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About

About Kirimana

The name

Kirimana is te reo Māori for contract. Two words sit inside it:

  • kiri — surface, skin. Where something becomes visible.
  • mana — honor, weight, spiritual authority.

A contract is where your name carries weight. Where your honor shows on paper. We borrowed the word because English doesn’t have one for that — contract in English is paperwork; kirimana is the weight on the paperwork.

That’s the brand. It’s also the architecture. Every contract names a human. Every classification gates an AI call. Every redaction is audited. Every dispatch is signed. Two manas, on the line, together.

Borrowing with respect

Borrowing a Māori word obligates us. Three rules we hold ourselves to:

  1. Word, not imagery. We don’t use koru, ta moko, or kapa haka photography as decoration. The word is the borrow; the rest is appropriation.
  2. Use it correctly. Kirimana means contract. Kiri and mana mean what they mean. Kiri the AI assistant is named for kiri (surface) — the part of Kirimana you talk to. We don’t reach for other te reo Māori vocabulary just because it sounds exotic.
  3. Acknowledge the source. Te reo Māori belongs to the Māori people. We use it because the meaning is precise; we don’t use it to claim association with the culture.

If you’re a te reo Māori speaker and we’ve gotten this wrong: security@kirimana.io. We mean it.

Who we are

Kirimana is an open-source project, Apache-2.0. The maintainer team runs the roadmap publicly on GitHub. The product is built in the open. The brand is held in stewardship — see the brand book in the website repo for the rules.

What we believe

  • Open source is the right default for governance tooling. The thing that decides who can read what, what the AI can touch, who signs off on a redaction — that thing should be auditable. By everyone, not just the vendor.
  • Mid-size teams deserve enterprise-grade governance. The Fortune 500 pays millions for what we ship Apache-2.0. There’s no good reason a 50-person team should have less.
  • Friction is the point. “Frictionless governance” is a contradiction in terms. A contract that anyone can rubber-stamp is a contract no one means. We design friction in; we make it cheap, but we make it real.
  • AI is here. Governance has to catch up. Every LLM call needs a policy. Every action it takes needs an audit row. We treat AI as a first-class actor in the platform, with the same obligations a human contributor has.

The community

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