Thank you, Val. Appreciate it. And, yeah, I've been going with the acronym FOMO, by the way, but my dear life partner pointed out that that acronym might feel a bit icky to some people. So, you know, the name's up in the air. Maybe we'll call it foundations. Maybe we'll call it FOMO, etcetera. We'll see how that plays out. But this doc this document has been brewing for years, and it has been my main technical work other than database design for over half a year now. And I'm gonna share this stuff, but it may look rather grandiose, frankly, in certain regards. So I do wanna share some acknowledgments and disclaimers to package this. Number one, acknowledgments. Number one, Buddhism has informed all of my life experience for almost forty years now, and this work that I share is deeply grounded in the pragmatically skeptical philosophy that I've derived partly from my longtime Buddhist background. Number two, I have a formal education in filmmaking and what's called new media art, which gave me a lot of my pathway towards thinking much more deeply about the essential nature of media and especially what digital media that is. Number three, the Inspiral Network was especially formative for me as I became an organizational development specialist 2014 through 2016. Particularly, I read the essay that I would be my number one reading suggestion for anybody who either has not read it or has only read it a few times. A fairly compact essay called The Tyranny of Structure, Less, and Less by Joe Freeman. I think it was first published seventy nineteen seventy two, maybe. This was incredibly informative for me to help focus my energy and attention on helping to develop open protocols and liberating structures, shall we say, because structurelessness sometimes can be problematic. Another acknowledgment about the Value Flows project was is what introduced me to rigorous REA or resource event agent data modeling and mapping about five years ago, and and that really centered my work technically ever since then. And I wanna give a thanks to my main design partner, Fernanda Ybarra of Common Sense, who has supported and enriched my technical and cultural work for a number of years now. And the last acknowledgment, my chosen family and especially my life partner, Elaine Laffay, who is supporting me in spending quite a lot of my time on unfunded open source work. So you'll see some of what what has come out of that today. So I'm going to share the link and start sharing the my screen as well. I'll put the link in the chat window. This is the link to foundations of modular organizing, which I have not previously shared publicly, but that's going to happen this week. And as you see this document, I'm going to start sharing my screen as well. I'm going to go through my disclaimers because with the work this ambitious and expansive, this feels pretty important to me to put it in some context. Number one, Google Docs. Definitely not the ideal long term home of any work like this, but it is my usual workflow for cloud collaboration. And because this text is heavily hyperlinked both to its itself and, well, to the supplementary there's there's a supplementary materials document that's about half as long as the actual document itself. It's very heavily hyperlinked, and that means that it would perform poorly if I exported it right now into a different format. But long term, the base format, in my opinion, ought to be a graph database format of some sort as long as there's a great user interface for that, and we will get there eventually. Alright. So, yes, this ontology here and this is mostly ontological work, defining terms, and relationships between terms. This is entering a phase of request for comments and collaboration right now, and, it may be updated. This document may very well be updated at points during that time because there's a lot of sections, particularly near the end, the deeper description and linkage section that are a little out of date because there is so much I've been pulling in from so many directions. So that also supports the Google Doc right now formatting, but long term we'll have a better format. Not just a request for comments and potential collaboration. This is actually a cry for help in some ways, you might say. Because, honestly, a few people, perhaps other than the people in this room, I think, are going to care much about me solo publishing something like this even though it is open sourced, and it is closely related to all of my team project work for the last several years. I seek collaborators for maybe future versions of this, also for bits and pieces, partial adaptations. This is in this text. Seeking collaboration is sent in almost all of my open source documents. So I'll be happy to hear from anybody and everybody that's interested in this afterwards. A few more disclaimers. Much of this content is very intentionally unoriginal mainstream, reflecting common and popular practices, typical terminology, typical ontology, and a lot of different projects. That's very intentional. However, even so, a lot of the terminology choices, specific terms, they're they're pretty arbitrary. In the long term, to do work like this, especially through a database design, becomes very important to include synonyms, different fur versions, and especially to have translations and, forms that will be more accessible to more diverse people. And the last disclaimer, and we'll get into the document now through that. The last disclaimer is attached here at the very entry here. The map is not the territory. And why is my link not working? Okay. There we go. Alright. So there's a disclaimer attached to most of my work about the map not being the territory, and we don't need to dwell on this. I think most people here are probably pretty familiar with this concept, but I can't emphasize strongly enough that life cannot be reduced to models and maps or to inputs and outputs. And my philosophy is that, you know, I highlighted some of this text for the presentation, but I should probably move along and try to get to everything else instead of going through all of this. I but I do wanna say we just I think we need very much to focus our attention on key personal and social issues. We need to get much better prioritizing where we put our time and energy. And sometimes this means modeling and mapping data and ideas and relationships and creating media items and connecting them to each other. And if we don't do that, we are passively ruled by definitions, formulae, algorithm algorithms and metrics that are imposed upon us by corporations, by governments, etcetera. And I referenced

Yes. Apologies for inter interjecting here. I just for the benefit of the recording, maybe others would like to see the screen a little larger if they wanna see

Oh, great. Yeah. Tell me if if is a 150% better? Is that too much, or is that good?

