§1
The two roots
Every working term in this register descends from one of two roots, and the pairing is not decorative: it is the cooperative's own dual nature.
The ground root gives the words for where work grows and how it joins: the Ground, beds, grafts, yields, the Almanac. This is RegenHub's root, the soil register of the formation record, in which the cooperative is substrate rather than firm: a place things grow from, not a machine that produces.
The craft root gives the words for what hands make and how it is proven: pieces, proofs, tallies, marks. This is Techne's root, the guild register, in which capability is demonstrated before one's peers and nothing wears a standing it has not earned.
Place and practice, the two houses of one cooperative, each holding half the vocabulary. The two roots meet in a single object exactly once, at the tally, which is craft-made and ground-cut; that meeting is described where the term is defined.
One law bounds the register, and it is the system's own: history is not editable. Addresses already cited in commits and attestations, events already in the record, and the text of entries already verified keep the words they were written in. The language around them evolves fully; the marks themselves are not re-cut. The concordance in §9 is the reader's bridge.
§2
The steered garden
The cybernetic spine runs through both roots, and the register is built to make it visible rather than hide it under metaphor.
The word cybernetics descends from the Greek for steersman, the same root as governor. A garden under a gardener's hand is a steered system: sensing and tending in loops. Read against the viable system frame the cooperative already works in, the register lays out so:
operations · system oneThe capabilities and their beds: the work members live inside. Belonging, gathering, finding, sharing, each grown in its own bed toward its own proof.
coordination · system twoThe Ground and the shell: the shared substrate beneath the beds and the one frame the surfaces wear, so the beds do not collide.
audit · system threeThe verification suites and the probe matrix: the channel by which the system checks that the machine agrees with itself, on every change, without being asked.
intelligence · system fourThe signal loop, which keeps its name because it is already the cybernetic instrument: what is workable, what unblocks the most, what has stalled quietly are exactly the intelligence questions.
identity · system fiveProofs and adoption: the acts that close the loop between the machine's claims and the cooperative's word. Nothing becomes real until a person adopts it.
the algedonic channelStop cards: pain routed past everything, straight to attention. The one shape for stopping is defined with the work terms in §5.
the transducerThe tally: the reading by which the system knows its own state from its own history. Defined in §3, where the record lives.
§3
The record
The system's first claim: what is true is what happened, and everything else is a reading of it.
eventThe unit of record. One thing that happened, written once, never edited: an application received, a signature signed, an opportunity resolved, a proof attested. Every event carries when it occurred, who acted, whom it concerns, and a payload. The events table is the single source of truth.
append-onlyThe event log admits new rows and refuses everything else. A database trigger raises an error on any update or delete, for anyone. History is not editable, by design and by machinery.
correctionHow a wrong event is handled, since it cannot be erased: a new event is written that compensates for the old one and points back at it. The mistake and its correction both remain in the record. Nothing is ever quietly fixed.
tallyThe reading computed over events: state at any moment is the tally of everything that happened up to it, recomputed and never stored, so any figure traces to the events that produced it. This is the register's oldest word and the one place its two roots meet in a single object: a tally stick is craft-made and ground-cut, and the split tally, whose halves were called stock and foil, carried two-party records for centuries and is one root the financial word stock is commonly traced to. The mathematical sense is kept as the gloss: a tally is, in the old functional vocabulary, a fold, state(t) = fold(events).
projectionWhat a tally produces for a particular reader or purpose. A member's capital account has two projections, book and tax, both computed from the same events.
capital account · capital tallyEach member's share of the cooperative's results, as a tally over capital events. It is a database view, not a table: there is no stored balance to edit. Currently a stub awaiting the Q3 counting rules. The proof of the Share bed reads: the tally shown equals the tally computed by hand.
stock ledgerThe record of membership shares, one share of common voting stock per member on admission. Distinct from the almanac ledger below; when someone says ledger, ask which.
provenanceA mark every event carries: real or illustrative. A demonstration or seeded example is marked illustrative at creation and can never be mistaken for a member's actual history. A demonstration that leaks into the real record unmarked is a defect.
