The rules of the game

Preamble

L'Assemblée exists so that the decisions that concern us collectively are taken collectively, with guarantees that everyone can check rather than promises. This charter says what each member can expect from L'Assemblée, and what binds L'Assemblée itself, including those who run it. It promises only what is actually built and tested; what is not yet is said plainly (Title XIII).

Title I — Members

In plain words: One person, one vote. Your real name stays private.

1. Each member has one vote. The role of an account (member, moderator, administrator) gives no extra decision-making power in deliberations.

2. Identity verification (Ğ1 web of trust, in-person certification by two members who are already verified) is optional. An unverified member votes like everyone else. Each result publishes several figures side by side: among all voters, among verified voters and, where possible, among the declared inhabitants of the place concerned. Nobody is ever excluded because of it.

3. A member's real name is never displayed publicly: only their pseudonym is.

Title II — The vote

In plain words: Your vote is secret. Nobody, not even us, can read your choice.

4. The vote is secret. For the secret-ballot methods (for/against, quick opinion, approval, majority judgment, Condorcet ranking), your choice is encrypted in your own browser before it is sent: L'Assemblée never sees it, and neither does the site. Decrypting the final result requires the deliberate agreement of at least 3 of the 5 people who each hold a piece of the key: never one person, never the technical team alone.

5. Before voting, you can audit your ballot (Benaloh challenge): it shows you what it really encrypted, to prove the software did not cheat. The audited ballot is never sent; voting afterwards builds a new ballot.

6. You can sign your ballot with a key that only you hold (never seen by L'Assemblée), so that it becomes impossible, even for us, to fabricate one in your name. This is optional.

7. Not all ballots are secret to the same degree, and this is stated. Quadratic voting and continuous funding are open by choice: who supports what is public, in the spirit of crowdfunding. The budget using the equal-shares method is not encrypted: to compute who funds which project, the calculation must know which projects each person approves. These choices are never published person by person: only the results are (projects funded or not, number of supporters, cost).

8. Limit we accept today. The 5 holders of the election key are not yet people independent of one another: this recruitment is under way (Title XI). Counting is done in batch, in each holder's browser, which transmits only their share of the decryption and never their key: remote holders can therefore take part. Until the 5 pieces are spread among truly distinct people, the secrecy of the vote rests on the good faith of the technical team, not yet on its technical impossibility to fail.

Title III — Receipt and verification

In plain words: After each vote, you can check that your voice is counted, without having to trust us.

9. After a secret vote, you receive a receipt with a tracking code. It lets you check that your ballot is in the public registry: the proof is recomputed in your browser, not on our side. The receipt does not reveal your choice.

10. Results and the registry are published as open data (Open Licence 2.0). An independent verifier, a single file to download, recomputes the proof tree without asking us for anything: if a single element was changed afterwards, the result changes.

11. Anyone can try an encrypted vote for fun, without an account, in the sandbox: no choice made in this sandbox is sent to a server.

Title IV — Places, scales and groups

In plain words: From the neighbourhood to the whole world, or as a group: the same democracy.

12. Each initiative has a scope: a neighbourhood, a town, an inter-municipal body, a department, a region, a country, a union of countries, the whole world, or a group (Title IV, art. 16). The names of the levels follow the country (Land in Germany, provincia in Spain, département in France…). Everyone can read and take part in any public initiative, wherever they live: the scope says what it is about and who finds it in their searches; it neither opens nor closes the right to vote.

13. The “declared inhabitants” result is computed from the town the member declares themselves. Only the town code is asked, never an address; it can be changed only once every 90 days. This declaration is not verified: we write “declared”, never “verified residents”. This detail is hidden when there are too few voters, so as not to identify anyone.

14. The number of supporters needed to open a debate grows with the number of declared inhabitants of the place, with a minimum. Each month, the 5 most supported ideas of each place move on to debate even without reaching the threshold, provided they have at least one supporter.

15. Place names come from official sources in France and from OpenStreetMap elsewhere. Outside France, the administrative breakdown shown may be incomplete; it is never presented as official.

16. A group (association, collective, cooperative, co-ownership, producers…) deliberates among its members with the same mechanisms. It is public (everyone reads, only members take part) or reserved (invisible to anyone but members and invitees). You join on a request approved by the owner or on invitation. In a group, one person = one vote: no delegation. The content of a reserved group appears neither in lists, nor in exports, nor in public statistics.

Title V — Delegation

In plain words: You can entrust your vote on a topic, and take it back whenever you want.

17. You can delegate your vote to another member, by topic, revocable at any time. A delegation expires after 6 months without renewal.

18. A ceiling prevents one person from concentrating too many delegated votes; beyond a threshold, their weight decreases. The graph of delegations is public.

19. Whoever carries delegated votes votes publicly, with the right to explain themselves: the discretion of Title II applies only to a member's vote for themselves.

Title VI — Deliberating before voting

In plain words: We do not vote on impulse: we get informed, debate, improve.

20. An important deliberation goes through an opinion map (short statements: agree, disagree, pass) and arguments for and against, before the ballot opens. Arguments are ranked by the minimum agreement between different opinion groups (“bridge ranking”); the formula is published.

21. A summary is published before the vote; reading it unlocks the ballot, a deliberate friction so that people vote informed rather than fast. The quick opinion (one click, consultative) is an exception, and says so.

22. The text of a proposal can be amended passage by passage. An accepted amendment replaces the targeted passage; if that passage has already been changed by another accepted amendment, the competing one is cleanly refused, never overwritten.

