Kifuliiru Lab Constitution

This Constitution is adopted by Kifuliiru Lab, operating through Wekify LLC, as a public governance commitment to the Bafuliiru community and to the digital future of the Kifuliiru language.

Ayivugwe Kabemba Mukome, a Mufuliiru from South Kivu and the founder of both Wekify LLC and Kifuliiru Lab, currently serves as the sole member of the Founding Circle. That starting point is named clearly so the institution can grow deliberately, transparently, and toward community governance.

This is not a legal instrument for courts. It is the institution’s word to the Bafuliiru community, wherever we are. Read it. Share it. Hold Kifuliiru Lab to it.

Simply put: We are Bafuliiru. We built this for our language. It belongs to our community.

Kifuliiru Lab is our institution, a research and technology lab dedicated to building, preserving, and sustaining the digital future of the Kifuliiru language and Bafuliiru cultural heritage.

Kifuliiru Lab was founded by Ayivugwe Kabemba Mukome, a Mufuliiru from the South Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, because the Kifuliiru language lacked the digital infrastructure it deserved.

The Lab operates as a division of Wekify LLC, a technology company founded and registered in Spokane, Washington by Ayivugwe Kabemba Mukome. But the Lab's mission, assets, and accountability are not commercial. They are directed toward the Bafuliiru community.

• Kifuliiru Lab is the parent institution of all our digital platforms, tools, research, and community efforts.
• We serve the Bafuliiru community in South Kivu, Bukavu, the diaspora, and everywhere our people live.
• We are not a commercial project. We do not exist to generate profit for investors or founders. We exist to serve our language and our people.
• Our full name is Kifuliiru Lab. We operate at Kifuliiru.org.

Simply put: We built these assets and we hold them, but they are not ours to keep. They belong to the community. We are their keepers, not their owners.

Everything we have built, including the platforms, the data, the tools, and the research, we hold in trust for the Bafuliiru community, as documented in our Declaration of Language Asset Trust. Here is what exists today:

• Kifuliiru.com, our primary digital home for the Kifuliiru language, already recognized globally as a primary source.
• Kifuliiru.org, our research and institution domain.
• KifuliiruFoundation.org, reserved for our community Foundation when the time is right.
• Kifuliiru HQ, our mobile app: dictionary, Imyazi news, Radio Ibufuliiru, social features.
• Tabula Kifuliiru, our community data and contribution platform.
• Kifuliiru Numbers, an offline mobile app that works without internet for every corner of South Kivu.
• Our Corpus: 3,500+ dictionary entries, 700+ verbs, quad-aligned sentences in Kifuliiru, English, French, and Kiswahili.
• The Conjugation Engine, computational verb conjugation for Kifuliiru, built from scratch.
• LaSAn, our Language Simulator and Analyser, measuring the digital health of our language.
• Kifuliiru Store, our cultural commerce platform, whose revenue funds the Lab directly.
• Core commitment: none of these assets will ever be sold, transferred to investors, used as commercial collateral, or taken from our community. That is not negotiable. It is documented. It is permanent.

Simply put: One institution. Everything under it. Lean, clear, and ours.

We chose not to create many separate organizations with separate overhead and separate bureaucracies. Everything lives under Kifuliiru Lab, one institution, multiple arms, all serving the same mission.

• Kifuliiru Lab is the parent. It holds all assets, carries all responsibility, and is accountable to our community for everything under its roof.
• Our Foundation Arm is the community governance and asset protection wing. It is not yet a separate registered nonprofit; it is how the Lab faces the community and protects what belongs to them. When resources allow, we will register it as a fully independent nonprofit.
• Kifuliiru Store is our revenue engine. Cultural products and diaspora merchandise create revenue that goes directly to keeping the Lab running.
• Our Research Division builds the NLP infrastructure, does the linguistic analysis, and expands the technical foundations of Kifuliiru's digital presence.
• The Lab sits inside Wekify LLC for legal and administrative purposes only. Wekify LLC does not own our language assets and has no authority over our community governance.

Simply put: Kifuliiru Lab currently has one founding steward. That is the honest starting point. Others will join deliberately, starting with those who need to know the technical work to keep it alive. The community's governance is the goal. No person governs forever.

Our governance moves through three stages: honest about where we start, clear about where we are going.

