Operate in Open Legibility¶
A person may understand a problem well without knowing how to solve it. Someone else may have the experience needed to develop a solution but be unaware of the situation where that knowledge would make a difference. To work together, they need to discover that connection and understand enough about each other's participation to decide how to act.
Operating in Open Legibility means creating conditions for these possibilities of collaboration to arise before a team is selected or a project approved. Preserving a formulation and making it available under defined access conditions allows other participants to examine it, add what they know and pursue their own paths. The Legible Protocol supplies record formats; participants choose the tools, access arrangements and practices that let them read and develop one another's work.
A space can follow a product, a department, a company or an idea that has no team yet. It can be public or operate entirely within an organization. Openness refers to the possibility of formulating before selection for use, within that environment's access conditions.
Participate in a space · Create a space · Share work
What you can do with Legible¶
The uses below apply the same record formats to different needs. In each, participants choose what to declare, which relationships to take responsibility for and what to share. A space can cover an individual, a product, an organization or an initiative spanning those boundaries.
Drafts allow these uses to be tried with tools already available. Signing formalizes specific declarations; search and automation depend on configured components. The code and configuration catalogue distinguishes what can already be used from areas under development.
Preserve your work and present your history¶
An individual record can bring together a problem formulation, the criteria adopted, choices taken responsibility for and references to versions of the work. This allows an investigation to be resumed and the reasoning behind a result to be presented to someone else, even after changing tools or closing a project.
When formalizing, you can sign the declaration with your key and keep it under your control. Acknowledgments issued by other participants can also accompany that history when shared, without turning it into a single score. It can be examined alongside the experience and relationships through which you are already known.
To begin: prepare a draft of real work, keep its references and decide later whether to sign or share. If existence by a particular date matters, consult independent temporal evidence.
Bring knowledge together within a company¶
A company can organize a space for a product, department or questions spanning several areas. Observations of use, technical analyses, hypotheses and decision criteria can be preserved before entering planning. Other participants can examine the problem and add something without taking on its entire execution or waiting for a task that matches what they know.
Decisions to implement and commit resources remain with the organization's responsible parties. Their records can declare which work informed the choice, preserving the participation of those who formulated the problem, assessed alternatives or developed a solution. The space can operate entirely within the internal environment.
To begin: choose a product or area where context is lost between teams and test the preservation and reading of a few contributions. Chapter 25 of the book proposes a pilot compared with the usual workflow.
Develop an initiative before forming a team¶
An idea can begin as a question, observed need or partial solution. Its author can preserve that formulation and make context available to anyone who recognizes something to add. Responses may develop the original proposal, reveal another application or change the understanding of the problem.
Participants do not need to adopt a common objective from the outset. Each can keep their own records and declare relationships with what they used. Team formation, hiring or funding can occur later, when there are reasons and conditions for them.
To begin: describe what you can already formulate and what remains open. If you want to receive contributions, present a space's context, with accessible materials and a participation channel.
Make open source dependencies legible¶
A project can preserve the formulations that guided its development and relate them to the components, methods and earlier work used. This expands the context available to those adopting, maintaining or adapting the software. Dependency files, commits and tests can provide evidence for these declarations.
Those who benefit from the project can acknowledge a consequence in a Nod. Maintainers and funders can examine accessible relationships and evidence to decide where to collaborate or support maintenance. Recognition is not automatically distributed to antecedents, and support decisions retain their own criteria and resources.
To begin: select a contribution relevant to the project and describe its dependency relationships, with available evidence. Chapter 26 develops the possibilities and limits of this circuit for maintainers.
Work independently and assess continuation¶
A professional can deliver an analysis, software or solution accompanied by the criteria and choices they take responsibility for, with references to what they produced. Records can remain with them and be examined in other professional relationships, subject to rights and sharing conditions. Clients who received a consequence can choose to acknowledge it in their own declarations.
Short work cycles can also be tried, making results and reasoning available for deciding whether to continue. Scope, payment and obligations need their own agreements. A Nod records a consequence received; it is not an invoice and does not replace a contract. If someone chooses to work without previously secured remuneration, the risk remains with whoever assumes it.
