After the Objection: Who Gets to Participate?
Participation Standards: Who Gets to Participate?
On September 20, 2026, working materials were circulated for the International Business Committee. I had to ask: who gets to participate and how?
They were drafts.
They had not yet been adopted, and I am not representing them as adopted rules.
But the subjects being developed raise an important institutional question:
What should participation actually look like in a functioning Assembly process?
The working materials addressed membership, voting, attendance, access, written proposals, sponsorship, AI-assisted work, communications, disciplinary measures, quorum, and accommodations.
They also contained this statement:
“We have been acting as the IBA and we have not established the IBA Committee.”
That sentence raises a useful question for more than one meeting or one member.
When a committee is still defining itself, participation standards should be made clear before those standards are used to measure conduct, determine access, or evaluate participation.
Participation Should Be Defined Before It Is Judged
A functioning committee should be able to tell people, in advance, what forms of participation are available.
Can a member submit a written proposal?
Must the author attend personally?
May another member sponsor it?
Can someone participate through written comments without voting?
What qualifies someone to vote?
What access is available to a member who is not yet part of the committee?
How are recordings, notes, and prior materials made available?
How does a person know when a draft rule becomes an adopted rule?
Those questions are not obstacles to participation.
Answering them makes participation possible.
A standard that becomes clear only after a dispute has already occurred cannot reliably guide the conduct that came before it.
Written Participation Should Have a Defined Place
A committee may reasonably distinguish between voting membership and public input.
It may reasonably require additional participation before someone can vote.
It may reasonably require a proposal to be discussed before action is taken.
But none of that requires written participation to disappear.
A sound process can distinguish:
written submission from committee membership;
committee membership from voting eligibility;
public input from committee action;
and proposal sponsorship from authorship.
Those distinctions allow the record to say what kind of participation occurred without reducing everything to either member or nonparticipant.
The practical question is not whether every written communication must result in a vote.
The question is whether the person submitting it can determine what happened to it.
Was it received?
Was it routed?
Was it placed before the committee?
Was discussion required?
Was sponsorship required?
Was it deferred?
Was it rejected?
Was there a reason?
A written process becomes meaningful when those answers are traceable.
A Rule Can Organize Participation — or Become a Gate
Rules are necessary.
They can protect meetings from chaos, establish quorum, assign responsibility, and prevent a committee from being overwhelmed by matters outside its scope.
But the same rule can become a gate if it recognizes only one practical form of participation.
For example, if a written proposal cannot be considered unless someone appears live to speak and answer questions, there must be a meaningful process for circumstances in which live participation is not reasonably available.
Otherwise, the rule is doing more than organizing discussion.
It is deciding which forms of participation count.
That becomes especially important when disability accommodations are acknowledged.
An accommodation cannot exist only as a sentence in a rule.
It has to change what participation looks like when change is reasonably needed.
“Troublemaker” Is Not a Standard
The working notes also contain a reference to not wanting someone to come in and be a “trouble maker.”
Every group has a legitimate interest in maintaining order.
But order is strongest when the standard is about observable conduct rather than labels.
A useful process can identify conduct such as:
repeated interruption;
refusal to follow an established agenda;
personal attacks;
disclosure of protected information;
or refusal to comply with an adopted procedural rule after notice.
Those are things that can be observed and answered.
“Troublemaker” is different.
It can mean almost anything depending upon who is using the word.
Requesting the source of an instruction is not, by itself, disruption.
Requesting correction is not, by itself, insubordination.
Disagreement with a Coordinator is not, by itself, disorder.
Requesting an accommodation is not, by itself, refusal to participate.
If any of those actions cross into actual misconduct, the conduct should be identifiable and measured against an adopted standard rather than a label.
A process should make those distinctions before disciplinary authority is exercised.
New Rules Should Have a Clear Beginning
Draft rules are part of building an institution.
They are not the same thing as adopted rules.
That distinction should remain visible.
A workable record should show:
when a proposal was drafted;
when it was circulated;
what changes were made;
when it was adopted;
and when it became effective.
That protects both the committee and its members.
People can then know which rules governed which conduct.
It also prevents later procedural development from becoming an accidental judgment about conduct that occurred before the rule existed.
Participation Should Leave a Trace
One of the simplest improvements we can make is to ensure that participation leaves a traceable record.
A proposal should have a disposition.
A written comment should have a place in the record.
A correction should remain associated with what it corrects.
An accommodation request should show whether and how it was addressed.
A question of access should have an answer.
A disciplinary decision should identify the adopted standard being applied.
That does not mean every disagreement becomes permanent drama.
It means the institution can later explain what happened.
The Standard Must Apply Internally Too
If we say that status-corrected Americans are responsible for upholding constitutional guarantees for one another, then our own Assembly processes must provide a real means of review, correction, and relief when one member says those guarantees are being denied by another. Otherwise the guarantee exists only in theory.
A system cannot reasonably insist that the People defend constitutional guarantees against outside institutions while providing no effective remedy when the alleged denial occurs among ourselves.
The standard cannot be: your rights matter until the person interfering with them is another status-corrected man or woman.
If the principle is real, it has to survive that test too.
That does not mean every complaint is automatically correct. It means there must be a process capable of determining what happened, identifying the governing standard, stopping ongoing conduct when warranted, correcting the record where necessary, and providing a reviewable disposition.
A constitutional guarantee without a remedy inside the very structure claiming to uphold it is not a sufficient safeguard for the People.
What We Can Build
None of these questions require us to choose between order and participation.
We can have both.
We can establish participation standards before applying them.
We can distinguish written participation from voting authority without making written work disappear.
We can establish where proposals go and what disposition follows.
We can distinguish disagreement from disruption by identifying observable conduct.
We can make accommodations operative rather than merely acknowledging that they may be needed.
We can preserve the date a draft was circulated, the date it was adopted, and the date it became effective.
We can identify who has authority to screen, route, accept, defer, or decline a communication and make that decision reviewable.
And we can preserve enough of the process that a later reader does not have to reconstruct what happened from memory.
Clear procedure does not weaken a committee. It protects the committee, the people serving in it, and the people trying to participate in its work.
The Better Question
The question is not whether rules are good or bad.
The better question is whether the rules make participation understandable, accessible, traceable, and correctable.
Can someone determine how to bring an issue forward?
Can the committee determine who has authority to vote?
Can written participation remain visible?
Can a correction stay attached to the record?
Can an accommodation actually affect the process?
Can a disciplinary decision be traced to an objective standard?
Can a draft be distinguished from an adopted rule?
And can a person reviewing the record later determine what happened without depending entirely on somebody else’s memory?
That is the kind of participation structure worth building.
A healthy process should not merely decide who may speak. It should make it possible to know how participation enters the record, what happens to it, and how the record can be corrected when necessary.
Companion Source Record
My Project Zero3 — Response to the Proposed AI Prompt
The September 20 working package included a proposed AI prompt. The companion document below examines that proposal and offers a different approach centered on capacity, source framework, testing, correction, and preserving unresolved questions rather than predetermining conclusions.
Public-redacted copy:
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