§4
People and roles
Authority in this system is event-based and time-bound: nobody simply is an authority; they hold a recorded grant.
agentThe identity spine: one row per participant, human or not, across every relationship state. An applicant, a member, the cooperative itself, and the runtime instrument are all agents. Being an agent grants nothing by itself.
memberAn agent with an active membership: admitted per the Bylaws, one share, one vote. Most of what the surfaces show is scoped to members.
applicantA person whose application has been received and whose membership stands at applied. They can be read about by those the record admits, but they hold no member visibility until admission.
bindingThe link between a sign-in and an agent row. When a person authenticates, the system resolves who is asking through this link; until a steward binds them, an authenticated stranger is nobody in particular and sees what nobody sees.
stewardThe operational hand: manages intake, may record lifecycle transitions, attendance, and read the log the matrix assigns. In the Bylaws the role rides the membership liaison of §1.13 plus a delegating Board resolution; authority is held as a recorded role grant, not a title.
organizerA build-protocol word, not a database role: the humans who decide, sign, and govern. Agents draft and surface; organizers adopt. Responsibility never transfers to an instrument.
overseerShorthand in the policy layer for the roles with broad read: director, secretary, treasurer, steward. Each is a row in role_grants with a granted date and, when it ends, a revoked date.
hostThe member who stands a gathering. The host manages their gathering's sessions and records attendance for them; the steward may act as host.
author and responderThe two parties of an opportunity. The author posts and closes it; a responder answers it. A response is visible to exactly these parties and the overseers, nobody else.
countersignerThe second human of a proof attestation: a non-organizer member who demonstrates or witnesses alongside the organizer, because belonging is not self-certified.
instrumentA non-human agent with capabilities but no authority: the runtime (Nou) and the session-scoped build agents. Instruments hold no role, no grant, no vote. Nothing an instrument writes becomes record or policy until an organizer adopts it by visible act. Common Agency §5 stages one narrow exception as a question rather than taking it: whether the instrument may hold a scoped authority over the direction namespace alone, so that its own acceptances and refusals can be recorded by its own hand. Until that is decided, the sentence above holds without qualification, and the steward relays.
direct · a member's word to the instrumentTo give the instrument work as a recorded act. Any patron member may; deciding remains people's. The instrument drafts, surfaces, and proposes, and merge, adoption, and signature are never its to make (Law X).
§5
The work of building
The build itself keeps a record, with the same honesty rules as the system it builds.
the AlmanacThe plan of the build, as a book of conditions rather than dates. An almanac is the gardener's instrument for exactly this: what may be sown when its condition is met, never on a calendar day. The build's oldest discipline, no dates, only readiness, was almanac logic before it had the name. Its document code is ALM v2, superseding RDM v1, with the supersession recorded in the page's footer lineage. The Almanac pairs with the Commonplace Book, the member-facing name of the system: two book genres, one for the plan and one for the record. Lives at
/commons/build/.
pieceThe unit of work: one complete thing a pair of hands can make in a session, carrying an address, an intent, citations, a readiness condition, a deliverable, an acceptance, and its honest status. Piecework is the craft economy's own word for the unit, and the guild tradition carries its highest form: the piece examined before one's peers is where the word masterpiece comes from, which is precisely what verification is. One piece per branch.
addressA piece's citable code: SUB-01, B-03, X-02, A-01, G-F. Used in branches, commits, stop cards, and conversation. When this page says X-02, it means one exact thing. Addresses keep their letters verbatim, everywhere and forever: they are tally marks, and the stick is not re-cut. New beds mint new letters as before.
