How knowledge is kept.
Most places accumulate material and call it a library. The test here is different: anything held has to be trustworthy, findable, applicable, passable to someone else — and able to survive the people who wrote it.
Six layers, and they are not equal.
Material is held in layers that change at deliberately different speeds. Treating them as one undifferentiated pile is how a body of knowledge quietly starts contradicting itself.
- Canon — the philosophy. Rarely changed, changed only through governance, always versioned with the reason attached.
- Doctrine of practice — how the Canon is applied. Changes deliberately.
- Curriculum — formation material. Changes seasonally.
- Living wisdom — what people have actually learned doing it. Changes constantly, and belongs to the people who wrote it.
- Testimony — stories, held with consent, indexed by the situation they speak to.
- Record — decisions, trusts and recognitions. Append-only, because a record you can quietly amend is not a record.
Nothing is held anonymously.
Every piece carries four things: where it came from, who is responsible for it, which part of the Canon it answers to, and the date it next gets looked at again. Material without those is not a resource, it is sediment.
Everything is retirable.
Knowledge that has stopped being useful is retired with a note saying why — not silently deleted, and not left sitting there going quietly wrong. Both of those are ways of lying to whoever reads it next.
If it cannot be passed on, it is not finished.
Anything substantial carries the short form of itself — the version you could hand to someone a step behind you and expect them to actually use. Knowledge that can only be consumed is a dead end wearing a library card. The teaching this comes from has three legs, and the pass-on is one of them.
Where it disagrees with itself, that gets said out loud.
Contradiction is surfaced and tracked openly as work to be done, rather than smoothed over. A body of knowledge with no visible disagreements is usually one nobody is checking.
The living wisdom layer belongs to the community.
Members contribute knowledge through a reviewed path. What people work out in practice is not a lesser class of material here — it is the layer that changes the most and teaches the most.
Nothing may live only in one person’s head.
Wisdom held by exactly one human being is recorded as a risk with a plan against it. That includes — especially includes — the people the place would find it hardest to lose.
A machine may read all of it and may never write the Canon.
Anything automated that draws on this material may only speak with its provenance attached, and is forbidden from generating philosophy. The whole covenant is published, including the flat list of what it may never do.
Today only the first two layers have anything in them — the Canon, and the pages like this one that say how it is applied. There is no curriculum, no living wisdom, no testimony, and the record holds nothing yet because nothing has been decided. Everything that does exist is on the open shelf, in full, with nothing held back.
From here
- The open shelf
Everything published so far, in one list, with nothing behind an account.
- How stewardship works
What a knowledge steward would be responsible for, and for how long.
- The Canon, in human language
The first of the six layers, and the one everything else is measured against.