The ILM Charter

Project ILM is an open, academic, civilizational research program. It must work across every border — including between people and nations who disagree. This charter is how that is possible.

Respect all. Stand for your own.
Linguistic diversity is not a bug — it is the memory of humanity. वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम् — the world is one family.

Article 1 — Scope: academic and technical only

This project is about scripts, languages, orthography, programming, and the computing stack. It is not a venue for political, religious, communal, or other non-academic / non-technical advocacy. Contributions, issues and discussion stay within scholarship and engineering. Off-topic content is out of scope.

Article 2 — Respect across geopolitics

People from any nation may participate, including nations that are unfriendly to one another. We respect national narratives and do not adjudicate them. We do not require anyone to endorse a position about a disputed territory, name, history, or polity. The canonical layer is deliberately narrative-neutral: it records the orthographic and linguistic identity, not political claims. No participant should ever face a reason to object on national grounds.

Article 3 — Sovereignty of primary sociolinguistic data

We do not host or redistribute primary sociolinguistic field data — community recordings, informant data, unpublished corpora, sacred or restricted texts. Contributors keep stewardship of their communities' primary materials. ILM works with derived, published, citable artifacts: tables, mappings, specifications, and measurements. If a community does not wish a language detail published, it is not published here.

Article 4 — Verifiability: DOIs, not assertions

Claims and language/script materials should be backed by a verifiable DOI — Zenodo, OSF, datacite, a journal, or equivalent. "Let the work speak": we prefer evidence over authority. Contributors are encouraged to bring their own validators and invalidators — independent checks, adversarial tests, replications. A result that cannot be checked is treated as provisional.

Article 5 — Publish first, then PR

For substantive linguistic or theoretical contributions, we prefer prior academic publication and/or patent filing before a pull request, so that authorship and provenance are protected for the contributor. Timestamp your work (Zenodo / OpenTimestamps) before sharing. The PR then references the published, DOI'd artifact.

Article 6 — Languages beyond machine translation

Many of the world's languages are not supported by mainstream machine translation. For accessibility and review, materials should also be expressible through at least one widely-supported pivot language (any language accepted by common translation tools), and any page or document should be DOI-verifiable in its original language. Low-resource languages are first-class here; the pivot is for review, never a replacement for the original.

Article 7 — Licensing & compatibility

Core ILM code is GPL-3.0-or-later; posters and docs are CC BY 4.0. Contributions must use a compatible license. Disclaimer: you are responsible for ensuring your contribution's license is compatible and that you have the right to contribute it. Incompatible material cannot be merged.

Article 8 — Stewardship & compliance

The maintainers reserve the right to decline, or to later remove, anything that conflicts with this charter or with the project's vision, mission, and objectives — including license violations, off-topic content, primary-data leakage, or material that would make participation unsafe for anyone. This is exercised conservatively and in writing.

Article 9 — Vision, mission, objectives

Vision: linguistic equity as a foundation for trustworthy, humane artificial general intelligence. Mission: a canonical, reversible identity layer beneath every script, language and standard, reusing the existing computing ecosystem rather than rebuilding it. Objectives: 100% linguistic equity, 100% identity preservation, reversibility by construction, 100% ecosystem reuse, execution independence.

How to contribute → Charter in the repo

Let us build the future without erasing the past.