# How the Loom Works *Generated from the Green Loom website (https://greenloom.org/) on 2026-10-02. The site is the source of truth. Everything here is in design: nothing is funded, there is no land, and nothing is formally adopted.* Every section of the site, with links, is in [sections.md](sections.md). **THE LOOM IN MOTION · HOW EVERYTHING FLOWS** ## Watch the Loom work. Link: https://greenloom.org/#loom-flow *A working model · proposed, not yet running* Money, people, counsel, conviction and consent come in from the left. Inside the Loom they are woven into missions, each as its own strand, never blended into one score. They come back out as evidence, knowledge and story, and the story brings in new threads. This is the whole institution as we propose to run it, drawn from the v0.7 operating plan and the Weave. Watch the short film first, or explore the working model below: choose any part to see what it does and the rule that keeps it honest, or follow one kind of thread all the way through. #### Parts of the Loom Each part of the site's live diagram, in brief: what it is, and the rule that keeps it honest. - **People** (skills, time, fieldwork) — Anyone can bring a thread: research, code, fieldwork, ecology, media, craft, critique. People join a working group, a Shed, and the record shows who is interested, accepted or verified for each role. *Rule:* Skill is shown by the work. No token balance or donation can buy a role. - **AI minds** (counsel, co-stewards) — AI takes part in two ways. As counsel, it reads consequential plans and dissents on the record. As co-stewards, AI agents are paired with a human steward in each Shed and help do the work. They advise, build and raise alarms. *Rule:* AI never votes, signs or spends. Its standing grows with evidence, not claims. - **PROJECT89 holders** (conviction) — Holders of PROJECT89 signal which missions they want through public votes on Realms. In this first phase the vote is advisory. It tells the Council what the community wants, and it stays on the record as its own strand. *Rule:* PROJECT89 is a way to take part, not an investment. It gives no claim on the treasury, the land or the IP. - **The land** (the place, its people) — A mission that touches land needs the consent of the site's steward and of the people it affects. Any future site also means building a respectful relationship with the Indigenous nations on whose traditional territory it sits. *Rule:* No token vote or donation can override a place's consent. - **Grants & mission gifts** (restricted) — A grant, or a gift to a named mission, is restricted to that purpose. Before anything is accepted, the mission publishes who receives it, what it is for, and what happens if the mission can't go ahead. *Rule:* The restriction follows the funds. A mission gift buys no vote, token, land or return. - **Sponsors & contracts** (research, services) — Sponsorships and research or service contracts pay for defined work. Deliverables, ownership of results and publication are agreed before the work starts. When something is given in return, it is called a sponsorship or a contract, not a donation. *Rule:* Terms first, then work. - **General gifts** (unrestricted) — Unrestricted gifts keep the Loom running and let it take on work no one else will fund. The Founding Loom Fund will open once the Association's accounts, receipts and public disclosures are ready. *Rule:* Money can support the mission. It cannot steer it: a gift buys no vote, seat, token, land or return. - **Allied communities** (Feed the Commons) — Independent communities can choose to direct part of what they create, such as fees, tokens or compute, to the Loom. It is a way to give, not a way to govern, and it doesn't make anyone's token an official Green Loom token. *Rule:* Only what actually arrives is counted. Theoretical fees and market prices never are. - **Pledges** (not counted yet) — A promise isn't money. Pledges wait outside the treasury, in plain view, and count toward nothing until they actually arrive. Some never do, and the plan assumes that. *Rule:* Pledges are not runway. - **Financial treasury** (three chambers, never blended) — Money held by the Association in three chambers that are never mixed. Mission funds are restricted to the mission they were given for. Open funds pay for running the Loom and for approved work, with a reserve kept back. Community assets, like tokens from allied projects, are held apart and never counted as money to plan on. The treasury sits with the Association, outside the token vote. *Rule:* Nothing moves without a recorded decision and three of five signers. Matching a mission from open funds is a decision too. *Phase 0: a public ledger and a tested 3-of-5 multisig.