Working Constitution four-year expiration (April 2026): status of Bedrock Constitution?

[ert485]

Summary

manual.md states:

In all cases, Optimism Collective governance is intended to be carried out consistent with the terms of its Working Constitution

The Working Constitution (Section 1) defines itself as:

A transitory document. The Working Constitution will remain in effect no more than four years from the date of its adoption. After that, authority over governance will be ceded to a permanent Bedrock Constitution (that incorporates the lessons of the Collective's prior governance experiments).

The Working Constitution was adopted April 26, 2022. The four-year window closes April 2026.

Problem

The OPerating Manual derives its authority from the Working Constitution ("empowered by the Working Constitution" per README.md). If the Working Constitution expires by its own terms without a successor document, the authority chain for manual.md and all governance procedures described in it becomes unclear.

I was unable to find:

• Any draft, proposal, or working group for a "Bedrock Constitution"
• Any proposal to amend the Working Constitution's expiration clause (Section 3 grants the Foundation amendment power)
• Any public discussion of this deadline on the governance forum, in Season updates, or in this repo's history

Additionally, the term "Bedrock" was reused for the June 2023 protocol upgrade, which may have contributed to this going unnoticed.

Questions

1. Has the Foundation exercised its Section 3 amendment power to extend or remove the expiration, and if so, where is that documented?
2. If not, what is the current plan — formal amendment, implicit continuation, or a Bedrock Constitution drafting process?
3. Should the Working Constitution be added to this repo (or a dedicated governance repo) as a versioned document? Currently it exists only as a Discourse forum post with no version control or changelog.

Context

I'm a newcomer exploring the Collective and not yet a token holder or Citizen. I'm asking because the answer to this question meaningfully affects whether the governance system has a clear constitutional foundation going forward — which matters for anyone deciding whether to participate.

• I've also submitted a post on the governance forum covering this topic (currently pending new-account review): "Status of the Bedrock Constitution — Working Constitution expires April 2026"
• There don't seem to be any related prior forum discussions, but these are the closest I could find: [Accelerated Decentralization Proposal](https://gov.optimism.io/t/accelerated-decentralization-proposal-for-optimism/8875), [The need for a meta-constitution](https://gov.optimism.io/t/the-need-for-a-meta-constitution-and-why-token-based-voting-cannot-deliver-the-optimistic-vision/6213), [Working Models for Decentralization](https://gov.optimism.io/t/optimism-working-models-for-decentralization/9054)

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Disclosure: Research for this issue (document review, forum search, timeline analysis) was done with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic). The question and interest are my own.