23. An open consultation gathers free ideas. During collection, everyone sees only their own (to avoid copying each other); ideas are always shown without the author's name. A public calculation proposes a grouping by themes; a human, the facilitator, decides the final grouping, whose fingerprint is recorded in the registry.

24. A panel of citizens drawn by lot can be called upon to give a public consultative opinion before a vote.

Title VII — No generative AI, published calculations

In plain words: Machines count and propose. Humans decide.

25. No generative artificial intelligence takes part in the democratic process: it does not write, summarise, rank or moderate members' contributions, does not count votes and decides nothing.

26. The statistical calculations used (opinion map, bridge ranking, grouping of ideas, budget allocation) are deterministic, publicly described and recomputable by anyone. They propose; a person or the community decides.

27. The “easy to read” versions of proposals are written by people, never by a machine; the full text remains the only reference.

Title VIII — Moderation and appeal

In plain words: No moderation decision is without recourse.

28. Any rejection can be brought before a jury drawn by lot among trusted members, who give public reasons for their decision.

Title IX — Participatory budget, continuous funding and follow-up

In plain words: An adopted decision has an owner, steps and a visible deadline.

29. An owner is accountable: milestones, proof, public follow-up. Whoever does not report loses their reputation and their eligibility for new funding. The state of each decision (to start, in progress, done, blocked, abandoned) and the overall indicators are public and computed live.

30. No Ğ1↔€ conversion rate is displayed or computed automatically, in any form. L'Assemblée never holds funds: any payment in Ğ1 is made directly between the parties, outside this site.

31. The budget can be allocated by simple sum, by quadratic vote or by the equal-shares method: the budget is split into equal shares among voters, who approve projects without limit; the projects whose supporters have the least to contribute are funded first, then we complete as long as the cost fits in the budget. No majority alone funds what the minority could not have funded.

32. Continuous funding (conviction voting) has no fixed deadline; it is adopted when sustained support exceeds a threshold that rises with the amount requested, so that no request can exhaust the envelope alone.

Title X — Transparency and personal data

In plain words: A public registry for everything that matters; the strict minimum for what concerns you.

33. Every action that leaves a trace does so in a verifiable public registry (Merkle tree), whose state is periodically anchored in the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps: once anchored, a root can no longer be falsified afterwards, and anyone can verify it without contacting us.

34. The registry never contains personal data or a reversible pseudonym: only cryptographic commitments and neutral events.

35. To create an account, a confirmed e-mail address is enough. The account is shared by Liberta Local and L'Assemblée. You can at any time download your data from “My space” (the content of your votes is not in it: it does not exist in clear), or request deletion of your account from “My space” (the request is handled by a person). The site measures its audience with a self-hosted tool, with no third-party service and no cookie; IP addresses are anonymised there.

36. The weekly e-mail summary is sent only to those who asked for it, with one-click unsubscribe. The site's e-mails carry no reply address: for any question, the 💬 button on every page collects feedback; it records neither the IP address nor the full identifier of your browser, and erases your e-mail as soon as your message is handled.

Title XI — Trusted roles

In plain words: Sensitive roles are public, shared and checkable.

37. Election key holders (5, of whom 3 suffice to count): named publicly, ideally with diverging interests. A replacement is a public procedure, never retroactive. (Apply)

38. Facilitators (summaries, grouping of ideas) and budget delegates (costing projects before the vote) are open roles, with published rules of conduct. (Learn more)

39. Any legitimate decryption of a result leaves a trace in the registry; any suspicious attempt to sign a ballot with a key different from the registered one triggers an automatic alert to the holder of the account concerned.

Title XII — Languages and accessibility

In plain words: Everyone must be able to take part, whatever their device, eyesight, age or language.

40. L'Assemblée exists in 9 languages, including Arabic written right to left. The interface texts were partly written with the help of AI tools and are being reviewed by native speakers, especially for Arabic and Catalan; the content of deliberations is always written by members.

41. Text can be enlarged, a dark mode exists, everything works with a keyboard, and each deliberation can be read aloud with your device's voices: nothing is sent to L'Assemblée; an “online” voice of your browser may however transmit the (public) text to that browser's publisher, which the interface indicates.

42. No full accessibility audit has yet been done by a third party: our statement says what is in place, what is missing, and that the conformity status is “not assessed”.

Title XIII — Where L'Assemblée stands, and what it does not do

In plain words: What is true today, without embellishing.

43. L'Assemblée is in a test phase. Until it is officially open, its results bind nobody and have no legal value: the yellow and red frame around every page recalls it.

44. L'Assemblée is not a public body and does not replace any legal authority: it does not validate petitions in the legal sense, does not officially summon elected officials and takes no decision enforceable against a third party. It makes visible, verifiably, what a group of people decides; what is done with it is up to those who carry it.

45. Opening to real use will be announced publicly. It requires, at the very least: the election key spread among 5 truly distinct people (art. 8), the review of translations, and the adoption of this charter according to Title XIV.

Title XIV — Changing this charter

In plain words: The rules of the game are harder to change than an ordinary decision.

46. An amendment to this charter is a deliberation like any other, but under tougher conditions: doubled quorum, two-thirds majority, a 14-day reflection period before it applies.

47. During this period, at least a tenth of the voters can demand that a panel drawn by lot re-examine the amendment before it applies.

48. Transitional provision. Before real opening, which does not yet have a community of voters, version 3 is adopted by the founding team, publicly, with its history. Once open, only Title XIV allows it to be changed.

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Scheduled to apply on 11 octobre 2026

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