Governance

Legal form

Tyche Institute is a non-profit association registered under Estonian law — mittetulundusühing (MTÜ), registrikood 80673227, seat in Tallinn. The MTÜ form is the standard Estonian vehicle for civic and research associations; it cannot distribute surplus to members and is governed by its statute and a board.

Funding

Currently self-funded through volunteer time. No grant has been received from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors, and no commissioned research has been undertaken. Future grant or partnership funding, if accepted, will be disclosed here and named in the relevant working paper.

How decisions are made

Research output — what to investigate, how to frame it, and where to deposit it — is decided by the contributing researcher and reviewed against the institute's published policies before the work carries the institute's name. Institutional decisions — adopting policies, recognising programs, accepting external engagements — are taken by the board under the MTÜ statute.

Public policies are published on the Policies page. Internal drafts and working history are versioned privately until they are ready for publication. The Research page lists every working paper with its permanent Zenodo deposit, so the institutional record of what has actually been published is public and timestamped.

Conflict-of-interest stance

Every working paper carries an explicit competing-interests disclosure naming any system the author maintains, any employment held outside the institute, and the absence or presence of financial relationships with systems referenced in the paper. Day-jobs and external affiliations of contributing researchers are not republished on the institute's pages on purpose, to preserve research independence and to keep institutional and personal scope cleanly separated.

Where a contributing researcher is also a member of a community surveyed in a Tyche paper, that fact is declared in the methods section of the paper. Researchers do not survey communities for which they hold an undisclosed financial relationship with the host organisation.

Boundaries — what the institute does not do

• Not an eIDAS trust service provider. The institute is not a TSP and not a QTSP under eIDAS or eIDAS 2.0; it does not issue certificates or timestamps for production use and does not offer commercial trust services.
• Not legal advice. Working papers analyse statute, case law, and standards; they do not constitute legal advice and are not a substitute for counsel.
• Not compliance certification. The institute does not certify that a system complies with the AI Act, eIDAS, or any other regulation. Conformity assessment is performed by notified bodies.
• Not an audit or advisory service. Working papers and dossiers are independent research; they are not compliance audits, legal opinions, or advisory engagements.
• Not a vendor. Reference implementations are published under Apache 2.0 for community review; the institute does not sell software or services built on them.

Contact

Questions about governance, policies, or board decisions go to [email protected]. See People for how the institute relates to contributing researchers, advisors, and volunteer contributors, and About for mission and approach.