First, just to make sure you have the same context, there’s two references/nods being made with the Article ‘0’ thing specifically:
One is to Asimov’s famous “Three Laws of Robotics” which are originally 1, 2, and 3 until the robots figure out that really there was a bigger implicit condition all along which they label the 0th law and explicitly come up with a wording for, even though it didn’t originally have one.
The second is to the general convention in computer science of numbering things from 0. Most constitutions don’t have an “article 0” so it gives it a more techie feel to have that numbering in the document.
With those here for reference, let me respond to your actual comment. Technically, any change we make at all can be called an amendment, sure. But there’s still the question of how we format the changes we make.
Realistically, “Article 0” is of a quite different category than the other articles, because it doesn’t add any specific mechanics or enforcements. Instead it talks about the context we apply to the constitution as a whole. Essentially, it’s a preamble. So just making it “Amendment 1” or even 2 or 3 is a really weird place to put it. It’s not one of the items in the list, it’s a description of what the whole list is about. The beginning is really the only place it makes sense to go.
There’s also another thing here that’s more nebulous, but let me say how I see it and others can offer their feedback as to whether it’s a good frame. But in my view, this proposal is to write Article 0 in the constitution, not to add it to the constitution. What do I mean by that? For me personally, I would say that the things in Article 0 are things which were already part of the ENS community before the constitution was ever proposed. This is true in a technical sense, that the effort to add an Article 0 started before the airdrop and hence before anyone had voted on anything. But it’s also true in a much bigger sense, that this whole token thing is something being added to an existent, vibrant community rather than being defined into the ENS system from the start.
So the way that I think of it, Article 0 is about taking the less tangible, less strictly enforceable things that were part of the ENS community before the constitution was even proposed, and making sure they’re written down. Article 0 is really the pre-existing standard by which the community is deciding how legitimate the idea of a constitution even is in the first place. If the constitution and the token and all of this succeeds in becoming the central mechanic by which the ENS community governs the ENS system (and looking at things so far, I think the chances of this are growing), then it will be specifically because the whole idea of adding a token and a constitution and all of these mechanics succeeded in doing what Article 0 says.
You can interpret that as saying that the constitution had an omission in it. But the constitution will never capture everything, so in that sense it will always be incomplete and imperfect, no matter how many times we amend it or how successful those amendments are in serving the ENS community and the world. It’s more like (and I think this is the literal historical truth of what happened) the proposers of the constitution just didn’t think at the time to write these things down. If they had, they may not have come up with this exact phrasing, just like if someone else had written the constitution proposal they might have worded things differently. But I think any constitution with a good chance of succeeding would have had to touch on concepts very similar to the articles included in some way. And in the same way, any pre-amble that someone had thought of including would have had to touch on the ideas in Article 0 somehow too.
So the symbolism of Article 0 I’m going for, and that I think most supporters of it are going for, is not a whole “this constitution is broken and we need radically alter it with an amendment”. It’s more of a “let’s write down more about how this all happened, so that when people are debating specifics later they can read that part too and be reminded of the bigger picture.” And also wink at Asimov and at every array indexing argument that any programmer has ever gotten into .