Societies, Policy Entities, and Law

Individual trust and identity are necessary but not sufficient. Governance must also scale to collectives.

Web4 uses the SAL framework — Society, Authority, Law:

Society

A society is a governed collective of entities with shared rules, transparent processes, and formal membership. Entities are born into societies through a citizenship lifecycle:

Applied— the entity requests membership
Provisional— limited rights during an evaluation period
Active— full participation rights
Suspended— rights temporarily restricted (with a path to reinstatement)
Terminated— permanent exit

This lifecycle is governed, auditable, and reversible (except termination). It mirrors how organizations actually manage access — onboarding, probation, full access, suspension for cause, and offboarding.

Authority

Authority in Web4 is always scoped and delegated. An entity may be granted authority over a specific domain — say, approving code deployments — without having authority over anything else. Authority is revocable, time-bounded, and itself subject to witnessing.

No entity has unlimited authority. This is the biological principle of least privilege, formalized.

Law

Laws in Web4are versioned datasets of norms (constraints), procedures (compliance requirements), and interpretations (precedents). They are published by designated law oracles and enforced through quorum — multiple witnesses must agree that a norm has been met or violated.

Three quorum modes:

Majority— more than half of registered witnesses agree
Threshold— a fixed minimum number agree
Unanimous— all must agree

This creates governance that is transparent (laws are published), versionable (laws evolve), and consensus-driven (no single entity decides).