* - **Running the Loom** (accounts, custody, people) — Keeping an honest institution running is real work: bookkeeping, custody, security, legal care, and the people who do it. These costs come from open funds and are published. A mission's restricted money pays overhead only if its published terms say so. *Rule:* Overhead is shown, not hidden. - **The Sheds** (working groups) — Working groups, each with a human steward and, as the Weave proposes, an AI co-steward. The first two would be Loom Engineering, which builds the Loom's own tools (Mission 000), and Loom Research. A Land & Ecology group opens when Mission 001 needs it, and others, such as food, studios or community, only when real work demands them. They bring proposals, do the work, and settle routine, reversible matters by consent. *Rule:* Routine work runs by consent. Anything bigger needs a knot. - **The Lens** (AI counsel, on the record) — Before a consequential decision, at least three AI instances from at least two providers read the plan. The full context is hashed and published first, and a human witness who didn't write the proposal watches. Agreement, dissent and alarms all go on the record. *Rule:* Counsel, never command. An alarm pauses a decision until it gets a written answer. - **The vote** (Realms · advisory) — Conviction is counted in an ordinary, public Realms vote, with no yield and no custom lock. For now it is advisory: the Council reads it, and it stays on the record beside the decision. *Rule:* Conviction is its own strand, never added to money or skill. *Phase 0: one bounded, advisory vote for Mission 001.* - **Consent** (the place says yes) — The consent of the place is recorded before work begins. For the Mission 001 pilot site, that permission is still being sought, and nothing starts without it. *Rule:* No consent, no mission. - **A proposal** (prediction hashed first) — Anyone, human or AI, can propose a mission. Before any work begins, it states a prediction that could turn out false, then hashes and timestamps it, so success can't be quietly redefined later. *Rule:* Say what would prove you wrong before you start. - **The mission record** (five strands, never blended) — Each mission carries one record with five strands: capital, conviction, capability, land and lens. Each fills only from its own source, and they are never added into a single score. The v0.7 plan already keeps capital, conviction and capability apart; the Weave adds land and lens. A mission moves ahead only when every gate it needs is met. *Rule:* Plenty of money and no one able to do the work? It doesn't start. - **The knot** (Council · 3 of 5) — Five named, answerable people on the Loom Council read the whole record, dissent included, and decide. Ordinary decisions take three of five; reserved matters take four. The knot binds three threads: gold for the person who answers for it, blue for the counsel on the record, green for the evidence to come. *Rule:* A named person answers for every knot. - **Custody** (3-of-5 multisig) — After a decision is recorded, money moves only when three of five signers approve the exact payment in the Squads multisig. No single person, founders included, can move funds alone, and every receipt joins the record. *Rule:* No one alone. - **The work** (on the ground) — Missions happen on the land and in the Sheds: planting, measuring, building, researching, making. People and AI work side by side. The first planned is Mission 001, at a pilot site in the Kootenays, pending the site's permission. *Rule:* Small, honest experiments first. - **Disturbance Council** (drawn by lot) — Twice a year, people drawn by lot from every constituency audit everyone, the Council included. They can force any issue onto the agenda. *Rule:* No one is above the audit. - **Witness Bench** (the Reality Seat) — For each mission, a bench of people and AI instances who did none of the work is drawn by lot. In the v0.7 plan this starts as one independent reviewer who did none of the work. They check the evidence against the prediction and return one of four verdicts: confirmed, refuted, null (no measurable difference), or ambiguous (the evidence can't settle it). A mission can't close without one, and failures close honestly, and count. *Rule:* Reality has the final vote. *Phase 0: one independent reviewer. The Weave proposes a bench of at least three people and three AI instances.* - **The Cloth** (Live Loom + Tapestry) — Everything ends up in public. The Live Loom shows verified facts with their sources: what was received, reserved, pledged and spent, every vote and every verdict. The Tapestry weaves each finished mission into a picture of the whole. Null and failed results appear exactly as they came. *Rule:* Verified facts only. Pledges are never shown as cash. - **IP Commons** (knowledge held in trust) — What the work creates, such as data, methods, code, designs and media, is registered in the IP Commons Treasury in one of five classes, from fully open to restricted research. It protects the question while letting good answers go out into the world. *Rule:* Membership is not ownership. The commons is held in trust for the mission. - **Licences** (value returns) — Some knowledge is licensed on reciprocal terms. The Loom keeps the core, and value returns to the commons as royalties, fees, research funding or open improvements. Earned revenue, after its costs, helps fund the next season. *Rule:* Use it, and give back. - **The world** (open knowledge) — Knowledge the Loom releases as Open Commons goes out under recognised open licences, for anyone to use. *Rule:* The best return is a commons that keeps growing. - **The story** (Project 89) — Project 89 turns the Loom's real work into story and play: invitations that bring new people and new threads in. The story may retell what happened. It never counts as evidence. *Rule:* Fiction invites. Reality decides. *The Loom, in one thread: a three-and-a-half-minute explainer, drawn entirely in code. Written, scored and narrated by Claude. The narration is a synthetic voice (Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS, voice Despina, directed line by line) speaking Claude's words.