HAO Open Questions Register

A record of the contradictions and unresolved questions the source material carries, checked against where the corpus itself takes a position and where it stays silent.

1. Scope, method, and the central finding

This appendix is written from two staged extractions: 04-open-questions.md, which registers 17 questions across five clusters drawn from material outside the corpus — working notes on the ICN’s entities and the MMM (Members, Mission, Market — the ordering that puts members before mission before market) working documents’ own “Still open” sections — and the ## Still open section of 05-mmm.md, which independently traces the nine MMM-proper questions to the same three MMM source files. No upstream archive was reopened to write this appendix. Every value and every source path named below was checked directly against the primary file cited, not accepted on the strength of either staging summary.

The corpus discussed throughout is the HAO (Humanized Autonomous Organization) — the network’s coordinating framework — as recorded in ~/code/hao/docs.

Central finding. The staged extraction registers 17 questions across five clusters. The active corpus now takes a substantive position on none of them. It previously asserted a 77%/23% Contribulo split for entries 2 and 3 without recorded reasoning, while the historical source material also carries a conflicting 77%/33% figure. The owner has withdrawn the active 77%/23% allocation pending a decision; this editorial correction does not reconcile the source figures or establish a replacement allocation. On the other 15 questions, the corpus either takes no position that a targeted search could locate, or reaches only adjacent material that does not answer the question as framed.

Entry 1 has since moved twice. The governance chapter initially reproduced an ownership-percentage proposal from informal notes. On 20 September 2026, the owner withdrew that proposal from the model and from generated-media source sets. Section 3.1 retains the decision record without repeating the deprecated percentage. This editorial exclusion does not establish a replacement ownership rule or a substantive model position.

One further question, present in neither staging file, is added here as §8: whether “Mycorium” — a term dropped from the corpus’s working vocabulary and independently reused by chapter 09 in a different sense — is used consistently. It was flagged for this register by the lineage appendix (docs/appendices/lineage.md §5.7), not by the open-questions staging pass, and is verified independently against its three named sources in §8. With it, this register carries 18 questions across six clusters. The count of questions on which the active corpus takes a substantive position is zero: the Mycorium question is one the corpus does not resolve either, though §8 notes a way in which it differs from the other 17.

A closing entry, §9, records a citation-integrity task first registered in docs/appendices/references.md and now completed. It is not counted among the 18 questions because it is a corpus-maintenance record rather than an owner decision or a new contradiction.

On sourcing. Every “corpus position” statement below reflects a targeted search of ~/code/hao/docs for the specific terms and figures the entry names. Where a search returns nothing, that is reported as a search result, not as proof the topic is unaddressed anywhere in the corpus under different words.

2. Summary register

3. Cluster A — Ownership and control of incubated units

Five historical questions trace to informal founder notes and a set of working notes titled “Still open” in ~/code/site-provide-coop/provide.coop/docs/icn/entities.mdx, itself flagged in its own text as reconstructed from notes that were never published. The ownership-percentage proposal formerly summarized here has been withdrawn from the active model; the original files remain private research evidence.

3.1 Entry 1 — Withdrawn ownership-percentage proposal

Historical question. Earlier informal notes assigned provide.io a fixed ownership or voting share in each incubated Cell (the earlier term for a UME — United Micro Enterprise, a small self-managing venture team of up to ~15 people). The notes disagreed about the legal form and exact threshold, and none was a ratified specification.

Decision. On 20 September 2026, the owner determined that the proposal should not appear in the HAO corpus or generated content. The active governance chapter no longer reproduces it. Canonical NotebookLM bundle construction rejects the deprecated assertion, and media that states it is ineligible for publication. The original notes remain in the private research archive so that the provenance record is not falsified by rewriting historical sources.

What remains open. The corpus has no replacement rule for ownership of an incubated unit. Any future rule requires an explicit owner decision and independent legal and cooperative-governance review; it must not be inferred from the withdrawn notes.

3.2 Entry 2 — The Contribulo split that sums to 110%

Question. Does the stated Contribulo ownership split add up to 100%?

