Founder & Steward
The Steward
Institutions require continuity.
Relationships need to be maintained. Responsibilities need to be carried. Decisions need to be approached consistently over time. Without stewardship, even well-designed institutions can gradually lose coherence as priorities shift and responsibilities become fragmented.
For this reason, My Chakchouka includes the role of steward.
The steward exists to help maintain continuity across the institution. This responsibility extends beyond any single product, contributor, article, or initiative. It involves helping preserve the relationships, principles, systems, and long-term direction that give the institution its coherence.
Stewardship is therefore not understood as ownership of the institution.
Nor is it understood as authority over the people who participate within it.
It is understood as a responsibility to help maintain the conditions through which the institution can continue to operate, evolve, and remain aligned with its purpose.
At present, this role is carried by Safouane Ben Haj Ali, founder of My Chakchouka.
The role emerged alongside the institution itself. As the institution developed, the responsibility for maintaining continuity, coordinating relationships, developing systems, documenting knowledge, and guiding long-term direction became part of the stewardship function.
The decision to carry stewardship emerged from the institution's needs rather than from a desire for personal prominence. As My Chakchouka developed, someone needed to assume responsibility for maintaining coherence across its different parts and helping ensure that its relationships, principles, and long-term direction remained connected over time.
The steward participates within the institution rather than standing apart from it.
Like other contributors, the steward forms part of the broader ecosystem. What distinguishes the role is not status, but responsibility.
For this reason, the steward is best understood not through personal biography, but through the responsibilities associated with maintaining the institution over time.
Relationship To The Institution
The relationship between the steward and My Chakchouka is one of responsibility rather than ownership.
The institution emerged through the work of its founder, and many of its early structures, systems, and directions were shaped through that process. As a result, the steward remains closely connected to the institution's development and ongoing evolution.
At the same time, the institution is not understood as an extension of a single individual.
My Chakchouka contains contributors, knowledge, products, practices, relationships, and responsibilities that extend beyond any one participant. The role of the steward is therefore not to become the institution, but to help maintain its coherence as these different realities interact and evolve.
This relationship involves participation at multiple levels.
The steward contributes to documentation, governance, representation, system development, institutional direction, and the maintenance of relationships across the ecosystem. These responsibilities create a close connection to many parts of the institution, while also requiring attention to the institution as a whole rather than to any single component.
The relationship also evolves over time.
As contributors participate, systems mature, and new forms of knowledge emerge, the institution becomes shaped by a growing number of people and relationships. Stewardship remains important, but the realities being stewarded become increasingly broader than the individual carrying the role.
For this reason, the relationship between the steward and the institution is best understood as a relationship of service.
The steward helps maintain continuity, direction, and responsibility within the institution, while recognizing that the institution itself is larger than any single contributor, including the steward.
The purpose of stewardship is therefore not to place the institution around a person.
It is to help ensure that the institution can continue to develop beyond one.
Responsibilities Of Stewardship
Stewardship carries a broad range of responsibilities because the institution itself contains many interconnected realities.
Products, knowledge, contributors, practices, systems, relationships, and governance structures do not exist independently of one another. Maintaining continuity across these different parts of the institution requires ongoing attention to how they evolve, interact, and remain connected over time.
One responsibility of stewardship is continuity.
This involves helping preserve the principles, relationships, and institutional direction that provide coherence across the ecosystem. Continuity does not mean resisting change. It means helping ensure that change remains connected to the purpose and responsibilities that shaped the institution in the first place.
Another responsibility is coordination.
Different contributors, initiatives, systems, and forms of knowledge often intersect in ways that require alignment. Stewardship helps maintain connections between these different realities so that they can operate as parts of a broader whole rather than as isolated components.
Stewardship also involves documentation.
Knowledge, decisions, relationships, and institutional developments require documentation if they are to remain understandable over time. Stewardship helps support the creation, maintenance, and organization of this institutional memory.
Responsibility for governance forms another part of the role.
The steward helps maintain the frameworks through which accountability, representation, transparency, and fairness are approached within the institution. This responsibility does not place the steward above governance. It includes helping ensure that governance itself remains visible, understandable, and capable of evolving when necessary.
Stewardship also requires long-term attention.
Many institutional decisions produce consequences that extend beyond immediate circumstances. Stewardship involves considering not only present needs, but also the future continuity, resilience, and development of the institution.
These responsibilities are connected by a common purpose.
The role of the steward is not to control every aspect of the institution. It is to help maintain the conditions through which contributors, knowledge, products, practices, and relationships can continue to develop within a coherent and responsible framework.
For this reason, stewardship is best understood not as a position of authority, but as an ongoing responsibility to the institution and the realities it exists to serve.
Stewardship Going Forward
Stewardship exists within time.
Institutions evolve. Contributors participate. Knowledge expands. Relationships develop. As these realities change, stewardship must evolve alongside them.
For this reason, stewardship is not understood as a fixed arrangement tied permanently to a particular moment in the institution's history.
The responsibilities of stewardship remain important, but the ways in which those responsibilities are carried may continue to develop as the institution grows and matures.
As participation expands, stewardship increasingly involves maintaining conditions through which contributors, systems, knowledge, and relationships can continue to operate coherently across a broader ecosystem.
This evolution is not a departure from stewardship.
It is part of stewardship itself.
The purpose of the role is not to preserve a particular structure indefinitely. It is to help maintain continuity while allowing the institution to adapt responsibly to new realities, participants, and forms of contribution.
Over time, the institution may contain more contributors, more knowledge, more represented people, more systems, and more relationships than any single individual could fully oversee alone.
For this reason, stewardship should not be understood as dependence on one person.
It should be understood as a commitment to continuity, responsibility, and institutional development over time.
The long-term goal is not to make the institution inseparable from its steward.
The long-term goal is to help build an institution capable of enduring, evolving, and remaining coherent beyond any single contributor, including the person who currently carries the stewardship role.
In this sense, stewardship looks toward the future not by centering the steward, but by helping ensure that the institution can continue to grow beyond one.