That's much better.

Thank you. Great. Great suggestion. Thank you, Sant. Yeah. Yeah. So we are often, I think, passively ruled by all of the patterns and structures that are imposed on us by corporations and governments, and we need to get better pattern making and communicating and collaborating with each other to help transform that into a more inclusive society. So that's that's the key aspect of the disclaimer regarding maps not being the territory. So when we go into the the document, it's about 40 pages long with a 20 page supplementary document. There's a brief intro because it's on Google Docs about navigating it, and there's a little hyperlink color code. The main point I wanna make right now is, like, number one, most of the internal hyperlinks are very optional. The main reason for them often is simply to indicate that there is indeed a rigorous structural link between two terms or between a term and another section in this document. And I think it's important to create that visibility of the structure of this document, but you may or may not follow them. If you do follow a an internal hyperlink, it's probably best the internal hyperlinks are kind of in the teal color deal here. It's probably best to grab them and open them in a different window because, otherwise, you can very lose easily lose your place in a 40 page document. So it's good to have two versions of the document open in separate tabs probably. Going back to the navigation, like I said, there's the supplementary document that's already opened in a in another window here. The nice thing about that is, like, when you click on those links, which are a bit of a darker color, if you're on a desktop computer, which is much better in this regard than a mobile device, you can using Google Docs, you can open previews that take you exactly where you want to be, in this case, the beginning of the document. But later on, we have a lot of of these supplementary links that pretty much later on, actually, that go to specific headings within this document. So you can pop open the preview. It'll take you to exactly that, those extended supplementary notes, and you can close them right afterwards. So navigation is pretty good with Google Docs even though this is not a great long term platform for heavily hyperlinked and structured work like this. Okay. So now I'll give the, like, outer space overview of foundations of modular organ organizing or foundations. This text describes a set of irreducible root terms or ontological primitives or sense making primitives, which are, I think, flexibly useful for modeling and mapping all describable concepts and phenomena, as far as I can tell. Meaning, you know, there are things in life that are not necessarily describable. You can't necessarily put them into words, and I'm very grateful for that. But if you can put words to something, I think you can model and map it in relation to other language concepts or structures. So these

Oh, I you know what? I should've done that for thank you.

