Bounded public-source acquisition completed 9 September 2026. This is a candidate research packet, not a case mutation. Read alongside root's ccf-programme.md; code/access is a separate lane. The exact Canadian contribution record was already acquired in the accepted Christchurch wave and was not fetched again.
Finding
ROOST has a documented route from board appointment to technical roadmap to code-maintainer decisions. It also has a separate employment arrangement, while its published fundraising total combines financial and in-kind resources. The acquired records establish these different kinds of authority; they do not establish that a founding partner, employer intermediary or the Canadian government can direct a particular deployed content decision.
Legal and operational home
ROOST's [privacy statement](http[local research file] effective 28 October 2025, identifies Robust Open Online Safety Tools Inc as the entity processing personal data for covered websites/events. Its current site footer reports 501(c)(3) public-charity status and EIN 33-3305434. These are the organization's legal/tax representations, not an independently obtained IRS determination or incorporation instrument. The website notice does not govern every product merely because it uses ROOST code. Source: governance-privacy.html, Privacy Statement and Contact Us; footer independently read on the official web reader.
Columbia SIPA's [19 February 2025 announcement](http[local research file] describes incubation at its Institute of Global Politics, founding president Camille François, and prospective operation as an independent nonprofit retaining close collaboration with Columbia. This proves the institution's account of incubation and intended separation, not a university ownership interest or transfer agreement. Full substantive announcement read through the primary-site web reader, lines 136–156. Ordinary GET returned a retained 403 challenge; that file is not the announcement's original content.
A current [Marketing Manager listing linked directly from ROOST's Careers page](http[local research file] says US-based individuals will be employed by Global Impact on behalf of ROOST. The position reports to ROOST's COO. This is a concrete advertised employment/operating relationship, not proof this vacancy was filled, every existing staff member has that employer, or Global Impact owns ROOST's grants. The posting's publication date is not established; it was live on 9 September 2026. No fiscal sponsorship, employer-services agreement or payment record was acquired. Source: governance-marketing-role.html, Compensation and Structure; source-discovery parent governance-careers.html.
Who can decide what
The current [Project Roles policy](http[local research file] expressly assigns:
| Actor | Published decision/resource role |
|---|---|
| ROOST | Repository administration; infrastructure, connections, specialists and some engineering capacity. Initially appoints maintainers; may replace them for inactivity, vacancy or misconduct. |
| Board | Appoints the Technical Design Committee (TDC). |
| TDC | Overarching technical direction/roadmap; consultation or tie-breaking for maintainer teams. |
| Maintainers | Day-to-day development, project/release management and merge approval under ROOST branch protections; can appoint additional/replacement maintainers. |
| Contributors/community | Propose changes; community membership alone grants no explicit permissions. |
The policy says employer organizations are not automatically contributors/maintainers. It permits partner GitHub teams for access administration, including prerelease repositories. It identifies open-source forking as a check on repository control. These are published rules, not an audit of their use or proof that downstream platforms must accept an upstream update. Source: governance-roles.html, entire substantive page; undated current snapshot. The actual identity of repository maintainers and runtime behavior belong to the code lane.
The [26 November 2025 governance explanation](http[local research file] describes a light, evolving governance approach: the initial TDC was recruited by ROOST, with future selection arrangements still to be developed. It also says users can offer feedback privately or pseudonymously and distinguishes shared infrastructure from platform-specific signals and decision logic. Do not backdate the more explicit current Roles policy to the earliest partnership. Source: governance-design2025.html, full substantive body, particularly Decision making, TDC and Staying secure sections.
The [current Team page](http[local research file] lists Clint Smith (Discord legal chief) and Eli Sugarman (Hewlett Foundation special-projects director) as co-chairs, François as president/CEO, and other board members including Mark Surman (Mozilla), Vincent Courson (Google), Audrey Tang, Angela Lungati, Jamil Jaffer, Megan Smith and Niki Christoff. Its TDC includes Naren Koneru (Roblox) and ROOST CTO Vinay Rao as co-chairs; other listed people include OpenAI's Sam Toizer, Discord's Hailey Elizabeth, Cash App/Afterpay engineering lead Shu Lei, GitHub's Tom Thorley, Rebecca Portnoff and Tim Pepper. These are named individual roles and listed affiliations, not employer-controlled seats or voting blocs. Source: governance-team.html, Staff/Board/TDC, full body read.