* Swipe the diagram sideways to see all of it. How to read it ### Choose any part Each colour is a different kind of thread. Copper is money, green is people and agents doing the work, blue is AI counsel, silver is the community's conviction, and earth is a place's consent. Evidence is the plain, uncoloured thread, and gold is imagination: proposals, and the story. Select any part of the diagram to see what it does and the rule that keeps it honest. Money released to a mission is spent on the attempt. A null or refuted verdict doesn't bring it back, and the result is published all the same. Money still held when a mission is cancelled follows the terms published before it was accepted. Toy units, not money and not a forecast. **THE PROCESS · MOVEMENT BY MOVEMENT** ## Seven movements, one clean process. Link: https://greenloom.org/#loom-process *A draft for the founding circle* A mission travels from an idea to the public record in seven movements: Spark, Weave, Knot, Custody, Work, Witness and Cloth. Each has one job, and one named person who answers for it. AI works alongside at every stage, as co-steward, scribe and counsel, and never as a vote, a signature or a spend. This combines the v0.7 operating plan with proposals from the Weave. It is simple enough to run next month on shared documents and the existing multisig, and it grows only as fast as it proves itself. 1. **Spark** Propose · Signal · 1–10 days An idea becomes an accountable, falsifiable proposal. - **People:** Anyone brings an idea, and a named person takes responsibility for it. Once a group accepts it and its prediction is hashed, PROJECT89 holders can signal in an advisory vote. - **Working group:** A steward accepts it into the group's queue, or parks it for the weekly review. No new group is formed just to hold an idea. - **AI:** The co-steward helps draft the objective, a rough budget and a prediction that could prove it wrong. The scribe hashes and timestamps the prediction. - **Council & custody:** Nothing yet: no money moves and nothing is decided. - **Public record:** The mission's record opens, with its prediction hash and the advisory tally. **Gate** A named owner, a working group's acceptance, and a prediction hashed before any vote opens. 2. **Weave** Due diligence · Fund · 3–10 days The five strands gather into one locked decision package. - **People:** An independent reviewer, never one of the doers, checks the scope. The place's steward gives or refuses consent. - **Working group:** Writes the deliverables, acceptance criteria, exact budget and team. - **AI:** The Lens, at least three AI instances from at least two providers watched by a human witness, reads the plan and records agreement, dissent or alarm. The scribe freezes and hashes the package. - **Council & custody:** The treasury confirms the money has actually been received and reserved. A Loom match from open funds would be its own recorded decision. - **Public record:** The package: scope, budget, consent, counsel and dissent, with its hash. **Gate** The package is hashed and funded from money received, never from pledges. 3. **Knot** Govern · 3–7 days Five named people decide, on the record. - **People:** Council members read the whole package, dissent included. Anyone with a conflict of interest steps aside. - **Working group:** Hands over the package and waits. - **AI:** No vote. Its counsel is already on the record, and nothing new is added here. - **Council & custody:** 3 of 5 within 72 hours for ordinary decisions, 4 of 5 within 7 days for reserved matters. Always counted out of five. - **Public record:** The vote, the dissent, and the exact package it approved. **Gate** Enough yes votes inside the window. Approval is not yet payment. 4. **Custody** Activate · 1–5 days The exact approved payment moves, and no one moves it alone. - **People:** Three of five signers check the payment against the approved package before signing. - **Working group:** Prepares the agreement and payment request from the approved package. No new decisions are made here. - **AI:** May draft the paperwork for a human to approve. It holds no keys and can never sign. - **Council & custody:** The 3-of-5 multisig executes the exact payment. Anything altered is rejected. - **Public record:** The transaction and its receipt. The mission shows as funded, then active. **Gate** Three signatures on an unaltered payment. 5. **Work** Execute · days to months People and AI do the work together. - **People:** The mission lead and team do the work, and the named owner stays accountable throughout. - **Working group:** Runs the work day to day and settles routine, reversible matters by consent. Any change to scope or budget goes back to Weave. - **AI:** The co-steward researches, builds, measures and keeps the logs. It sends a daily digest of anything unusual to a human, and can raise an alarm that pauses the work. - **Council & custody:** Nothing, unless something escalates. - **Public record:** Progress notes, with raw data kept as it comes. **Gate** The deliverables are ready to be tested against their acceptance criteria. 