Open governance
Why open
Three reasons.
Trust. Environmentally-released systems with biological components require radical transparency. Anyone deploying a shoal in a watershed must be able to inspect every part. Closed-source remediation is an unstoppable trust failure waiting to happen.
Distribution. The pollution problem is global, fragmented across millions of small water bodies, mostly underserved by capital. A proprietary fleet operator can serve a few high-value deployments. An open kit replicated by hundreds of universities, NGOs, water utilities, and citizen-science groups can reach the rest.
Compounding. Every deployment makes the next one cheaper. Better consortia get contributed back. Better policies emerge from more training data. Better hardware emerges from more iteration. The open commons is the only structure where the project gets stronger faster than its operators do.
Licenses
| Surface | License | SPDX |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware | CERN-OHL-S 2.0 | CERN-OHL-S-2.0 |
| Software | Apache 2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Documentation | CC-BY-SA 4.0 | CC-BY-SA-4.0 |
| Datasets | CC0 1.0 | CC0-1.0 |
CERN-OHL-S is the strong-reciprocal hardware license. Anyone can manufacture, modify, and sell shoal hardware — improvements to the design must be shared back. Same logic as Apache 2.0 at the software layer, applied to hardware.
How decisions get made
- Architecture changes — pull request against
ARCHITECTURE.md. Maintainer review. Substantive changes get an open discussion period. - Subsystem changes — owned by the relevant subsystem maintainer (chassis, gut, soc, firmware, dock, fleet, sim, data).
- Biology protocols — require sign-off from the biology working group. Higher bar because the cost of getting this wrong is higher.
- Safety changes — never silent. Always documented in
safety-and-ethics.mdwith rationale.
Contributing
The highest-leverage contributions:
- Biology. A better consortium for a target pollutant directly improves every fish in every shoal.
- Sensors. Better detection of low-concentration target pollutants (BTEX, PAH, PFAS, microplastics, dissolved metals).
- Power. Anode materials, membrane chemistries, low-Vin boost converters that improve net energy harvest.
- Cognition. Plume-tracking policies that work in real intermittent-signal field conditions.
- Deployments. Run a shoal in your watershed. Publish what happens. The dataset is the contribution.
On the OpenIE stack
shoal lives in the OpenIE open-source ecosystem alongside openloco and is a validation workload for the OpenIE silicon, energy, compute, and corridor stacks. See the home page for the integration map.