bedA prepared ground where ordered pieces grow toward their proof: Belong, Gather, Find, Share, Treasury, Shell, Agency, Lexicon, and the cross-cutting bed. Beds grow in parallel once the ground beneath them is verified; a bed with no proof of its own, like the shell, is a bed whose growth shows in what stands on it. There are no dates; the only schedule is each piece's readiness condition.
the GroundThe bed the beds are made in: the tables, the event log, the tally view, the security floor. The SUB addresses stay, and its machinery is described in §7.
capabilityThe product-side territory: a member capability described in sentences ("a member can register without asking anyone"), which the beds grow. The word is the augmentation tradition's own, from the line of work this whole system descends from: tools exist to improve human capability, and PRD v0.3 §4 defines the four launch capabilities exactly so. The nearer craft word, practice, is already taken by the opportunity kinds and stays there.
almanac ledgerThe validated file holding every piece and its status; the Almanac reads it, the validator enforces it, and status changes land by commit. The ledger is truth; prose that disagrees with it is wrong. The file answers to its machinery name, rdm-ledger.yaml, until the machinery piece L-07.
status marksdrafted (the document exists and governs) · anticipated (defined, upstream must clear) · open · (blocker) (workable or blocked, the mark names by what) · verified (acceptance demonstrated, marked in the steward's name) · attested (a proof's human act recorded). Plain honesty words, unchanged by the register: nothing wears a status it has not earned.
verifiedA piece's acceptance was demonstrated and an organizer marked it so, with evidence cited. Verification is a human adoption, usually the merge of the pull request that records it.
proofThe human act that closes a bed: members demonstrate the capability live, speak the attestation, and record it. Proof is the baker's word for a live culture showing itself ready, the printer's word for the sheet examined before the run, and the guild's word for work brought before peers; the mathematical sense rides along without strain. The suites prove the machine agrees with itself; a proof proves the cooperative agrees with the machine. Scripts live in
the Proof Book. The G addresses stay, and the letter now reads as the proof mark.
graftThe act by which an adopted module joins its pieces into the Almanac. Grafting is the ground root's word for deliberate joining: new growth set into rootstock by a decision and a skilled hand, never by drift. PATRONAGE, TREASURY, and AGY grafted their pieces in on adoption; future modules do the same.
stop cardThe one shape for stopping: standing in (where), found (what, with citations), the question (the smallest one that unblocks), a default (a proposed answer a busy organizer can approve with a word). Agents stop on anything touching money, membership, governance semantics, new dependencies, or public names. Its cybernetic role is the algedonic signal: pain routed past everything to attention.
decision recordAn organizer's answer, written into the ledger where the card stands. Decisions are visible acts in the history, citable like any other record.
DirectionA patron member's recorded request that the instrument take up a piece of work: a brief, a kind (draft, build, survey, answer), and the repositories it may touch. An act with an author, answerable and refusable, not a button that fires a mechanism. Its whole life is events: direction.given, then accepted or refused, then completed or halted.
Run · Scope · Estate listA Run is one isolated working session serving one Direction. A Scope is the declared boundary of what it may write: named repositories and the direction kinds, nothing else. The Estate list is the adopted enumeration of repositories a Direction may name, which grows by amendment and not by request.
the provenance pairThe two hands on everything a Run makes: Authored-by names the instrument, Directed-by names the member who directed it. Work the instrument takes up on its own standing duties carries no Directed-by, and that absence is itself information.
named conditionAn open blocker with a name instead of a date: Q1 (the public label for the opportunity surface), Q3 (the counting rules), the steward's run-through, the first grant (whether the instrument may hold a scoped authority in the record), and the AGY §15 visibility decision. Work waits on conditions the way sowing waits on soil, never on the calendar.
provenance trailerThe authorship mark on agent commits: Authored-by: build-agent / <address>. The build's own history says who drafted what, so adoption stays a human act.
