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Advisory Board
Version 0.1 (pre-board-ratification) · Last updated: 2026-05-27
v0.1 — pre-board-ratification. Substantive commitments below will not weaken between v0.1 and v1.0 of this page; ratification by the advisory board is procedural. The board does not yet exist as a recruited body — this page describes the structure that will exist when the first members are confirmed; ratification (by definition) is the board's first formal act once it exists, per the §Decision log bootstrap. The canonical source is the markdown file at FTP/_shared/regulator-facing/advisory-board.md in the public repository; this page is rendered from it.
Status
StatusRecruitment in progress (as of 2026-05-27)
Members confirmed0 of 3–5 target
First decision-log entryPending — board confirmation of v1.0 charter
First quarterly meetingPending initial composition
This page exists from Phase 1 day-one because the Bill of Rights references board authority (Articles I, VI, VII, VIII), and the Precommitment names the board as the trigger-condition arbiter. Even before the first member is confirmed, the page demonstrates the governance structure is real and operator-confirmed.
As individual members are recruited, this page updates with their names, archetypes, and disclosed COI relationships. The roster does not reach v1.0 status until the initial 3–5 are confirmed and the board ratifies v1.0 of the governance charter as their first formal act.
Composition target
Target size: 3–5 members. Smaller is fine; larger gets unwieldy.
Three archetypes, all three represented:
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Ex-regulator (1–2) — a former senior staffer from a US federal agency, ideally chemistry/health/safety-adjacent (FDA, EPA, CPSC) given Holistic Quality's data footprint. Knows agency procurement, IT-security questionnaire culture, and the difference between "we'd use this" and "we could publicly endorse this."
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Academic ethicist / regulatory scientist (1–2) — faculty at a public-policy / regulatory-science / STS program. Tracks the arm's-length governance design from the policy-research literature.
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Civil-society / bias-research representative (1) — someone who works on platform accountability, algorithmic bias, or cognitive-sovereignty topics. Holds the project accountable to its stated values rather than its commercial trajectory.
Composition we explicitly do NOT recruit:
- Sitting employees of any regulator we want to engage with (procurement-side conflict)
- Sitting executives at companies we want to sell enterprise tier to (sales-side conflict)
- Investors in Holistic Quality or any parent entity (financial conflict)
- Personal friends of operator without independent professional credentials (legitimacy concern)
- AI / tech-industry executives — the board's purpose is independent perspective, not strategic alignment
Compensation: $5–10K/year honorarium per member. Modest but real. Travel reimbursement for any in-person meetings. Published in the regulator-tier unit-economics line item; not hidden.
Term limits: 2-year terms with renewable once (max 4 years total). Rotation ensures the board does not ossify and provides natural off-ramps if a relationship sours.
Recruitment process: operator-led initially; board-recommends-successors after initial composition. Each candidate gets a written charter describing the role, compensation, time commitment (~2 hrs/month sustained; ~6 hrs/month during pricing or precommitment-trigger discussions), and the explicit "you will sometimes need to vote against operator's preference" expectation.
The board has decision authority (not just advisory) over a specific scope:
- Regulator-tier pricing changes. Any change to the regulator-tier base rate, multi-seat discount, or usage-tier-pricing model requires board majority approval. Operator proposes; board approves or rejects with rationale. Threshold: simple majority; ties favor status quo.
- Precommitment trigger conditions. If unit-economics or annual recalibration suggests the $500K-ARR threshold should be revised (up or down), the board votes. This is the strongest authority — adjusting the precommitment is the most legally and reputationally sensitive thing we do. Threshold: supermajority.
- Public-engagement-registry exceptions. When an agency requests "do not publicly cite our use," the board reviews and approves the carve-out. Default is public listing (with citation as data consumer, NOT endorsement); exceptions documented in the engagement log.
- Annual recalibration audit. The board reviews the actuals-vs-model variance and publishes a one-paragraph signed assessment alongside the pricing recalibration.
Advisory authority (operator decides; board's view captured but non-binding):
- Strategic priorities (which agencies to outreach next, when to spin up a new tier, etc.)
- Enterprise-tier pricing changes
No authority over:
- Day-to-day operations
- Hiring decisions (except advisory-board-successor recommendations)
- Engineering / product roadmap — the board is not the right body for these
Meeting cadence + transparency
- Quarterly meetings (4/year), 90 minutes each, video. Operator presents financials, the regulator-engagement-log delta, any pending pricing decisions, anything explicitly board-decision-territory.
- Annual in-person retreat (1 day), if travel logistics allow. Designed around the annual recalibration.
- Out-of-cycle meetings for trigger-approach decisions (precommitment fire, major pricing change, public-engagement-registry exceptions). 1–2 hr, video, on-demand.
- Meeting minutes published in redacted form on this site. Redactions limited to: (a) specific commercial terms with named customers, (b) personnel matters, (c) anything covered by NDA with an outside party. The fact-of-a-decision is always public; the contextual reasoning is published as a paragraph.
- Dissent recorded explicitly. A board member who votes against a decision can request their dissent be recorded with a short rationale, published in the minutes.
Conflict-of-interest controls
Operator-level
- Operator commits to no consulting / employment engagements with any regulator that is a regulator-tier customer, during the relationship and for 12 months after.
- Operator commits to no consulting / employment with any enterprise-tier customer's regulatory-affairs function during the relationship.
- Operator's other commercial interests in adjacent products (HEXAD, simulations, etc.) require disclosure in the public-engagement-registry footer.
Advisory-board-level
- Each board member discloses, on appointment and annually, any consulting / employment / equity relationships with agencies or companies in the regulated-industry-firm category.
- Disclosures are published on this site alongside the board roster.
- Material new disclosures trigger a recusal review by the rest of the board (not the affected member); recusals are recorded in meeting minutes.
Company-level
- Holistic Quality does not accept investment from any party with a material commercial interest in regulator-tier outputs (e.g., a regulated-industry firm investing as a way to influence the tool). Standard institutional / VC investment is fine if disclosed and the investor has no operational influence over regulator-tier pricing or outputs.
- The advisory board reviews material investment changes and may publish a dissent if the change affects governance posture.
Decision log
Format for board decisions, published in the public engagement registry footer:
### Decision [N] — YYYY-MM-DD
Topic: [pricing change | trigger condition revision | engagement-log exception | annual recalibration]
Vote: [N for, M against, K abstain]
Decision: [outcome]
Reasoning (≤1 paragraph): [why]
Dissent (if any): [board member name + 1-2 sentences]
No entries yet. The first entry will be the board's confirmation of v1.0 of the governance charter itself — i.e., the board ratifies the document they are operating under as their first formal act. The bootstrap problem is solved by treating operator-drafted-and-board-ratified as the legitimate origin of the charter.
Related pages
Contact
Recruitment inquiries, COI-disclosure questions, or any feedback about the governance structure — email board@holisticquality.io. For regulator-tier engagement inquiries, fill out our intake form or email regulator@holisticquality.io. Per Bill of Rights Article IX, any observable deviation between the published structure here and what Holistic Quality actually does can be published without legal exposure.