I should've

Okay. That's great. Alright. Thanks. Well, if nothing at a 150% now, and I think that will hopefully keep me in the right in a more user friendly setup here without running over in time, etcetera. Thank you so much. That's an important feature of making this recording more valuable. So there is a special emphasis here, not just on modeling and mapping, whatever we want to model in that, but on designing, developing, and governing governable resources. And I have definitions for what what is governable and not and why. But that includes communications protocols, projects, networks, systems, and databases. And these ontological primitives are arranged in a little structure of hierarchy a hierarchy of types and subtypes. Networking primitives, the table of contents is very instructive in this regard. Any describable concepts and phenomena, network networking primitives can apply to them. And these terms, I've tried to define them very carefully and relate them to each other properly and to the other terms later on too. But these are very normative or conventional conceptions of these terms. You know, not they're not the only way people do it. Some you know, in in, like, a network theory, a lot of people use the term node and edge instead of, like, a a an element and a link. But these terms are effective for networking and relating any concepts and phenomena, in my opinion. Systems primitives, the next section, help us to map flows of force which can define, I think, any perceptively enduring networks and systems, all enduring forms, all entities, all organisms, etcetera. So systems primitives are really important, I think, in trying to understand why we perceive ongoing patterns and and things that last. Resource primitives build upon the systems primitives conception to facilitate mapping of all types of resources. And so I'll go into that a bit. But the resource primitives are built into three technical categories here, mental resources, physical, and media resource, with a very big emphasis on media resources because this documents a media resource. This recording is a media resource. The Zoom screen is a media resource. So I think it's really important, or at least I found it very important for me to think greatly about what especially about what media items and media channels are and how we can use those concepts to build what I call a granulated authority in projects of any type in media networks that are controlled by projects. Yes. So so there's this emphasis on the technically strict definitions for media item and for media channel. And then after that and that resource primitives section is much longer than the, you know, the relatively quick and simple networking and systems primitives. But functional media primitives is much, much bigger yet, and rightfully so, I think. These functional media primitives facilitate in-depth mapping of both analog and digital media items, anything we use to represent, to model, map, and discuss any describable concepts and phenomena. And there's this big emphasis in in the, functional media primitives on governance resources. You know, basically, we've got the way I factored it. And, of course, this isn't the only way to do it, but this makes sense to me. This seems very sustainable, scalable, consistent, and efficient. Media items can be recordings. They can be models, and we can define maps as being a type of model and, in fact, probably by far the most common type of model. In fact, I would say the distinction between map and model isn't that important. If people wanna think just in terms of mapping, stuff, that's cool as long as we have a an understanding that there's a difference between mapping stuff, closely at a very specific or localized level of detail or, like, mapping what happens during this a specific brief interval of time versus modeling something that occurs over ages and ages or or modeling something that which we might argue is timeless. So, anyway, functional media primitives include recordings, include models and maps, but the rest of this long section is what I've packaged as governance resources. And I've come up with this conception of governance resources simply as models and or maps which function directly in the governance of one or more resources. So, of course, there's a definition for resource way up above, and we can now look at that somewhat more closely during this talk. But the governance resources that I've identified, they're pretty mostly pretty conventional, actually. Identifiers or IDs is a major category of those. There's topics, issues, goals, plans. Within plans, and my definition of plan is intentionally very reductive and generic and flexible, I think, because I use the term plan as a container for all protocols and programs for all automated processes, for all policies, all tasks, which I I see tasks as being intentionally planned events or activities. Likewise, all planned events, whether we define them as tasks or not. And meetings meetings are often, but not always planned events. So I'm not sure meeting's in the right spot in this document right now, but it's a good placeholder as I further iterate the document to put the concept of what a meeting is in proper relation to all of the other terms, and we'll get there. No burden there. So anyway, talking about governance resources generally, and these are the types of resources that are used in project management systems and task management systems generally, even though sometimes people use different names for them. Of course, we have proposals and project, and project is a very big container for me, another very intentionally reductive and expansive term I use. I don't want us, or at least not in my conversations, to fuss over whether a project is or well, whether or not something people do is or isn't a project. Let's put it that way. I define projects simply as being a plan in which one or more agents intentionally support during a specific period of time. And, basically, I I think that we can use that very expensive container to include all design and all governance activity. And, basically, if you can share a goal or a plan, we can't you don't have to call it a project, but we can call it a project, and we can map it if we want to. And this includes all subprojects, and this includes all collectives and organizations, which includes all companies, includes all corporations, all governments. So obviously, I'm using the term project in a very expansive way, but I think it's also technically consistent and effective for creating linked data structures that are limitlessly scalable, especially if we're dealing with hierarchies of project and subproject or a task that is part of a subproject of another subproject of a project. Or maybe it's a task that's shared by two or more independent projects, etcetera. I think well, really, the main purpose of this ontology is scalability. So I think that I'm defining these governance terms, including project in a way that supports scalable relationships of all sorts, peer to peer, hierarchical, etcetera. Roles are a very big category, and I define it simply as a functional link which an agent has with with other agents and or with resources, including projects. And, I mean, that's a very technical definition, but it means almost exactly the same thing that everybody probably thinks of if they think that a person has a role in a project. But here, I've defined a bunch of role primitives in two main categories, core role primitives. I'm sorry. Core governance roles within projects and channel roles. I'm sorry. There's also meeting roles. I forgot that this container included all three of these, which is good that it does. And we probably won't have time to go into that in-depth today, but I certainly invite anybody to look closely at any of these sections and how they connect to the other sections in terms of the internal consistency and the flexibility and the scalable usability of these terms. So we've got the core governance roles for projects, which includes stewards, members. We can define trustees or directors in a way that is, I think, different than steward because if we have a member led organization, we can define or identify membership directly with stewardship often, like the members are the decision making people. And that's cool. That's great when it happens. But often memberships elect like a board of trustees or a board of directors, and that's very useful when they do it. It's questionable, but it's useful. But those trustees or directors have a specialized role within the organization, and the members are the ones that hold the, you know, the ultimate authority, so to speak. The trustees or directors have delegated authority. However, that delegated authority may include certain special powers that the voting members don't have. Right? And that's that's also the case. So these core governance roles are important, I think, when we're modeling and mapping projects and media resources and events to each other. Likewise, channel roles.