To begin: accompany a deliverable with its genealogy and agree on how the recipient can examine it. Chapter 28 discusses the portability of declarations and cooperation in cycles.
Build a collective's shared memory¶
Collectives, cooperatives and research groups can preserve formulations, methods, revisions and relationships between work that do not fit into a single deliverable. That memory helps people understand contributions and recover knowledge when members or priorities change.
Participants themselves define how to consult records, contest attribution and decide about common resources. Declarations provide material for that reading, while governance rules remain the group's own. Acknowledgments can record consequences received by their beneficiaries without turning the collection into a mandatory ranking of members.
To begin: choose a shared activity and preserve a few formulations and dependencies that would be hard to retrieve today. Chapter 28 examines this use in organizing a data commons.
Broaden participation in public problems¶
A public institution can present needs and conditions of use so that universities, organizations, professionals and other participants can formulate problems or partial solutions. It can also preserve contribution relationships when a component is developed jointly or adapted by another institution.
This reading can broaden the capabilities considered before procurement and preserve the reasoning behind decisions. Selection, budgeting, procurement and accountability remain subject to their own processes. Public records and restricted evidence need access conditions appropriate to each material.
To begin: select a question that can be shared and present the materials and participation path. Chapter 27 discusses how this practice can complement digital public infrastructure initiatives.
Choose what to support and assess continuation¶
Foundations, agencies and other funders can consult formulations, dependencies and declared consequences to consider work they did not commission. Published criteria can guide that reading, broadening examinable alternatives before the decision to commit resources.
This possibility also matters to those offering computing infrastructure, equipment, specialized knowledge or other resources needed to develop an activity. Support can be provided in stages, allowing the work produced, the contributions used and the consequences participants declared they received to be examined.
When the relationship allows retrospective recognition without a predetermined amount, those providing the resources assume uncertainty about the return. The beneficiary decides what to acknowledge after experiencing the consequence; the provider decides whether to expand, maintain or end further support. Records can inform these choices while preserving each party's decision.
This circuit can help sustain cooperation that would be difficult to initiate through a full contract or a requirement for advance payment. Its viability depends on resources consumed, results, recognition received and the effort of following the activity. A Nod documents a declaration of recognition; contracts, transfers and support decisions remain acts specific to each relationship.
To begin: choose a form of support and define which information would help decide whether to continue it. Compare what the usual workflow allows you to examine with what formulations, dependencies and declared consequences add to the assessment.
What if a contribution could exist before someone decided to use it?¶
A formulation can be useful even when the proposal in which it appeared was not adopted. Preserving the problem identified, the criteria and the proposal's reasoning allows other participants to examine them against different needs, provided the records are accessible and understandable.
The introduction to how it works explains the distinction between preserving that formulation and deciding to use it.
This raises a question that goes beyond documentation.
In many organizations, preserving information and deciding which information will be used are closely connected activities. A proposal tends to receive attention and remain in work processes when it is accepted or considered important enough.
There are economic reasons for this. Preserving large amounts of information, finding what is relevant and interpreting its meaning have always required resources.
AI can reduce some of these costs.
If someone can record a formulation with little effort and others can find and examine it with AI assistance, preserving contributions before knowing which will be used becomes more feasible.
The paper calls the order selection → preservation → search Regime A and examines the conditions for reversing it into Regime B, preservation → search → selection. The change seeks to expand what can be considered without eliminating the decision about where to allocate resources.
Collaboration can begin when formulations meet¶
This can change not only how solutions are found but also how problems are identified.
Observations produced in different companies and contexts can reveal similar needs, complementary constraints or applications not yet considered. When these records are accessible, participants can compare them with their own experience and decide to develop a formulation without needing a task from the earlier authors.
When presenting their work, participants take responsibility for what they added and declare which contributions they drew on. Others can examine the proposal, respond or take another direction. Relationships between the work remain legible without requiring everyone to adopt the same solution or join a team.
