Cooperative Covenant

What the cooperative is for

$BUILD.Store is a shared professional infrastructure owned and operated by its Members. It exists to make it possible to do serious, well-compensated creative and technical work without surrendering the upside to an employer, a marketplace platform, or a private-equity aggregator. The Covenant is the shared operating agreement that keeps the cooperative worth belonging to.

Governance principle: flat governance, hierarchical relationships

Every Member has one voice in governance. Relationships inside project teams and client engagements are hierarchical when the work requires it — someone owns delivery, someone owns account, someone owns direction — but that hierarchy is confined to the engagement. Governance is not for sale, and leadership on one project confers no permanent authority over another.

What every Member commits to

• Deliver work you agreed to. Missing milestones without communication is the number-one trigger for the compliance ladder below.
• Communicate at least weekly. Silence is a signal, and the cooperative reads it. Say you're heads-down, say you're stuck, say you're overextended — just say something.
• Route through the platform. Client relationships originated through the cooperative stay on the cooperative. Direct-hire circumvention is a covenant violation.
• Give peer review honestly. The MVP score depends on peer input being useful, not polite. Ratings that don't match the work devalue the system for everyone.
• Respect the confidentiality stance. Members see each other. Outsiders see what Members choose to publish. Client-privileged information stays with the engagement.

MVP score — how standing is measured

Every active Member carries an OVR (0-99) computed from seven sub-ratings: quality, outcomes, reliability, hustle, collaboration, attendance, referrals + BD. Twelve-month rolling window, weighted to recent work. Provisional new Members do not carry a public OVR until they cross the promotion threshold (roughly three completed engagements + two peer reviews received).

Bands: 90+ Champion's Court eligible. 75-89 Promotion eligible. 65-74 Good standing. Below 65 Probation.

Compliance ladder — the penalty mechanic

Covenant violations produce compliance penalties. Each penalty is -9 OVR for 90 days, stacking. The math is deliberate: three penalties inside 90 days moves a middle-band Member into probation; four moves them toward removal. Real-time impact prevents the pattern where a Member's slow decline is only recognized after a year of accumulated damage.

Penalties are admin-recorded with an arbitration record — the reason text is preserved in the immutable audit log. Rescission by admin is possible and itself audit-logged. A Member facing a penalty they believe is mistaken can invoke the cooperative arbitration process; the formal Arbitration Procedure document lands with the production LLC operating- agreement rewrite (see production-swap-checklist.md §9).

Recognition rails — how excellence is surfaced

• Future Modernist of the Month — admin selects (Phase 1) or Member vote (Phase 2, gated on membership count). Open to Members and Partners; recognition unlocks a public-discovery window for Partners.
• Constellation of [Year] — annual cohort of Members who held Champion's Court standing during the year.
• Champion's Court — standing tier for Members in the top 10% AND at OVR ≥ 90. Refreshes with each daily compute.
• Annual canonization — at the end of every calendar year, each active Member (and any Partner who held a recognition during the year) mints an ERC-721 canonization card with ERC-6551 token-bound account. Tier locks to year-end rarity band.

Cooperative canon starts at zero

The first canonization runs at the end of the cooperative's first full calendar year of operation. No retroactive canon — Members do not receive credit for pre-launch work through the cooperative record, because retroactive minting would invent standing that nobody earned through the system. This is the integrity floor.

How the Covenant changes

Changes to the Covenant require Member vote. Proposed changes are posted at least 30 days before the vote so Members have time to read, discuss, and weigh in. Governance weight is the token-weighted balance held in each Member's annual canonization TBA (production; sandbox has admin-only proposal for testing).

Exit

Members can exit voluntarily at any time. Contribution record + canonization cards remain — the cooperative record does not retroactively erase what someone contributed. Data subject erasure is available at /profile/data-rights and covers personal data; the financial subset is retained per legal-hold policy documented in the Privacy Policy.