Governance#

fieldmesh calls itself farmer-owned. The software is built for that: a farm's log is the farm's, exports lose nothing, and sharing is by grant. The project itself is not farmer-owned yet, and this page says who decides today and what is meant to change.

Who decides today#

One maintainer, @anun333, on a personal GitHub account. No farmer, farmworker, community or sponsor has a say in the decisions yet. That is the largest gap between what the project says and what it is.

How decisions are made#

• A design question is written down before it is decided. It goes in docs/spec/open-questions.md with every option considered, the case for and against each, a recommendation and a Plan B. The maintainer decides, and the decision, its date and what it was weighed against stay in the file.
• A change to the specification is recorded with its evidence. Each change is an amendment in §17 of the spec, with the measurement, test or failure that motivated it. A reversal is cheap when the reasoning is written down; an argument with a recommendation is welcome there (CONTRIBUTING.md).
• What has not been tested is listed. Every claim not yet checked is in docs/UNTESTED.md.

What is meant to change#

These are intentions. None of them has happened yet.

• A fiscal host (Q9): a non-profit that holds the project's name, money and agreements, so that it does not depend on one person's account. Then an entity of its own.
• Farmers in the decisions (Q1): the pilot farms and the people who work them, given a standing voice in what is built next before the first release is called stable.
• An organisation account, chosen alongside the fiscal host, so that the repository and its site survive a change of maintainer.

What cannot change#

The licences make it impossible to take the work private (LICENSING.md). Layer zero is Apache-2.0, so anyone may implement the contract, including in products. The server and modules are AGPL-3.0-or-later, so whoever runs them as a service must share their changes. The prose is CC BY 4.0. There is no contributor licence agreement: contributors keep their copyright, and nobody can relicense their work alone.

Written with AI#

The code, tests and documentation here were written by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, working in Claude Code at the maintainer's direction. Every commit so far says so in a Co-Authored-By: Claude trailer, and git log shows it. The maintainer:

• chooses what to build;
• decides each open question;
• decides what lands;
• does everything outward-facing: sending a report, asking a farm, filing an issue.

Two consequences are stated so readers do not have to find them:

• Copyright. In the United States, copyright protects human authorship. The U.S. Copyright Office has said that material generated by AI without sufficient human control is not protected. Parts of this repository may therefore not be covered by copyright, and the licences reach whatever is covered. The project claims no more than the law gives. In particular, the AGPL's requirement to share changes may not bind a part that no copyright covers.
• Trust. AI-written code is held to the project's standard for any other code: tested, with its evidence in the repository, and its untested claims listed. Some free-software communities do not accept AI-written contributions; this page exists so that nobody has to discover it from the commit log.

Contributions written with an AI tool are welcome, disclosed the same way, with a Co-Authored-By: trailer naming the tool.

Where it lives#

Development is on GitHub, which some of the free-software movement asks projects to leave over its proprietary tooling and its training of AI on public code. A mirror on Codeberg, run by a non-profit on free software, is planned so that the code is reachable without GitHub. Until it exists this page says "planned", not "here".