An opportunity for collaboration can arise from this encounter. Instead of beginning by selecting who will participate in an already defined project, it begins when participants recognize the relevance of problems, experiences and capabilities to one another.
In this setting, demand itself can start to take shape from available contributions rather than depending entirely on someone first deciding which problems deserve investigation.
A conversation can also bring out knowledge that has not yet been recorded. The space of possibilities is not limited to available files: reading a formulation may give someone an occasion to explain an experience unknown to the others.
Preserving and choosing are different decisions¶
The proposal is not to eliminate selection. Companies and individuals will still need to decide where to put their time, money and attention.
The difference is that preserving a contribution and choosing to use it do not have to happen at the same time.
A formulation that found no application today may remain available to someone with different goals, criteria or resources tomorrow.
For participants, being able to follow what happened to what they formulated also matters. If another person uses their analysis and declares that relationship, or recognizes a consequence received, this information can help them understand where their work was useful and with whom it makes sense to continue collaborating.
Preserving authorship and relationships therefore serves more than those seeking a solution. It also gives contributors ways to present their work, follow declared uses and decide whether they want to continue participating.
This does not guarantee that a contribution will be found, used or recognized. But it creates the possibility of considering it in situations its author could not have anticipated.
Collaboration has costs too¶
Receiving a file may take little effort, but understanding enough to continue the work often costs another entire conversation. It requires recovering why an alternative was rejected, where a criterion came from and which experience led someone to request a test, retracing part of that path with each change of team or tool.
When contributions are preserved with their relationships and evidence, readers can use AI to locate a criterion and compare it with the current situation, starting the conversation from what they already understand. Where the record falls short, a well-placed question can bring out an experience no one had thought to explain.
The efficiency sought needs to account for both sides of the collaboration: the effort of describing and reviewing a contribution, and the effort of finding and assessing it. Making records easier to produce without improving how they are read would shift work from one participant to another.
How to organize this practice¶
To begin, someone needs to be able to preserve a formulation, choose whom to share it with and retrieve responses. A folder, repository or file exchange can support the first experiment.
Whoever organizes the space presents its context, explains which materials can be consulted and indicates how to propose something. Participants can respond to an existing question, formulate another or develop part of the work without having to take on its entire execution.
The decision to incorporate a proposal into the collection maintained by the group is distinct from deciding to use it, fund it or hire its author. Someone can also keep their formulation at their own origin, within the applicable rights and access conditions.
Repositories and proposals for incorporation¶
Git provides preservation, history and distribution, while GitHub and other environments add interfaces for discussion and change proposals. Authors can retain contributions in their own repositories and present a PR or a reference to an interested space, whose maintainer decides what to incorporate into the collection they maintain.
Preserving, presenting and incorporating are different decisions: a PR may provide access to a proposal before merge, but downloading the repository's main version does not include its files. To consider unincorporated proposals, consult their pages or versions explicitly, subject to available permissions and tools, including closed PRs where relevant.
Issues and comments support conversation. A selected Legible record makes the formulation and relationships portable across environments. Opening an issue, making a commit or accepting a PR does not automatically produce an Appoint, Trace or Nod. A Git signature does not replace a record signature either.
Public, internal or combined¶
A space can run on internal infrastructure accessible only to authorized people. Openness means allowing formulation before selection within that perimeter. It does not require public disclosure of work, data or contributions.
Sharing only selected questions is also possible. Choose what may leave and preserve evidence access conditions. A public declaration can reference restricted material without granting access to it. To combine both environments, use stores with their own permissions; another branch of the same repository does not protect internal evidence.
On mobile, the circuit may involve selecting attachments and transferring files manually. An agent with authorized file and Git access can assist more steps. Choose capabilities for your environment; the protocol supplies no model and requires no shared infrastructure for all participants.
Continue from your context¶
You can begin with your first draft or share work. To sustain collaboration, see how to participate in a space or create one.
The economic paper develops the conditions and implications of this proposal. The book Open Legibility examines the role of human choices and the forms of coordination that may emerge as the costs of work change.
Maintaining the protocol itself has a path in the Project area. Using Legible does not require sending records to this site or contributing to its development.