Interim draft — pre-incorporation. These documents have not been ratified; they are proposed here for review. A version date tag is applied when they are ratified. Last revised 2026-08-20.
CAMSAI is not yet incorporated and has no separate legal personality; see CHARTER.md §11 and TRADEMARKS.md for what that means in practice.
The Consortium for the Advancement of Materials Science with AI (CAMSAI) is an open, vendor-neutral community devoted to advancing materials science with AI. This repository is the canonical home of CAMSAI's constitutional documents: what the consortium is for, who decides what, and on what terms its projects are hosted.
| Document | What it covers |
|---|---|
| CHARTER.md | Mission, scope, principles, membership, contributor IP, projects, antitrust, export control, funding, affiliations, interim status, amendments |
| GOVERNANCE.md | Steering Committee, founding period, decision rules, Advisory Council, project intake and lifecycle |
| STEERING.md | Convener, Chair, and the roster of seats |
| SUPPORTERS.md | Who bears the operating costs, who supports CAMSAI, and the Advisory Council roster |
| TRADEMARKS.md | Custody of the CAMSAI name, marks, and domain, and permitted uses |
| CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md | Expected conduct, how to report a concern, and what happens when the report concerns whoever would normally handle it |
| SECURITY.md | Reporting a security issue in this repository |
CAMSAI hosts open-source projects that serve its mission. Every project is admitted under the intake requirements in GOVERNANCE.md §7.
These repositories predate this framework, so none has been admitted by a vote — there was no body to take one. They are listed as Proposed until the first Steering Committee decides on each, which it must do within 180 days of adoption (GOVERNANCE.md §8.1). The status column says what is true, not what is hoped.
| Project | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| standards | Schemas, validation tools, and data models for materials science and AI research | Proposed |
| notebooks | Interactive notebooks demonstrating CAMSAI tools and workflows | Proposed |
| jupyterlite | Browser-based environment for running CAMSAI notebooks without local setup | Proposed |
| actions | Shared continuous-integration workflows for CAMSAI repositories | Proposed |
| q3 | An AI-native codebase for materials science. Apache-2.0 intended; public release targeted for late 2026 | Proposed |
Day-to-day work is decided in the open by the people doing it. Routine decisions carry by lazy consensus: a proposal opened as a pull request or issue, left visible for the review period, and merged if no Steering Committee member objects. Constitutional changes, project intake, and project archival require a recorded vote of the Steering Committee. The full rules, quorum, and conflict-of-interest requirements are in GOVERNANCE.md §4.
The Steering Committee has seven seats, allocated by constituency rather than by employer, so that no single organization or sector can control the consortium. Seats are open and the founding cohort is not closed — see STEERING.md for how to put yourself or someone else forward.
Organizations that commit substantial resources, and constituencies that do not hold a seat, have a standing non-voting channel to the Steering Committee through the Advisory Council (GOVERNANCE.md §5). Support is acknowledged publicly and confers no governance rights; that separation is deliberate and is explained in CHARTER.md §9.4.
If you are reviewing CAMSAI on behalf of a laboratory, university, or company, these are the sections your review will most likely turn on:
| Question | Where |
|---|---|
| What are the inbound contribution terms? Is there a CLA? | CHARTER.md §5.1 — DCO, no CLA, no copyright assignment |
| What happens to our patents? | CHARTER.md §5.3 — the Apache-2.0 §3 grant and nothing beyond it |
| Can our students and postdocs contribute? | CHARTER.md §5.2 — institutional rights must be cleared first |
| Can our researchers still publish? | CHARTER.md §5.4 — no embargo, no pre-publication review |
| Is there antitrust exposure in a shared forum? | CHARTER.md §7 — prohibited topics and the duty to halt |
| Export control, ITAR/EAR, classified or CUI material? | CHARTER.md §8 — what CAMSAI will not accept, and whose review governs |
| What are we committing to financially? | CHARTER.md §9.2 — nothing; there are no dues |
| Who are we contracting with? | CHARTER.md §11 — no entity yet, and what may not be represented |
| What if the interim period runs out? | CHARTER.md §11.2 — the Charter continues; the question must be put by 30 September 2027 |
| Can we sponsor and get a seat? | CHARTER.md §9.4 — no, deliberately; see the Advisory Council instead |
| Can we ship a commercial product on this? | TRADEMARKS.md §4.1 — yes, under your own name |
Governance documents are versioned by date tag, not by semantic version:
YYYY.M.D-N
where YYYY.M.D is the date the version was ratified and N is a zero-based
ordinal distinguishing multiple ratifications on the same day — for example
2026.8.20-0. A date tag is applied only to a ratified state of these
documents; the tip of main between tags may contain drafts.
Pushing a date tag automatically builds a single consolidated PDF of the governance documents and attaches it to a GitHub Release for that tag, so that reviewers, counsel, and partner organizations can read and circulate a fixed, citable snapshot without cloning the repository. Releases are listed at github.com/camsai/governance/releases.
While the documents are still under review, a draft-YYYY-MM-DD tag publishes
the same PDF as a pre-release instead. A draft carries no version number,
is marked draft-… in the footer of every page, and asserts nothing beyond
what the documents said on that date. Only a date tag means ratified.
To build the same PDF locally, with Docker installed:
scripts/build-pdf.shOpen a pull request against this repository. Amendments to the Charter or to GOVERNANCE.md follow the process in CHARTER.md §12: discussion in the pull request, a recorded Steering Committee vote, then a new date tag and release. Editorial corrections that do not change meaning may be merged by lazy consensus and folded into the next tagged version.
These documents are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). See LICENSE.