So if

Maybe three or four minutes. Will that work, you think? Or Well,

Alright. Thank you. Thank you for the prompt, Val. So we've got core governance roles. Channel roles are distinctly different because this these relate to how we structure media channels and how we create media items that are useful, and we have meeting roles. And and then there's there's a few other there's there's products, which include all the bits and services, and then there's reports, which is when people make statements or claims about things that supposedly happened. So that's the the bulk of this document is all of these, primitives and these, sections up to deeper description and linkage, which goes into a great more detail. And, also, some of it's a little unfinished, to be honest. It's not properly integrated in this document yet in relation to the one supplementary materials, but I do think that it's very useful and sound. So that's what foundations of modular organizing is. Now, of course, bring us back to inclusivity and not being like a a mega project. None of this matters unless people care about it, and I wouldn't expect anybody to hop on board with this entire ontology. It's very modular work, and it's actually very closely related to the rest of my work, which is mostly about collaboration protocols. How do we make consent based decisions, inclusive decisions with each other? So I'm very interested not only in having people comment on this, but also discuss this and to get involved. And that's what I want to say for now. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for that prompt. And I I think it's very much in the way that I'm trying to be very technically rigorous and consistent in in designing media items and media channels. And in attaching this to the general conception I have of granulated authority, and that's part of the Inclusive Governance Premises, which I put together as a separate document. It's the idea of granulating authority or localizing authority might be a good way to put it for a lot of us too, to focus on giving the authority to people where it it matters, to the stakeholders, to the decision makers, to the the people that are affected by something. And that means granulating the authority in a massive media network, like like, maybe a a subforum has a some different authority than the main forum. Granulating authority of media channels, particularly, I think we need to get a lot more rigorous in general about channel roles, this conception of what an administrator is, a moderator, editor, author, commentator, speaker, etcetera, and how we relate these roles and these authorizations to the persons and projects that are attached to other people in projects and how we put those into databases because I have a you don't have

Is what?

Provenance. Oh.

you. Not per se, but it you can design a ledger, perhaps a distributed ledger or a blockchain or a hollow chain that that that keeps a strict track of a version history, etcetera.

Yeah. For example, the way that I do this with primitives in a relational database and, by the way, relational databases are not great compared to the graph databases for scalability, but is to focus the attention on relationships between media items, persons, projects, and calendars. And this works really well, but there's a lot of the other primitives and foundations that come into play here. For example, we've got roles and credit accreditation creative credits, example, authors, illustrators, blah blah blah, channel roles. Like, if somebody was the moderator of a particular meeting, that can show up in a very highly detailed map of a particular project if necessary. So so I think it's this granulating the authority and also the creative credits or the provenance. One might say it's better attached to whatever a particular person or a small team of people or a family or a local community of people or a distributed worldwide network or a distributed tiny team of people, like three people in three different continents, etcetera, localizing and granulating that authority, not just so that we have an accurate map or model of a project or of a media resource, but also so that so that we can develop more just creative and decision making processes, more collective wisdom, consent based decision process where everybody's concerns are fully addressed.

And this I appreciate it. Is linked. If one goes into it, this document, inclusive governance principles is linked in the right spot, I would say, to this foundation's document. And it includes a Awesome. Brain related authority.

Well, I'm not sure how to answer that except to say I I think there's a great hazard in measuring or applying metrics to things that are really hard to measure or the measurements may be very biased, etcetera. So that relates pretty closely to the the disclaimer for almost all of my work. And if what I mentioned is focusing our attention on key personal issues. So don't develop metrics or formulae or statistics, etcetera, I don't think, unless it's really important for us to do so. But but bear in mind that media items, there's a great focus in this document on developing media items in a methodical and consistent way. But the map is never the territory, and, all media resources are related to mental resources and physical resources. And I don't go into detail in this document, but mental resources include all thoughts and feelings, including things which are either difficult or impossible to measure. And I don't think it's always important for us to even try to measure those things, but they're still important, and they still show up in the where we put our time and energy and the way that we verbalize and the way that we do model and map the things that can be measured and counted or traded, etcetera. Does that answer your question, Lydia?