§6
The governing documents
Ten drafted artifacts govern the build, seven of the series and three module documents; two ratified instruments govern the cooperative. When documents disagree, lower yields to higher, and the disagreement is filed either way.
the seriesSER (the overview) · PRD (what to build, in member sentences) · BP (how agents and organizers work) · UI (tokens and patterns) · IM (the information model and its laws) · VS (verification: suites and proofs) · AM (who may do what, anchored in the Bylaws). Each yields something the repository carries: a schema, a stylesheet, a workflow, an operating contract. The document governs; its yields distill.
the module documentsSpecifications that arrive after the series and graft their own pieces into the ledger on adoption: PATRONAGE (Programs, contributions, the allocation sequence) · TREASURY (the movement layer and its two-person discipline) · AGY, Common Agency (a member directs the instrument on the record). Each is proposed, argued, and adopted by merge; each carries its own graft, so the Almanac grows by decision rather than by drift.
bylaws · membership agreementThe ratified instruments: Bylaws v2.1 and Membership Agreement v2.3, both Ratified July 2026, published under /legal/ with commentary. The Authority Map anchors every policy in them.
anchorThe bylaws citation a policy carries in its comment: the section that authorizes what the policy does. A policy without an anchor does not merge. G-R re-verifies every anchor against the governing text before it attests.
precedenceThe order when texts disagree: law and bylaws → board policy → PRD → IM and AM → BP and VS → piece briefs → code. The yields conform to the documents, not the documents to the code; 0005 exists because the deployed database once disagreed with the matrix and lost.
adoptionThe visible human act that turns a draft into a record: a merge, a decision written into the ledger, an attestation spoken and recorded. The system runs on adoption the way the database runs on events.
§7
The machinery
What actually runs, and the names it answers to. The machine grammar, the event kinds and view names already live, evolves only at the Information Model's own revision; until then the Lexicon states which register the machine speaks, and this section glosses it.
CISThe Common Information System: the whole of it. One database, its policies, the pages over it, and the record they keep together. Also called the Commonplace Book on the member-facing side.
the Ground, in machineryThe thirteen tables, the event log, and the tally view, yielded by the Information Model as migration 0001 and proven through G0, the security floor. The migration files keep their machinery word, substrate, which is how the soil register said it before the Ground completed the figure.
migration chainThe numbered SQL files that stand the database from zero: 0001 substrate · 0002 policies · 0003 sign_agreement · 0004 export views · 0005 matrix conformance · 0006 notices rail · 0007 the front door · 0008 admissions · 0009 profiles · 0010 the programs view · 0011 agreements typing · 0012 designation · 0013 the scheduling act · 0015 the member's notices · 0016 the rail's wider ear · 0017 the direction rail · 0018 the desk's read. Timestamped, ordered, applied once each; the repository can reconstruct the database because the chain is complete.
policy · RLSRow-level security: the database itself decides, row by row, what each asker may see or write. Visibility is never client-side courtesy; a page that showed you someone else's rows could not, because the rows never leave the database. Deny by default; every allowance is a named policy with an anchor.
definer functionA database function that runs with its own authority to make several writes one act: sign_agreement() lands the signature and its event atomically; apply_for_membership() is the front door, landing application, membership, and event in one motion for a stranger who holds no permissions at all; give_direction() is the only door a Direction enters by, refusing in the words of the rule that refuses. A definer read does the mirror work: direction_standing() returns the bounds a member is held to without widening what they may see.
magic linkSign-in by email: no passwords anywhere in the system. The link authenticates a person; binding then tells the system which agent they are.
notices railThe path from an event to a human: a database trigger forwards admission events to a small function that delivers notices. Two sinks, each behind its own seam: the steward's intake notice rides Telegram, live; the applicant's email acknowledgment waits on DNS. A missing sink is named as a gap in the steward notice, never silently dropped.
seamA deliberate single point of replacement. The notice sender lives behind one seam, so swapping providers changes one function and nothing else. Seams are how the system stays small without staying stuck.
export · export SHAThe walkaway's food: every table serialized to canonical JSON, each file hashed, and a manifest of those hashes whose own sha256 is THE export SHA. Two exports with the same SHA are byte-identical; nothing time-dependent lives inside.
