The Common Information System

What this is, and why it exists

Techne is a cooperative: a studio owned and governed by the people who use it. Ours is organized in Colorado as RegenHub, LCA, and works from a shared space on Walnut Street in Boulder, where members gather to build things together.

Every durable community keeps its memory somewhere outside any one person's head. A town has its minute book and its deed drawer; a parish kept its register; a ship keeps its log. A cooperative needs this more than most, because it runs on a particular kind of confidence: that what was agreed can be found by anyone it binds, that what was contributed is counted by rules written in advance, and that what happens next is decided in the open. That confidence needs a home, and this system is that home.

The name is meant literally, one word at a time. Common: it belongs to the members together, not to an office or an administrator, and what it says about you, you can see. Information: not opinions and not marketing, but the facts the cooperative knows about itself, people, promises, money, work, and plans, with their history kept. System: kept in working order by rules rather than by heroics, so that when something changes, the record changes with it and shows its work.

What it holds

Four kinds of fact, which together are enough to run a cooperative.

Three doors, one room

The record is one body of fact with three ways in. The doors differ; the room does not.

The record says how solid each fact is

Most systems present everything with the same confidence. This one does not. Every fact wears a mark, and the marks are few enough to learn in a minute: green for what an authority or the members have made solid, blue for what is written and in review, a neutral outline for what is planned, red for a genuine open question.

As of this writing, nothing on this page wears Ratified. The governing documents are published in their latest versions at techne.coop/legal, and the strongest mark appears only after a gate re-verifies every citation against the adopted text, following the members' gathering of August 14, 2026. A record that awarded its best word casually would not be worth keeping. The discipline runs one way only: a plan is never dressed as a fact.

What the record promises, and how each promise is checked

Five commitments, and none of them is a slogan: each one is enforced by the system's own structure and tried, continuously, by tests that attempt to break it and pass only when they fail to.

What you can do, and when

The system opens in slices, each one usable the day it arrives, and the first two open with the cooperative itself.

For builders and agents

Everything above has an exact address underneath it. The system is specified by a series of governing documents, and each one distills into something a machine can run, so the distance between the promise and the code stays inspectable.

Concretely: the schema applies to a fresh database and refuses, at the data layer, anything that would break a conserved quantity. The thirty access policies each carry the bylaws citation that authorizes them, and a lint rejects any policy without one. The verification workflow proves the refusals by attempting them. The ledger of work has no dates, only readiness conditions, and its status table reads as a set of reasons. Agents contributing to the build begin at the operating contract in the repository root, whose first rule is the whole method: stop and ask rather than invent.

And the walkaway test is the promise made executable: from the published artifacts alone, on infrastructure the cooperative does not control, a stranger can rebuild the record and arrive at the same balances. If that ever stops being true, the tests say so before we do.