As recorded. entities.mdx lines 125–127: the source states that one note gives provide.io a 77% share of Contribulo held in perpetuity, and separately refers to a remaining 33% available for participation in public markets — a total of 110% — and records that no reconciliation of the two figures was ever established.

Root source of the 77% and 33% figures, both giving the same non-summing pair: ~/code/provide.io/content/english/governance.md lines 347 and 349, and ~/code/papr/coop-bi-003.md lines 17 and 19, which carries the identical wording as the prompt governance.md was drafted from — provide.io holding 77 percent of Contribulo in perpetuity under an unequivocal Operating Agreement, with the other 33 percent available for participation on public stock exchanges.

Corpus position. A previous version of the active corpus stated 77%/23% (summing to 100) wherever it gave a Contribulo split, including the consolidated manuscript and the public-market sections of chapters 02, 04, 08, and 12. That allocation has been withdrawn from active model prose pending an owner decision. The conflicting 77%/33% source figures remain historical evidence; neither pair is an adopted allocation. The active corpus gives no reason for the earlier substitution of 23% for 33%. See entry 3 for where that substitution first enters the source chain.

3.3 Entry 3 — The Contribulo perpetuity share: 77/23 vs. 77/33, and its chain of custody

Question. The same underlying figure as entry 2, recorded separately because the source chain shows where the discrepancy entered the record, not only that it exists.

Chain of sources:

• ~/code/papr/coop-bifurcate.md — the initiating prompt, requesting a bifurcation strategy; no percentages appear in it.
• ~/code/papr/coop-bi-003.md — the human-authored follow-up prompt, stating the 77%-in-perpetuity, 33%-for-public-markets figures (identical wording to governance.md).
• ~/code/papr/bi-gpt-r-003.md line 14 — a language model’s own restatement of that same prompt, which substitutes a different number without marking it as a change: it states that provide.io retains a 77% stake in Contribulo, with the remaining 23% available for public market participation. Nothing in the file flags the substitution or notes that the human prompt it restates gave 33.
• ~/code/provide.io/content/english/governance.md — carries the original 77/33 figures forward into the site content as it currently stands.

Corpus position. A previous version adopted the 77/23 figure — the same number a language model substituted, unflagged, in bi-gpt-r-003.md years earlier — without citing that exchange or any other reason for the change. The match may be coincidental, since 23 is simply the arithmetic complement of 77, rather than a traceable editorial decision. The allocation is now withdrawn from active prose and remains unresolved pending an owner decision; both conflicting figures are retained here solely as historical source evidence.

3.4 Entry 4 — Potential conflicts among operational roles

Question. Can one entity incubate units, provide ongoing services, participate in unit governance, and direct network-level resource flows without creating a conflict of interest?

As recorded, raised and left unanswered. entities.mdx lines 132–136: the source states this arrangement directly and records no answer to it. It separately notes that independent arbitration appears to be the available mitigation, while stating that the question needs review by someone qualified to give a considered answer.

Corpus position. The ownership premise in the source framing was withdrawn in §3.1 and must not be treated as part of the HAO model. A narrower operational-role question remains: the corpus describes Exit Protection (docs/11-deployment/02-provide-io-as-deployment-engine.md line 44) and golden shares and sunset clauses (docs/02-structure/05-public-market-interfaces.md line 118), but it does not specify independent review, recusal, service-provider replacement, or arbitration rules for an incubator that also supplies ongoing services. No position taken on that narrower conflict-of-interest question.

3.5 Entry 5 — How temporary incubator controls should taper

Question. Which temporary controls, if any, may an incubator exercise, and how should they taper as a unit matures?

As recorded. entities.mdx lines 128–131 proposed heavier early control that loosens on agreed milestones and recorded no decision. Its equity premise is withdrawn under §3.1. The broader question remains relevant to non-equity controls such as approval rights, required services, technical access, or temporary governance seats.

Corpus position. The corpus specifies no equity-based incubator control. It also does not define a milestone-based handoff for the non-equity controls listed above. No position taken on that narrower question.

4. Cluster B — Membership

Three questions from ~/code/site-provide-coop/provide.coop/docs/mmm/01-members.mdx, “Still open” section, checked directly against that file. The file carries a working-document notice: not yet reviewed.

