ORGANISATION

The Culton project is an independent non-profit foundation (under establishment) contributing to preserving and developing the genetic resources providing for food, medicins, clothing, materials and other needs by providing an open checklist with images and traits info of the worlds cultivars, breeds and strains.

Purpose and goals

1) Create a comprehensive checklist of all known cultivars, breeds and strains of domesticated organisms, pluss those foraged, fished and hunted.

2) Promote the development of a unified systematics (cultonomy) and a unified nomenclature code for all domesticated organisms, replacing the existing separate systematics and nomentclature codes for domesticated plants, fungi, animals and bacterial and viral strains.

3) Relieve the taxonomic system from the burden of including domesticated organisms through hybrid names and taxonomic ranks, which is currently the practice, making taxonomy unnessecarily complicated without serving domesticates optimally.

4) Establish criteria for accepted names, and thereby assign others as synonyms, according to the practice from taxonomic publishing.

5) Develop a network of competence to maintain the lists and judge proposals (a “CULTON” parallell to the publishing journal TAXON, run by the IAPT or comparable institution). They should be recruited broadly, from the field of systematics and with representatives from the community of breeders, growers, collectors, both community based and commercial.

Tasks

1. Be a globally available nonprofit actor
2. Own and maintain an openly accessible database of useful organisms
3. Ensure that the data is structured and can be used in other systems in a predictable way
4. Develop and manage data collection guidelines to ensure data quality
5. Develop and implement personnel certification system
6. Enter into agreements with data providers and provide good exchange systems
7. Enter into agreements with system vendors for the development and operation of technical infrastructure for the cloud-based service
8. Initiate and oversee the development of systems for the best possible interaction with the system’s target audience to capture users’ wants and needs

Choice of legal structure

There are three main reasons for choosing a non-profit foundation as structure for this project:

• There is a lot of high quality data in large, both public and private, organizations (such as gene banks and the like). Much of this is developed for non-profit purposes and is financed by public funds. A non-profit foundation with a non-profit purpose to make such data available would be the right platform to create exchange solutions with these institutions.
• It would be a great value for such a system if users could contribute their own data, such as images, observations, and autogenerated user data to enrich the data for common benefit. In other words, a form of Wikipedia model (although with a higher degree of standardization of data). Here, too, an independent foundation is considered the optimal guarantor and manager.
• The project will do a very specific job that will support the work of member organisations, but would probably not benefit from itself being a member organisation with all the activities and administrative processes that entails. Foundations may have member bodies as part of their formal organisation, but this project should in principle have as slim and efficient an organization as possible, and therefore choose a model with the board as the sole decision-making body, however with an advisory reference group as a support function.

Current version of the founding documents.

For discussion conserning the organisation, go to the forum (for logged in participants and only in English)

Board

The board of Culton mainly has an oversight function, and the daily work will be led by the folks at CultonX AS with a gradual transfer of responsibilites to the working groups as the organisation grows. In developing the board we follow the checklist from the Norwegian gambling and Foundation Authority.

We are aiming at 3-5 members to get started. Our very competent candidates so far:

Reference group

A reference group is important as a platform for informal networking and consulting. Participants so far:

Systematics working group

This group is not yet established, but will be a natural spin-off from the first reference group. Go to the forum (for logged in participants and only in English), or join here

Name moderation team

This group have a potential to become quite large, since there will be a lot of work with maintaining the data. We have only startet establishing this group. Go to the forum (for logged in participants and only in English), or join here

Administration

The goal is to keep things as simple as possible so that the board can govern the activities with just a few meetings per year, and with little need for ongoing administrative work. The main economic activity within the foundation will be centered around the technical aspects, at least the first years. And since this is going to be outsourced, there is very little internal economic activity.

Secretary and public contact

The board appoints a formal secretary and public contact. Since the activities of the foundation is mostly that of a facilitator and guarantor of public access, this activity should not need to involve much work and can be replaced largely by automated systems, in line with the focus and goal of the project it self. Bi-O’s founder and ceo, Karl Aakerro, will provide secretary service along with the role as initial coordinator until the foundation is established.

Technical operation

The technical partner is CultonX AS, which was established by the initiator Bi-O AS for this purpose. The collaboration will be formalized at the foundation’s founding meeting in line with a pre-developed agreement document.

Auditing

Foundations are obliged to get assistance from a registered or state-authorized public auditor registered with the Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway (Finanstilsynet). Partner Revisjon, now Crowe, has been with us in the establishment process since 2020, and they are also well acquainted with Tripletex.

Last Updated on 2025-12-08 by Karl Aakerro