• Stage 1, Where We Are Now: Ayivugwe Kabemba Mukome is currently the sole member of the Founding Circle and is bound by this Constitution, our Declaration, and every public commitment made in both.
• Stage 2, Building the Circle: others join deliberately, by invitation and by explicit acceptance of this Constitution. We start with technical continuity, then expand.
• Stage 3, The Goal: through elected and appointed community representatives, the Bafuliiru community takes governance of the Foundation arm and eventually of the Lab's major decisions.
• In Stage 1, Ayivugwe Kabemba Mukome holds sole founding governance authority and is fully bound by this Constitution and our Declaration.
• New members join the Founding Circle only by explicit invitation and explicit acceptance; participating in the community does not make someone a governance member.
• Once the Founding Circle has two or more members, decisions that permanently affect our language assets require agreement of at least two members.
• Bringing community representatives into governance is not optional. It is a constitutional obligation we build toward from day one.
• Any community member can raise concerns about how we govern through our Foundation arm's public channels at any stage.

Simply put: We fund this ourselves first, then together with the community. Not grants with conditions. Not investors. Our independence depends on this choice.

We do not primarily seek external institutional grants. We have seen what happens when African language institutions accept funding with conditions: the conditions follow, and eventually the work is no longer theirs. We choose differently. Our independence is funded by us.

• Phase 1, Where We Are Now: Ayivugwe Kabemba Mukome personally funds both the Lab and our Foundation arm. Three separate documented flows, personal donation to the Foundation arm, personal contribution to the Lab, Foundation-to-Lab grant, establish institutional independence from the start.
• Phase 2, Next: community donations and store revenue become the primary engines. The founder’s personal contribution reduces. Community members who give receive store credit back.
• Phase 3, The Goal: the Lab runs on community contributions and store revenue alone. External funding may come only if it arrives without conditions touching our governance, our assets, or our decisions about the Kifuliiru language.
• Our language assets are never collateral, never sold, never transferred to any investor or creditor, ever.
• Store revenue is community revenue, earned by selling our cultural identity and reinvested in our language infrastructure.
• Community members who give to the Lab receive store credit. Their contribution is not charity; it is ownership in action.
• We publish our financial flows annually. The community can always see where the money comes from and where it goes.

Simply put: This is not ours. It is yours. Every Mufuliiru is an owner. Every contribution is an act of ownership.

The Bafuliiru community is not our audience. Our community is our owner, our funder, and our ultimate governing authority. We built this for you, not for ourselves, not for institutions, not for recognition.

• Own it. Every Mufuliiru is a rightful owner of the Kifuliiru Language Assets. This is documented publicly and cannot be taken away.
• Fund it. Even $1 per month from enough of us keeps this alive for years, independent of any single person's financial situation, including the founder’s.
• Build it. Our corpus grows when community members add words, correct entries, record audio, and share knowledge through Tabula Kifuliiru.
• Hold us accountable. Question us. Challenge us. Demand better. We welcome it; that is how trust between us is built.
• Govern it. Through elected and appointed representatives, the community will take formal governance authority over our Foundation arm and its decisions.
• The principle we live by: when the community funds the work, the community governs the work. Giving $1 is not charity. It is sovereignty.

Simply put: Right now, the Founding Circle has one member. Others will join when the institution is ready to share the work with them, deliberately, not by assumption. Being family or a collaborator puts someone on the community side. Governance is a separate, deliberate step.

The Founding Circle is our governance body. Membership is not assumed. It is offered deliberately, accepted explicitly, and comes with real responsibility.

Where we are today: Ayivugwe Kabemba Mukome is the Founding Circle's only member. We record this here because clarity protects the institution, and because our community deserves to know exactly where things stand.

Why others will be brought in: clarity and continuity. This institution cannot depend on one person alone. The work will be shared first with trusted technical continuity stewards who need to understand the infrastructure in order to help carry it.

The distinction that matters: family, collaborators, educators, our linguist in Bukavu, our journalist in Canada; these people are part of our movement and our community. They contribute, participate, and matter enormously. But being part of the community is different from carrying governance responsibility.

• We start with technical continuity. Then we expand. The community side grows naturally. The Founding Circle grows deliberately. When someone joins, their name and role are added to this document publicly.
• The Founding Circle currently has one member: Ayivugwe Kabemba Mukome. We record this honestly.
• New members join by explicit invitation and explicit acceptance of this Constitution and our Declaration. Nothing else qualifies someone for governance.
• Being family does not make someone a governance member. A family member is part of our community, always. They join the Founding Circle only when explicitly invited and when they explicitly accept.
• Once we have two or more Founding Circle members, we govern by consensus where possible, by majority vote when we cannot agree.
• Our primary obligation is to build the structures that make community governance possible, and to hand that authority to our community as we grow.
• Every time someone joins the Founding Circle, this article is updated and published publicly with their name and role.

