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Governance Structure

The Association operates under Swiss association law, a well-established and politically neutral framework designed for membership-driven organizations.

Membership is structured in two tiers:

• General Members are community members who can participate and engage in Association meetings.

• Contributing Members are long-standing contributors to CKB and hold formal governance rights, including voting on key matters such as the election of the Board and the approval of major decisions affecting the Association.

The governance of the Association itself is organized around two primary bodies: the General Assembly and the Board.

The General Assembly is the highest governing body of the Association and consists of all Contributing Members. It is responsible for setting the Association’s overall direction and exercising ultimate oversight of its operations. This includes approving budgets, ratifying major strategic decisions, admitting new Contributing Members, and electing or removing Board members.

The Board serves as the supervisory body of the Association. It is elected by the General Assembly and is accountable to it. The Board is responsible for overseeing the Association’s strategy and ensuring that execution aligns with the priorities approved by the membership.

Day-to-day operations such as communications, software development and testing are conducted by various operational teams, coordinated by the Office of Association Operations, led by the Operations Director, a position appointed by and accountable to the Board.

This structure establishes a clear separation between strategic oversight and execution. Authority ultimately rests with Contributing Members (through the General Assembly); the Board is tasked with supervision and operational personnel focus on day-to-day execution toward board-decided goals.

In practice, this distributes decision-making power among active contributors, ensures leadership accountability, and creates a governance system that can evolve and scale with the ecosystem while remaining decentralized and transparent.

For more details, please check out this post A New Chapter for CKB: Introducing the Common Knowledge Base Association