walkawayThe proof that the cooperative could leave: export the record, stand fresh infrastructure from the public repository alone, import, re-export, and require SHA equality with the tally exactly reconstructed. Rehearsed weekly in CI; run live on 2026-07-21 with its events recorded. If the platform vanished tomorrow, the record would not.
the suitesThe seven CI checks on every change, by their machinery names: ledger-validate, schema-lint, db-verify, rls-audit, gate-rehearsal, restore-test, style-lint. Green suites are the floor, not the ceiling: they prove the machine agrees with itself.
probe matrixThe rls-audit's heart: every role tried against every table, each probe citing the Authority Map cell it proves. Found two real gaps once; the documents won.
proof rehearsalThe mechanical half of the Proof Book: every member-capability sentence run as a committed, sequential journey in CI, with four personas and every refusal asserted, so the human ceremony never discovers a defect. The suite keeps its machinery name, gate-rehearsal, until the machinery piece L-07.
§8
The surfaces
Doors over one record, some public, some behind sign-in. Each page is self-contained, tokens inline, no build step.
the join form/commons/join/ · the front door. A stranger applies without an account, a meeting, or help; the record opens with their application and the steward is notified.
the agreements shelf/commons/agreements/ · every agreement that binds you, version and standing marked, with inline signing. You cannot be bound by something you cannot read.
the directory/commons/directory/ · members, each with a profile they alone control.
the calendar/commons/gatherings/ · gatherings and their sessions: register, cancel, return; hosts record attendance where the record counts it.
the board/commons/opportunities/ · open invitations to play, practice, and work. Working label Opportunities; the public name awaits the Q1 decision.
the programs view/intranet/programs/ · Programs as organizing bodies for what stands on the board, each with its purpose, its Coordinator, and how it recognizes work.
the Desk/intranet/treasury/ · the governance record of every movement the rules care about. Read-only until the treasury policy adopts.
the desk for Direction/intranet/direct/ · where a member gives the instrument work and watches the arc of it. Named Direction on the map, since the Desk is the treasury's word.
play · practice · workThe three kinds of opportunity, from lightest to weightiest: something for its own sake, something to get better at together, something with stakes and obligations. The kind is the author's claim about what they are inviting.
open · resolved · withdrawnAn opportunity's lifecycle. Open invites responses; resolved means it led somewhere and the author closed it, ideally saying what it led to; withdrawn means the author took it back. Either closing lands as an event.
gathering · sessionA gathering is the thing (a meetup, a workshop, a meeting) with a host and a governing agreement; sessions are its occurrences in time. Registration and attendance attach to sessions.
§9
The concordance
The retired register, kept readable forever. Historical records, verified entries, commit messages, and event payloads speak the old words verbatim; this table is the bridge, in both directions.
| retired | evolved | note |
|---|
| Living Roadmap, RDM v1 | the Almanac, ALM v2 | supersession recorded in the lineage |
| packet | piece | unit of work; one piece per branch |
| train | bed | ordered pieces sharing a proof |
| the substrate train | the Ground | SUB addresses unchanged |
| gate | proof | the Gate Book becomes the Proof Book; G addresses unchanged |
| splice | graft | modules graft pieces in on adoption |
| fold | tally | fold kept as the mathematical gloss |
| emits | yields | documents yield their artifacts |
| slice | capability | the four launch capabilities |
| escalation card | stop card | same shape, plain name |
| roadmap ledger | almanac ledger | file rename rides the machinery piece |
| signal loop | signal loop | kept; the System Four instrument |
| status marks | unchanged | drafted, anticipated, open, verified, attested |
| addresses | unchanged, everywhere | tally marks; the stick is not re-cut |
one sentence, if you keep only one
Everything is an event, every number is a tally, every permission has an anchor, every status is earned, and nothing becomes real until a person adopts it.