Simply put: The work cannot depend on one person alone. If something happens to the founder, illness, death, financial hardship, the work must go on. This article makes sure of that.

Kifuliiru Lab names this risk directly because naming it is how we protect against it. Much of the code, architecture, and research framework began in the founder’s knowledge and systems. That concentration is a vulnerability the institution commits to reducing.

• Living continuity document. Kifuliiru Lab maintains a plain-language document, updated regularly, telling the Founding Circle where everything lives, how it works, what is in progress, and what needs to happen for the work to continue beyond any one person.
• Knowledge transfer. Technical knowledge is progressively shared with Founding Circle members, so the work is never entirely inside one person's head.
• If the founder is incapacitated, the Founding Circle takes over collective stewardship of all assets and operations immediately. The community is told publicly within 30 days.
• If the founder dies, all Kifuliiru Language Assets transfer to the Foundation arm immediately. If the Foundation arm is not yet formally registered, the Founding Circle holds them in trust until it is.
• If the founder can no longer fund this, the community funding model becomes the primary engine. Life changes; the work does not stop because one person’s financial situation changes.
• No single point of failure. It is our constitutional obligation to ensure that no critical part of this institution, technical, financial, or governance, depends entirely on Ayivugwe Kabemba Mukome or on any one person.

Simply put: We do not want any institution telling us what to do with our language. Our independence is worth more than any grant.

We are built for total independence. This is a choice we make with clear eyes.

We know what external grants look like in practice. A university wants co-authorship. A government wants alignment with their language policy, which may not be ours. An NGO wants quarterly reports in formats designed for their bureaucracy. A foundation wants to shape the project in their image. Every grant comes with a condition. Enough conditions and the work is no longer ours.

• We do not primarily seek external institutional grants. Community funding and store revenue are our intended primary sources.
• External funding is only welcome if it comes with no conditions affecting our community governance, our asset ownership, our research direction, or our editorial decisions about the Kifuliiru language.
• No external institution, university, government, NGO, or international body, acquires governance rights over Kifuliiru Lab or our assets by funding us.
• Partnerships are welcome when they serve our community's interests. They are governed by written agreements that protect our independence explicitly.
• Our independence over our own language is worth more than any amount of external money that comes with strings attached.
• Why we choose this: when other institutions start coming, conditions start coming too. We have seen what happens to African language institutions that accept conditions. We choose differently.

Simply put: Some things are off the table. Always. No matter what anyone offers.

• We will not sell our language assets to any person, company, or institution.
• We will not give any investor equity in or control over our language assets.
• We will not accept grants or partnerships that require us to limit our community's authority over its own language.
• We will not use community data for commercial purposes without explicit community consent.
• We will not make decisions about the Kifuliiru language, its documentation, standardization, or digital representation, without community input.
• We will not govern permanently. The Founding Circle's authority is transitional. The community's authority is permanent.

Simply put: This Constitution can grow and improve, but only to strengthen what we have committed to, never to weaken it. And the community always knows when it changes.

• This Constitution may be amended by agreement of a majority of the Founding Circle, plus at least one community representative.
• No amendment may reduce community protections, expand any individual's or company's authority over community assets, or weaken the independence provisions of Article IX.
• Every amendment is published publicly on Kifuliiru.org and distributed to the community within 30 days of adoption.
• The community may propose amendments through our Foundation arm's accountability channels. We commit to formally considering them within 90 days.
• This is a living document. It will grow as we grow. Every version is archived and publicly available.

This Constitution is adopted by Kifuliiru Lab, operating through Wekify LLC, and is published to the Bafuliiru community in May 2026. It is an institutional public commitment, not a legal instrument. As others join the Founding Circle, their names and roles will be added here and published publicly.

• Ayivugwe Kabemba Mukome. Founder, Kifuliiru Lab & Wekify LLC. Sole Current Member, Founding Circle. Mufuliiru, South Kivu, DRC. Spokane, Washington. May 2026.
• Future Founding Circle Members. Added here when each person joins, deliberately, explicitly, and with full acceptance of this Constitution and our Declaration of Language Asset Trust.