate requires protecting interpretive process. Comfortable resolution cannot replace productive tension because the architecture is designed to hold complexity, not resolve it quickly.

The governance protects the architecture. The architecture protects the purpose. The purpose is judgment formation through sustained interpretive dialogue. Everything serves that. Everything bends toward it. Or it gets blocked.

The Compact Doesn't Protect Against Malice

Here's what the Compact cannot do.

It cannot prevent someone from intentionally destroying the institution. If leadership decides to abandon mission, they can. If trustees collude to corrupt governance, they can. If enough people coordinate to break the structure publicly, it breaks.

The Compact protects against drift, not sabotage.

Drift is natural. It happens through reasonable decisions accumulating over time. Good people making practical choices that gradually corrupt mission without anyone noticing the pattern. The Compact makes drift structurally difficult. It creates resistance at every decision point. It forces public examination of mission impact. It embeds independent oversight.

But malicious actors can still act maliciously. The Compact doesn't prevent that. It just makes it visible.

That's enough. Because visible corruption can be confronted, opposed, and stopped. Invisible drift cannot. By the time you notice it, the institution has already changed.

The Compact is designed for the more dangerous threat. Not dramatic failure. Slow erosion. Not villains. Good people losing sight of mission under pressure.

That's what governance as architecture prevents.

What Comes Next

The remaining pieces explain how this scales, what makes it defensible, and what failure modes remain despite all this protection. The Compact is structural defense against drift. But structure alone doesn't guarantee success. Judgment matters. Facilitator quality matters. Domain expertise matters.

The next piece addresses that directly. Not everyone can operate a Founders' Room just because they copy the format. The architecture is visible. The judgment that makes it work is not. That distinction matters. That's what makes this defensible.

For now, understand this. The Founders' Room is governed by structure, not by trust. The Compact doesn't ask people to be good. It makes corruption difficult. That's the difference between aspirational governance and architectural governance.

The mission is protected before pressure arrives. That's the point. That's the design.

Next in this series: "Why This Is Hard to Copy (And Why That's Good)"

About the author: Duey Evans has coached junior tennis since 1989. He's building institutional infrastructure that can outlast its founder by embedding mission protection in structure. The Compact is that structure.