• Contribution assessment. How a member’s contribution can be assessed without the process becoming a performance review. Corpus position: not addressed. The phrase “performance review” now appears once in ~/code/hao/docs, in docs/03-governance/03-accountability-mechanisms.md §3.3.C, which names “Performance Review Teams” as one of five accountability bodies its MTU-sourced material states with no stated composition, appointment process, or procedure. That entry does not describe how a member’s contribution is assessed or bear on the tension this question poses between assessment and performance review; it names a body’s title and states that the source is silent beyond the title. This search no longer returns zero hits, and the result is recorded here so the register stays accurate, but the question itself remains open.
• The membership floor. What a member is guaranteed regardless of how much they have contributed; the source states that a floor should exist and has not been set. Corpus position: not addressed. A search for “floor” now returns one hit — docs/13-member-trust-union/09-physical-branch-model.md states that compensation rests on a living-wage floor for all contributors — but that floor is contribution-linked staff compensation, not a guarantee attaching to membership regardless of contribution, so it does not answer the question. The hit is recorded because it postdates this entry.
• Cross-unit membership relations. How members of different Cells relate to each other inside a shared Cellular Venture — a SEP (Strategic Enterprise Partnership), a joint venture between teams, in current terms. Corpus position: partially adjacent material exists — SEP governance specifies a double-consent protocol (all members plus a HAO coordination representative) for capital allocation and role changes (docs/11-deployment/04-sep-structuring.md line 58) — but this specifies a voting mechanism, not how membership weight or identity carries across UME boundaries inside a shared SEP. Treated as not clearly resolved, not as adopted.

5. Cluster C — Mission

Three questions from ~/code/site-provide-coop/provide.coop/docs/mmm/02-mission.mdx, “Still open” section, checked directly against that file.

• Mission authorship. Whether a unit’s mission is written by the unit itself or by whoever established it.
• Mission revision. What happens when a unit judges its own mission to have been wrong.
• Inter-unit overlap. How much overlap in mission between units is healthy activity versus waste.

Corpus position, all three. ~/code/hao/docs discusses Mission Drift Detection at length as a risk to monitor and mitigate (docs/humanized-autonomous-organization.md line 6352 and elsewhere), but this addresses drift away from a mission that is assumed already settled. It does not state who has authority to author or revise that mission, and it does not address the inter-unit overlap question. Not addressed.

6. Cluster D — Market viability

Three questions from ~/code/site-provide-coop/provide.coop/docs/mmm/03-market.mdx, “Still open” section, checked directly against that file.

• Assessment window. How long a new unit is given before its viability is assessed.
• Subsidy authority. Who decides to sustain a strategically important but underperforming unit, and on what authority.
• Outside investment. How the entity structure handles a unit that wants outside investment. The source’s own text points this question back to the entity-ownership questions in §3 above, stating that the ownership figures there are unresolved.

Corpus position, all three. No explicit assessment window for a new UME was found in docs/06-lifecycle/01-ume-lifecycle-and-transition-states.md, read directly for this check. A loosely adjacent concept, time-bound probation in place of punitive bans, appears in docs/13-member-trust-union/03-governance-and-risk-distribution.md line 113, but it concerns sanctions against individual members inside the MTU (Member Trust Union) — the network’s credit-union-like financial institution — not a new-unit evaluation period. No decision authority for subsidizing an underperforming but strategic unit was located. Not clearly resolved on any of the three questions.

7. Cluster E — Open-source maintenance

Three questions from ~/code/site-provide-coop/provide.coop/docs/story/the-open-source-cells.mdx, “Still open” section.

• Defining “critical.” Which projects count as critical, and who makes that judgment; the source states this is a judgment call with no neutral answer.
• Funding an orphaned critical project. What happens when a project is critical but no commercial actor wants to fund it. The source names the xz incident as exactly this case, and calls it the hardest to fund.
• Taking over maintenance. How a unit can take over maintaining a project it does not own without recreating the trust problem the arrangement exists to solve.

Corpus position, all three. docs/08-legal/03-commons-based-ip-and-licensing.md exists and addresses commons-based IP and licensing generally, but a targeted search of that file for “critical,” “orphan,” “unmaintained,” and “xz” returns no matches. Not addressed on these specific questions, so far as a targeted search can confirm.

