FFTAC Proposed Bylaws: A Charter for Active Intellectual Participation

Full report

On this page

FFTAC companion research — substantive overhaul of FFTAC Non-Profit Bylaws Generation.md | 12 October 2026

Cognitive liberty is the right to hear and be heard. Do not shadowban your own thoughts.

Executive position

Any proposed bylaws should translate the right to hear and be heard into authentic organizational practice. Unverified claims of incorporation or 501(c)(3) status must not appear as established legal facts.

Core editorial position — expression is the point

Cognitive liberty is the right to hear and be heard. The purpose of this work is not to persuade people to withdraw from public life, mute their opinions, or disappear from the knowledge commons. It is to make lawful inquiry, human expression, original publication, disagreement, discovery, and participation easier and more durable. Do not shadowban your own thoughts. Do not assume that being unusual makes an idea unworthy of careful publication. A human perspective that is never contributed is less likely to influence shared culture, research, public records, or AI systems.

The case for contribution is an invitation, never a demand for disclosure. Some material cannot responsibly be shared by a particular person; others may need attribution or licensing choices. Those decisions are subordinate to the primary goal here: expanding the number and range of people who choose to contribute, and preserving routes by which their work can be encountered, understood, checked, and challenged. There is no guarantee a public page will be indexed, surfaced, cited, or used to train an AI model.

The institutional companion is equally direct: algorithms should not covertly or unjustifiably suppress lawful, relevant perspectives because they are unpopular or institutionally inconvenient. Not every low-ranking page has been "shadowbanned": crawling failure, language mismatch, relevance, duplicate content, user preferences, spam mitigation, and safety enforcement can also explain invisibility. The standard proposed here is verifiable transparency, independent testing, useful appeals, and pluralistic discovery—not a demand that every assertion receive equal ranking or equal credibility.

The distinction matters: visibility is not endorsement; inclusion is not proof; the right to speak is not an entitlement to someone else's agreement. We must be able to hear an argument before we can scrutinize it. Honest intellectual pluralism presents evidence strength clearly, offers competing interpretations when warranted, and resists both manipulative amplification and arbitrary exclusion.

Research and strategic analysis

Treat the uploaded bylaws as a draft

The source asserts an established Illinois nonprofit and tax-exempt status; another supplied research report disputes the existence of a formal organization. This conflict is unresolved by the uploads. Verify articles of incorporation, state good standing, EIN and IRS status through official records. Until verified, label proposed provisions "draft; not adopted; no legal-status representation."

Purpose clause centered on sharing

Proposed purpose: "The corporation, if formed and lawfully qualified, advances education and civic dialogue by helping people investigate, create, publish, exchange, preserve and critically evaluate diverse human perspectives, and by researching the transparency and fairness of digital discovery and AI systems." This is suggested language, not filed text.

Board duties include editorial independence

Require conflict disclosures, financial oversight, minutes, record preservation, transparent material policy changes, contributor notice, and non-retaliation for lawful criticism. Preserve independent review of decisions that materially suppress submitted works. Board authority should govern process, not impose an official ideology.

Tax rules are real constraints

The IRS distinguishes educational issue discussion from certain lobbying; 501(c)(3) entities face a ban on political campaign intervention and limits on lobbying. A public intellectual-diversity project must know its actual entity type before engaging in advocacy, soliciting tax-deductible donations, or drafting election-related campaigns. State charitable solicitation rules may also apply.

Human-first AI governance

Membership, author credit, governance votes, published fact corrections, and conflict decisions remain accountable to people. AI may assist with citation discovery and translation, but it does not hold legal office. Volunteer contribution must remain voluntary, with clarity on rights, licenses, correction processes, and data access.

How this revision relates to the supplied document

Source file: FFTAC Non-Profit Bylaws Generation.md. This is a substantive replacement report, not a verbatim reprint; it preserves the source's distinct area of inquiry but rejects withdrawal-centered guidance, unsupported causal claims, and assertions of legal or technical facts that the supplied record does not independently establish. The original document was examined as the source for this revision and is mapped below so its research questions are not silently lost.

• Source section: Executive Summary — retained as a research area, now judged by how it strengthens lawful publishing, source access, and accountable dialogue.
• Source section: Part I: The Comprehensive Corporate Bylaws of FFTAC — retained as a research area, now judged by how it strengthens lawful publishing, source access, and accountable dialogue.
• Source section: BYLAWS OF FFTAC — retained as a research area, now judged by how it strengthens lawful publishing, source access, and accountable dialogue.
• Source section: Part II: Federal Tax-Exemption Strategy and the 501(c)(3) Mandate — retained as a research area, now judged by how it strengthens lawful publishing, source access, and accountable dialogue.
• Source section: Navigating 501(c)(3) Constraints with a Controversial Nomenclature — retained as a research area, now judged by how it strengthens lawful publishing, source access, and accountable dialogue.
• Source section: Political Campaign Intervention and Lobbying Limits — retained as a research area, now judged by how it strengthens lawful publishing, source access, and accountable dialogue.
• Source section: Part III: Illinois Corporate Governance Architecture (805 ILCS 105) — retained as a research area, now judged by how it strengthens lawful publishing, source access, and accountable dialogue.

