Policy Briefs
Mainstay policy briefs connect practical local-first infrastructure with the enduring responsibilities of communities and institutions. They are written for leaders, operators, policy makers, and partners who need to understand the purpose and implications of the work without beginning with its protocols or deployment details.
Clerk and Treasury Functions
Every institutionally sustainable community needs ways to preserve records and move value. These can be understood as Clerk and Treasury functions. The names are functional shorthand, not prescribed offices or governance models.
Mainstay is not inventing these responsibilities. It is exploring how to reconstitute age-old institutional capabilities with local-first software, portable cryptographic identities, verifiable records, private bearer instruments, and infrastructure that can continue operating when outside services are unavailable.
Credit, Clearing, and Transferring Value
Credit relationships are older than coinage and modern banking. Drawing on David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, this brief places Clear and the Treasury function in that longer cultural history.
It distinguishes transferring a claim from clearing the obligation behind it, then considers how cryptographic signatures, private bearer instruments, and digital communication can support familiar community practices without pretending that software creates value, authority, or trust.
Community-Led Recordkeeping and Digital Originals
A community can establish which exact digital records are authoritative for work within its own legitimate scope. This brief explains how OpenETR combines digest-identified artifacts, signed review evidence, consequential state, and bounded recognition without claiming that a local record replaces its outside issuer for every purpose.
It also presents graduated disclosure as the practical default for sensitive records: check first, present when necessary, share only for justified deeper review, and surrender only when custody or control is meant to change.
Indigenous Community Stewardship in Canada
Indigenous communities can operate digital infrastructure aligned with their own governance, languages, information practices, and service realities while remaining connected to Canadian public institutions and financial systems. This brief uses a distinctions-based Canadian frame and examines how Clear can administer a bounded community benefit without presenting it as cash, legal tender, or a replacement for ordinary payment options.
Digital Public Infrastructure and the Capability to Deliver
Digital sovereignty depends on more than regulation, procurement preferences, or local hosting. This brief examines the institutional capability to build, operate, maintain, connect, and replace foundational digital systems, drawing on OpenForum Europe's analysis of Digital Public Infrastructure.
It connects Europe's federated approach to Mainstay's principles of component substitutability, stable identity, explicit recognition, and cooperative independence while keeping community-scale infrastructure distinct from population-scale DPI.
Data Sovereignty, Authority, and Capability
Data sovereignty is credible when legitimate authority and practical capability align. Drawing on the World Economic Forum's Data Sovereignty in Practice, this brief examines sovereignty across individuals, communities, institutions, governments, and technology platforms.
It explains how Mainstay can strengthen local agency, portability, audit, and continuity while avoiding the claim that localization, open source, or self-hosting automatically creates sovereignty.