8. Cluster F — Vocabulary: which sense of “Mycorium” the corpus intends

This question is present in neither staging file for this appendix. It was flagged for this register by the lineage appendix (docs/appendices/lineage.md §5.7) during work on that appendix, and is verified here directly against the three sources it names.

Question. “Mycorium” is used in two different senses in the material available to this corpus. Which sense, if either, the corpus intends is not stated anywhere, and the two uses are not reconciled.

Sense 1 — the earlier lexicon’s economic sense. In the dropped vocabulary recorded in docs/appendices/lineage.md §4 and §5.7, “Mycorium” named the whole network conceived as a self-organizing socioeconomic system modeled on fungal networks: interconnected, resilient, and able to draw on underused resources in existing markets. This sense is not used anywhere in the live corpus; a search for “Mycorium” at the time the lineage appendix’s staging extraction ran returned zero matches in docs/.

Sense 2 — chapter 09’s cultural and linguistic sense. docs/09-adversarial-analysis/01-threat-taxonomy.md line 42 and docs/09-adversarial-analysis/04-external-and-technical-vectors.md lines 99–101 use “Mycorium” as the sources’ term for the network’s evolving shared language and history, and identify it as the target of the threat pattern the chapter names Lexical Drift — a faction shifting the connotation of shared vocabulary over time, until the terms no longer constrain the conduct they were adopted to require. Both instances were read directly for this entry. Line 42 states that Lexical Drift’s source material names its target as the Mycorium, the sources’ term for the network’s evolving shared language and history. Lines 99–101 make the same identification and cite docs/appendices/lineage.md §5.7 directly as the record of the term’s two senses.

The two senses genuinely differ. Sense 1 is a structural and economic description of the network as a whole, modeled on a biological system. Sense 2 is a description of the network’s shared vocabulary and institutional memory. A network resembling a fungal network in its economic structure is a different claim from a network having a vocabulary that can drift. Neither source treats one sense as a specialization or a consequence of the other.

A nuance chapter 09 itself preserves. Chapter 09’s use of “Mycorium” reports what its own source material calls something — the text is explicit that this is the sources’ term — rather than a term chapter 09 adopts as live corpus vocabulary in its own voice. This distinguishes the chapter 09 usage from a case where the corpus had coined or endorsed the term a second time on its own authority; it reads closer to citing an external label than to redefining one.

Corpus position. No position taken. This entry differs from entries 1–17 in one respect: chapter 09 is the one place in the corpus that already names this exact tension. 04-external-and-technical-vectors.md lines 98–99 cite docs/appendices/lineage.md §5.7 directly and state that the corpus does not reconcile the two senses. That self-citation flags the ambiguity; it does not resolve which sense, if either, governs when the word recurs, and no source states one.

9. Citation integrity — verification completed

When this entry was registered, docs/appendices/references.md §3 recorded eleven unchecked defects: the wrong author for Slicing Pie, two Ostrom year-and-title problems, and eight identities that the staging pass could not corroborate. None had then been checked against a primary source.

Corpus position, updated 2026-08-12. The verification task is complete. Primary publisher, journal, DOI, institutional-repository, source-control, and permanent-revision records were checked for the 48 baseline works and four supplemental citations discovered during the occurrence audit. Slicing Pie is now attributed to Mike Moyer; Understanding Institutional Diversity is dated 2005; and the Governing the Commons conflation is corrected to the 1990 work and merged with its duplicate audit record. Of the eight identities the staging pass could not corroborate, six remain not verifiable within the bounded primary-source search and two are unsupported because official DOI or issue records positively contradict them. Their live references were removed rather than silently transferred to similar works. The full audit also found two other identities with unresolved primary records, bringing the final unresolved identity-or-access count to eight.

The wider audit also corrected additional metadata defects, removed unsupported uses, and narrowed claims that ran beyond their sources. docs/appendices/references.md §3 summarizes the outcomes, while docs/appendices/citation-audit.md preserves the record-level evidence, occurrence verdicts, and actions. This historical entry remains outside the 18 owner questions in §2 because it records a completed corpus-maintenance task rather than an owner decision.