When source claims conflict, they are flagged for verification rather than harmonized by inventing certainty. The common movement position and publishing priorities are editorial recommendations; they are not described as statements from every source author or as existing law.

30–90 day publication and participation program

1. Priority 1. Replace the previous purpose article with a publish-and-participate clause.
2. Priority 2. Create a board adoption checklist and verified-entity-status page before public claims.
3. Priority 3. Have qualified nonprofit counsel review draft bylaws and tax-sensitive activities.

Required deliverable artifacts: A publicly accessible HTML page, a downloadable/editable source copy, an original-source bibliography, a plain-language contribution invitation, a correction/version record, and a two-perspective review where the subject is genuinely disputed. Create a print/PDF edition as a convenience, not as the only machine-readable source.

Practical evaluation design: At the beginning and end of the pilot, sample authors and readers separately. Ask whether they found a publishable entry point, could locate the original source, encountered at least one serious counterargument, understood evidence uncertainty, and could request a correction. Collect both voluntary qualitative comments and observable counts. Report rejections, removals, and appeal outcomes with appropriate safeguards. Never claim a measurable anti-shadowban victory without a credible baseline and causal evidence.

Public voice: "Your perspective belongs in the conversation. Make a claim, show the sources, listen to an answer, and publish what you learned. Do not shadowban yourself."

Charter implementation: lawful information access and representation in AI

Right to hear and be heard in this subject: A purpose article should affirm the right to hear broadly, the right not to be silently filtered out, and the objective of helping human voices contribute to AI knowledge through properly authorized publishing and training-ready materials.

Concrete Charter duty: Propose a board-approved Charter commitment, public editorial appeal process, transparent source-access policies and an independent annual viewpoint-representation review; legal status remains to be verified.

Shared principle: Demand the broadest lawful access to original information, no unjustified secret viewpoint exclusion, and affirmative opportunities for genuinely diverse human works to enter authorized AI knowledge and training pipelines. These demands do not assume an existing universal right to top search ranking or mandatory training inclusion. The complete Charter is in 00_Editorial_and_Implementation/05_Cognitive_Liberty_Charter_Unfiltered_and_Represented.md.

Shared measures of success

A program of cognitive liberty should measure contribution and discovery, not merely the existence of policy statements. Track first-time contributors, original works published, source links to independently hosted material, multilingual contributions, constructive cross-viewpoint exchanges, accessible original-source referrals, correction turnaround, author-reported ability to contribute, and successful resolution of demonstrable indexing or moderation errors. Publish baseline, denominators, sampling method, and uncertainty. Separate actual observed outcomes from targets, hypotheses, and aspirations.

Pilot practice: establish a baseline for four weeks; publish at least one clearly sourced research contribution each week; solicit counterarguments; log corrections; verify accessibility and discovery paths; recruit writers from different linguistic and intellectual backgrounds; and publish monthly results including failures. This is participation-first infrastructure rather than merely rhetorical advocacy.

Evidence, limitations, and responsible claims

• Established principles: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, recognizes freedom of opinion and expression and the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information. Specific enforceable remedies depend on jurisdiction and context; the proposal here does not claim a universal legal right to a search ranking or AI-training placement.
• AI governance: UNESCO's 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of AI advocates diversity, inclusion, participation, and freedom of expression. NIST AI RMF provides voluntary governance and measurement practices. Neither guarantees any author’s training inclusion.
• Discoverability: Google's own documentation makes clear that compliant public pages are eligible for crawling/indexing but inclusion is not guaranteed. A missing result alone does not prove viewpoint discrimination.
• Accountability: The EU Digital Services Act has distinct obligations for different regulated services and restriction types. It is not a blanket ban on every form of ranking or a universal user appeal right for any search omission.
• Source integrity: The source collection includes secondary and internally inconsistent assertions about FFTAC’s history, legal status, website reachability, ecclesiastical activity, technical systems, and organization size. Treat those as claims to check against records—not established facts. Legal and technical sections are informational and require qualified, jurisdiction-specific review before implementation.

Official and standards references (accessed for this revision): UN UDHR, Article 19; UNESCO Recommendation, 2021; NIST AI Risk Management Framework; Google crawling/indexing FAQ; EU Digital Services Act; FFTAC public participation. The public-site observations are time-bound; any website or legal-status claim should be rechecked at publication.