Chronology matters: the [22 December 2025 board announcement](http[local research file] calls this an inaugural board and uses Chair/Vice-Chair for Smith/Sugarman. The February launch already names Smith as board chair. Therefore December is an announcement date, not demonstrated first existence of a board. The exact co-chair transition, board appointment/removal rules, voting thresholds, reserved donor rights and approved budget delegations remain unacquired. Source: governance-board2025.html, full substantive body; compare launch below.
Financing: the headline is not a cash balance
ROOST's [10 February 2025 distributed launch release](http[local research file] says it had raised more than $27 million for its first four operating years. It names Eric Schmidt, Discord, OpenAI, Google, Roblox, Knight Foundation, AI Collaborative, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and Project Liberty Institute as founding partners. This is an issuer press release distributed by PR Newswire (SOURCE ROOST), not independent reporting. It does not allocate individual contributions, disclose restrictions or establish cash received. Source: governance-launch2025.html, complete release body excluding distributor navigation/marketing; exact currency is expressed as dollars without an acquired currency annotation.
The same-date [president's launch letter](http[local research file] instead uses $28 million in initial funding; the [4 June 2025 first-100-days update](http[local research file] specifies $28.5 million in funding and in-kind contributions. These differing dates/descriptions cannot safely be subtracted to create fresh grants or summed. The June account attributes capacity to founding-partner support, but no cash/in-kind schedule, valuation method, audited reconciliation, individual grant contract or CCF allocation was acquired. Source: governance-100days.html, Building an Organization for Change; governance-gratitude2025.html, opening.
The [current partnerships page](http[local research file] separates founding partners from partners; CCF appears in the latter. Logos are partnership labels, not donor-payment evidence. Its founder label for SCSP does not identify the legal vehicle behind every Schmidt-associated resource. No Carnegie entity is newly introduced by this packet.
Connection to the existing case
The February launch letter credits CCF/Paul Ash for planned joint technical and information solutions supporting the Call. It separately credits Tech Coalition/Sean Litton, Lauren Tharp and Kay Chau with child-safety expertise, alongside a quotation about the Coalition's Pathways capacity-building programme. The author expressly describes ROOST as not a corporate membership organization. These are source-attributed collaboration/expertise relations; they do not establish Lantern data sharing, a Tech Coalition grant, or ROOST membership in the Coalition. Source: governance-gratitude2025.html, CCF/Tech Coalition paragraphs and paragraph preceding philanthropic partners.
Accepted prior record: [Public Safety Canada contribution26007](http[local research file] CAD1,369,064 to The Christchurch Call Foundation, 23 October 2025–31 March 2028, includes a ROOST partnership in three expected workstreams. The retained original is ../christchurch-governance-wave-2026-09-09/transition-canada26007.html, SHA256 df2b85ed3c34f56a465fa769bdba2bee05b829fd67f710ac5d4318e1ab6cf352. It does not turn the whole contribution into a ROOST subaward or identify authority over ROOST's maintainers. Root owns new programme/output findings; this packet does not duplicate or pre-judge them.
Candidate relations and next decisive record
For integration, reuse the existing CCF, Columbia, Discord, OpenAI, Google, Roblox, Tech Coalition and other exact identities where they resolve. The meaningful new relationship types are incubation, advertised employer, named board/technical role, appoints, roadmap authority, merge/release authority, fundraising reported and collaboration/expertise reported. Avoid converting the entire roster into control edges. The Canadian edge remains a CCF award with an expected partnership purpose.
The highest-yield missing instruments are the CCF–ROOST project agreement/budget and its acceptance schedule; ROOST's board constitution/budget delegations; donor contribution schedules separating money from donated resources; and the Global Impact service/fiscal arrangement. These would establish who can withhold resources, approve work or redirect it. Ordinary employer administration, charitable resource pooling and maintainers' independent technical judgment remain live alternative explanations to a donor-directed policy chain.
Acquisition frontier
Twelve ordinary public GETs: eleven substantive HTML originals and one Columbia 403 challenge. Columbia's primary web reader supplied the substantive substitute; no retry or proxy was used. Companion governance-captures.json records each URL, response status, original SHA256, derivative text, reading scope and exclusions. All substantive originals were read in their stated scope. No repository execution, API account, contact, application submission or money movement occurred.
Finite searches covered ROOST governance/legal identity, its exact EIN, technical committee, and targeted ROOST + Google/McGovern/Global Impact funding combinations. Several combined searches produced irrelevant results or none. They do not establish the absence of financial records. No original IRS determination, constitutional instrument, restricted grant agreement or partner-specific cash receipt was located in this bounded pass. An initial overlong search response was truncated before any results could be inspected; it is not evidence. Acquisition is closed for the combined forest assessment.