Oh, like like principles and ethics, values in that sense? Like

Well, to put it in context, this document is very much focused on it's called foundations of modular organizing because it's a very technical document regarding data structures. It can't it it's within a broader conception I have, which is not called modular organizing. It's called inclusive organizing. And foundations of modular organizing is down here in the shared languages stack. It's a very technical conception. But most of my work is actually about inclusive activities and inclusive governance. And the other main focus of my work personally is inclusive cultural covenant, which is very much about inclusive and healthy culture and, how we develop, communities or at least, one on one relationships, and they become communities sometimes where, where we mutually support each other in developing our values and and bringing the things that we want to bring into the world. And it is there there's a strong emphasis on on shared responsibility for creating healthy society. So there's a lot of other things here, and a lot of these modules that are in inclusive organizing are directly linked inside of here one place or another as I see relevant. Although the link the links are optional because my work is intentionally very modular. It's meant to be used separately. It's not meant to be like, hey, if you want to use this technical ontology work, you have to use the my conception of inclusive and healthy culture. You have to have the community agreement that that other people in my communities might use. But the overall focus I have is very much on inclusive organizing because I also have a document called Inclusive Technology. What is it? And right at the start, it's about inclusive culture, and that's why inclusive cultural covenant is a big part of my work. Because inclusive technology, including modular ontology, etcetera, to me, it never matters. It's never a good thing, actually, unless it's rooted or founded in inclusive culture. So hope that helps a little bit more to put this into context with my other works and my priorities.

Thank you. Thank you for that presentation, Greg. This is fantastic, and I really like the idea of the modularity of it. I'm trying to figure out my specific question. I'm not sure if I can have an I have an elegant frame for it, but I'll give a brief, like, twenty second thing here, hopefully. So I'm approaching this from my practical experience with homeschool communities. There's everything from this very informal, maybe eight parents with their kids, and we meet once a week and go on a field trip once a week, and it's just all, like, a text based chat kind of thing. And one person has decided to choose field trips, and we're all cool with that. To say, like, a statewide, you know, 20,000 membership Facebook group is focuses on education, educating homeschoolers in the state about their legal applications and what they can do and what their rights are and how to navigate different structures. And there's also since we like a growth of of organizations from the informal one to maybe that can become more formal at some point.

Mhmm.

And I start to see indications of, well, maybe they're accused that maybe things need to be added or maybe a little bit more formal structure needs to be added at some point. So that's the approach I'm taking this. In the future, I'd love to have more discussion with you about that sort of thing, but would be curious as to your initial thoughts.

Thank you, Dave. And I have greatly benefited from your perspective on homeschooling and local communities in your area. So thank you for all of that. And I put a highlighter here on this very incomplete section at the end of the supplementary materials document because I think, just for what it's worth, most of this document, because it's intentionally very reductive and abstract, even though I think it's very technically rigorous, most of these concepts will be much better, much more easily understood by most readers, in some cases probably won't click unless people see a very specific example of that. So eventually, this document will probably every every section, every definition, hopefully, will link directly to a collection of examples. And some of those examples, like, might be, okay. This is for, like, a this is how we might develop a a homeschooling network that's just in a certain neighborhood. It's in this subdivision. Or how we might develop a homeschooling network, which is global, but maybe it's a global, but also pretty selective. And or maybe it's about one aspect of homeschooling because I think that any community can be defined geographically and or conceptually. It can be localized or specified in either or both of those domains. So we can develop endless examples of here of how different projects and organizations might develop. And there is no standard order in which a project ought to or should develop, which is why in this work, I would say most people would begin using one or more of these, terms or or types of linked data structures on an as needed basis based on the current needs in the specific relationship or even just a conversation, like you're trying to build a project. And there is, for what it's worth, a a a simple recipe attached to all of this modular organizing recipe that's meant to be very methodical and simple. But I don't think anybody probably cares about that unless unless it becomes very pertinent to their own, current needs. But also in my work in general, most of these modules, including foundations, but all the other modules, it would be more much more appropriate based on your current needs to start maybe with one of these, subjects than a different one, like, let's say consent based organizing because I'm a really huge advocate of consent based organizing patterns. Or you might start with inclusive cultural covenant because I think that that is a real big problem in our society, having a a very healthy, effective effective and inclusive policy for projects that that might, initially grow very effectively, very informally, but then you end up with this person that comes into the local homeschooling network who is maybe they're a neo Nazi or whatever, but they come in with a type of goal or a or an outlook that is dangerously distracting and harmful to the mission of that particular project. So so many pathways, many different ways to build ontology, to build data structures, to build projects, and I've been trying to provide a lot of different pathways, but we'll need to work really hard, I think, on examples and implementations.

It's I think it's linked there somewhere, but, yeah, let's put it here. Now this this is a visual diagram of most of my open source works, either directly or indirectly. Some of them are secondary here. Some of them are link only inside of other ones. But, also, we should note, you know, it makes more sense if you look at the guide document probably. It was organized in framework, purpose meditations. I've tried to articulate what how all of this fits together in my sense making process. So but the link to this to this diagram, which includes this link, is in the chat window now.