Fold Commons

Governance

Fold Commons is governed by three bodies. As the organisation formalises, meeting minutes, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and budgets will be published; this page tracks what is done and what is planned, without overstating either.

Web first, iOS second

Fold Commons builds for the web first. Every tool ships as a free page you can open on any device without installing anything — and that page is the product, not a preview of one. iPad and Mac apps come second: they wrap the same tools and add only what a browser cannot do (Files, the Share Sheet, an offline library, Spotlight). Nothing is held back from the web to make the app look better.

Where every picture comes from

Fold Commons draws on three open, public databases and says which one under every structure:

Under every AlphaFold picture we print one source line. It is built from our copy of the database, never typed by hand. For p53 it reads:

AlphaFold DB model v6 for UniProt P04637, from Fold Commons' snapshot of 2026-10-04. A prediction, not an experiment.

It names the model's version, the protein's UniProt accession and the date of our copy, so a stranger can check exactly what we showed. The last sentence matters most: a predicted structure is a computer's answer, not a measurement.

The same question, "can a stranger check it?", runs through two games on our sibling site, Spark & Anvil: CommonForge (ages 15 to 18) and ProvenanceQuest (ages 15 to 18). One asks who owns knowledge and whether a claim can be checked; the other follows an object's chain of custody through documents. A different field, the same habit.

Three bodies

Maintainers

The people who write, review, and ship code. They make day-to-day technical decisions. A public roster and code repositories will be published as the organisation formalises.

Authority: Code (what gets built, how it's reviewed). Releases (what ships and when). Technical roadmap.

Fiscal-oversight team

Once fiscal sponsorship is in place (via NumFOCUS or the Open Molecular Software Foundation), this team is the sponsor's designated overseer of Fold Commons funds.

Authority: Approve quarterly budgets. Sign off on grant applications. Review conflict-of-interest disclosures. Authorize substantial expenditures.

Scientific advisory body

Volunteer scientists who advise on accuracy, priorities, and ecosystem fit. Not paid; not employees; not legally liable for Fold Commons decisions.

Authority: Advisory only — the maintainers and fiscal-oversight team retain decision authority. Their advice on scientific accuracy is reviewed in good faith.

Transparency

How to participate

Timeline

Updated 2026-09-22.

Done

Planned