Enclave Eligibility Criteria

1. Mission and Purpose

An enclave must have a publicly stated mission that serves a direct human benefit such as education, information access, human connection, or civic discourse. The mission must be specific enough to be evaluated against.

The mission must not include, as a goal or a means, the accumulation of profit, political influence, or wealth generation for founders, investors, or affiliates in any direct or indirect form. Revenue is permitted. Enrichment is not.

An enclave must define and publish the metrics by which it will measure success against its stated mission. These metrics must be outcome-oriented (the effects on members) rather than output-oriented (the volume of activity). Engagement-based measures such as daily active users, time on platform, session length, and content volume are prohibited as primary success metrics. For each metric, the enclave must publish a short justification explaining why it indicates progress against the mission.

2. Organizational Structure

An enclave must be incorporated as a non-profit organization in its jurisdiction of operation. Alternative mission-locked structures may be evaluated in the future. Until that framework exists, non-profit status is required.

Founding documents must include an irrevocable provision that prohibits conversion to for-profit status and that, in the event of dissolution, transfers assets to another 501(c)(3) organization (or jurisdictional equivalent) whose mission is consistent with the principles underlying these criteria.

3. Revenue and Funding

An enclave may generate revenue through membership fees, subscriptions, grants, donations, or paid access to services, provided these are priced to sustain operations rather than to maximize extraction.

Executive compensation must comply with the IRS reasonable compensation standard for 501(c)(3) organizations (or jurisdictional equivalent). The ratio between the highest-paid employee and the median full-time employee may not exceed 7x, with exceptions requiring documented justification published in the annual report. Aggregate salary bands must be disclosed in the annual report.

The following revenue sources are prohibited: advertising of any kind, sponsored content, affiliate links, sale or licensing of member data for commercial purposes, and any arrangement in which a third party pays to influence what members see or experience.

Member data may be shared with academic researchers only under the following conditions: the research must be non-commercial, the data must be anonymized, the arrangement must be publicly disclosed, and each member whose data is included must provide explicit opt-in consent.

4. User Experience and Anti-Addiction Design

An enclave must actively avoid UX and UI patterns that the current body of scientific research identifies as contributing to compulsive use or psychological dependency. This obligation is ongoing. As research evolves, practices must be reviewed and updated.

The following practices are permanently prohibited:

• Infinite scroll, autoplay, or any content delivery pattern that loads additional content without an explicit member action
• Gamification of any kind including points, levels, streaks, leaderboards, or achievement systems
• Check-in bonuses or rewards for frequency of use
• Push notifications of any kind. Notifications for safety or accessibility purposes may be permitted on a case-by-case basis.
• Dark form patterns including default opt-out, pre-checked consent boxes, obscured cancellation flows, and other patterns designed to extract consent or action the member did not intend to give
• Behavioral personalization algorithms. All members see the same content by default. Members may construct views using filters or search criteria available to all members.
• Status symbols or markers that create social pressure around participation frequency or volume

5. Privacy

An enclave must collect only the minimum member data required to deliver its stated service. New categories of data collection require a documented purpose tied to the mission.

Data must have defined retention limits. Behavioral and operational logs default to deletion after 90 days unless required for a stated purpose. Account-linked content is retained until the member deletes it or the account is closed.

Data collected for a stated purpose may not be repurposed for another use without explicit member consent.

Account cancellation and data deletion must be accessible from member account settings and completable online without human intervention. Deletion must complete within 30 days of request.

Members must have the right to export their data in a portable, machine-readable format. This capability must be available before the enclave reaches general availability (open to non-invited members or unrestricted signup). During invite-only or closed beta, exports may be handled as a manual operations process on member request.

Members who are known or reasonably suspected to be minors are subject to stricter data minimization than the default. Enclaves operating in jurisdictions with youth privacy laws (COPPA in the US, GDPR-K in the EU, or similar) must comply with those laws. Each enclave must publish its age policy: minimum age of membership, whether minors are admitted at all, and the treatment of mixed-age communities.

Any use of AI models to support the operations of the business must take all steps to ensure member data is not leaked to an external vendor or used to train external models.

6. Transparency

An enclave must publicly document its mission, its success metrics, and its material product decisions in a manner accessible to its members.

Any member-facing content generated in whole or in part by a large language model or AI agent must be clearly labeled as such at the point of display. This applies to content generated by the platform itself. It does not restrict members from using LLM tools to assist their own writing, provided the enclave does not represent such content as human-authored on the member's behalf.

An enclave must publish an annual report disclosing revenue sources, expenses, aggregate salary bands, executive compensation, board composition, and progress against stated mission metrics.

7. Technology and AI Use

Large language models and AI agents are permitted as operational tools to support the enclave's mission. These uses fall into two tiers with different requirements.

Back-office uses (no direct effect on member experience) include development tooling, code review, internal analytics, administrative automation, and similar. These uses are subject only to the data protection requirements: no member data may be leaked to external vendors or used to train external models without explicit opt-in consent.

Member-facing uses (any AI tool whose outputs affect member experience) include content moderation, search, discovery, accessibility features, and member-facing summaries. These uses are subject to additional requirements:

• Disclosure at the point of display when AI is involved in producing what the member sees
• Member ability to opt out of member-facing AI features where technically feasible
• Documented path to human review on member request for consequential decisions such as account suspension, content removal, or eligibility determinations
• The enclave is accountable for harms from these tools regardless of the underlying model provider

The following uses of LLMs and agents are prohibited entirely:

• Generating content presented to members as human-authored without disclosure
• Operating synthetic user accounts or personas
• Behavioral profiling of members for any purpose
• Training AI models on platform member content without explicit opt-in consent from each member whose content is included
• Any use that conflicts with the privacy or anti-addiction provisions above

8. Code Access

An enclave is not required to make its codebase public. The Enclave Project must be granted access to the full codebase for compliance verification. Standard cadence is annual review. On-demand access may be requested during active compliance investigations.

Qualified academic researchers may also request access for legitimate research purposes.

Access in all cases is granted under a mutual non-disclosure agreement. Refusal to provide access is grounds for suspension of endorsement and funding.

9. Governance

The board of directors must have a majority of members independent of the founder, executive team, and major funders. Independent means no employment relationship with the enclave, no material financial interest beyond standard board service, and no immediate family relationship with executives or major funders.

Board members must be subject to term limits. No board member may serve more than two consecutive terms without a documented gap.

The enclave must adopt and publish a conflict-of-interest policy covering board members, executives, and material contractors.

Enforcement

The Enclave Project reserves the right to suspend or terminate funding and endorsement if an enclave is found to be in violation of any of the above criteria.

Standard process: written notice of alleged violation, 60 days to respond and remediate, suspension of funding and endorsement if unremediated. Material privacy violations have a shortened remediation window of 14 days given the irreversibility of data exposure.

Willful or repeated violations are grounds for immediate termination without a remediation period.

Enclaves may appeal a violation finding to a review panel constituted by The Enclave Project before suspension takes effect. The panel's decision is final.