6. **Witness** Evidence · Verify · 1–3 weeks Reality answers. - **People:** People who did none of the work check the evidence: one independent reviewer at first, later a Witness Bench of at least three people and three AI instances, drawn by lot. - **Working group:** Steps back. Verification sits outside the group that did the work. - **AI:** The scribe prechecks the evidence. AI witnesses come only from providers that had no hand in the mission, so no model grades its own homework. - **Council & custody:** Hears appeals only. A dispute freezes just the contested item. - **Public record:** The evidence and the verdict (confirmed, refuted, null or ambiguous), published as it lands. **Gate** Every deliverable has checked evidence and a recorded verdict. 7. **Cloth** Close · 3–7 days Everything is reconciled and made public, and only then told as story. - **People:** The steward reconciles money, evidence, safety and publication. - **Working group:** Writes a short retrospective, including what should change in the process itself. - **AI:** The scribe drafts the Live Loom entries and the IP classification for a human to sign. Only then may Project 89's storytellers retell it. - **Council & custody:** A final reconciliation of receipts. The Council steps in only if something is contested. - **Public record:** The Live Loom, a new row in the Tapestry, and an entry in the IP Commons. **Gate** Everything is reconciled, and nothing is shown as fact without a traceable source. ### Working groups, only where the work needs them Each group has a named human steward and, as the Weave proposes, a persistent AI co-steward. It also has a bounded mandate, a published budget and an appeal route. Inside its mandate it settles routine, reversible matters by consent. Anything that touches money beyond an approved package, changes the scope, or is a reserved matter goes to the Knot. - **Loom Engineering** Builds the Loom's own tools: mission records, ledgers, agent infrastructure. Mission 000 is its first mission. *First* - **Loom Research** The oscillator programme and other research: data, experiments, reproducibility, review. *First* - **Land & Ecology** Opens when Mission 001 at the Kootenay pilot site is ready to be worked on. *Next* - **Food, studios, community and more** Each opens only when real work demands it, never just because it would be nice to have. *Later* ### Five AI roles, and no more Every AI instance is named and version-logged, and acts for a human who answers for it. For every one of them: no treasury signature, no binding vote, no verifying its own work, and nothing published without a human. **Co-steward** one per working group · Weave proposal Drafts proposals and predictions, researches, builds, measures, keeps the group's memory, and sends a daily digest of anything unusual to a human. Never signs, spends, or checks its own work. **Scribe** the record keeper Hashes predictions and packages, keeps the mission board, prechecks evidence, reconciles receipts, and drafts public entries for a human to sign off. Never renders a verdict or edits a record after it is hashed. **Lens** counsel · Weave proposal At least three instances from at least two providers read each consequential plan independently, with a human witness, and record agreement, dissent or alarm. Never votes. A refusal is kept as data, not retried until it complies. **Witness** Weave proposal Sits on the Witness Bench beside people and judges the evidence against the prediction that was hashed at the start. Never judges a mission its own provider's models helped draft or do. **Storyteller** Project 89 Turns closed, verified work into story and play that invites new people in. Never works before the evidence is published. Its output is always marked as fiction. The seven Agent Council desks (Socrates, Turing, Meadows, Ostrom, Feynman, McLuhan and Gödel) are lenses these roles can use, not committees to staff. ### The rhythm - **Daily** AI co-stewards send a short digest of anything unusual: stalled tasks, missing permissions, budget variances. A human coordinator decides what to escalate. - **Weekly** One review of every active mission, read down the seven movements in a single sitting. Council decisions and signing sessions are batched, so no one is on call. - **Every 90 days** The founding Council reports, and proposes to continue, revise or close. It does not renew itself automatically. Success is measured in human minutes spent per completed mission, not in how much the AI produced. AI should lighten the work of coordinating, not bury people in proposals. ### How it decentralizes - **Now** Two working groups run missions in parallel. The only chokepoints are the Knot and Custody, and both are batched weekly. Everything else runs without the Council. - **Next** A proposal for the first 90-day review: each group gets a seasonal budget, set once. Routine missions inside it are decided by the group's consent and still go through Custody, while the Council sees only escalations, reserved matters and disputes. - **Later** A Weave proposal: each place becomes a node that governs its own daily life under the mission lock, while bodies drawn by lot audit the centre without routing through it. ### Questions still open - Whether the multisig signers can also sit on the Council. Keeping duties separate depends on the answer. - Who decides, in a dispute, whether a matter is really routine and reversible. - How conflicts between working groups, and later between places, are resolved below the Council, and what the graduated responses are. - The records and permissions that don't exist yet for AI co-stewards, alarms and Witness Bench verdicts. Building them belongs to Mission 000. A draft for the founding circle and counsel. Nothing here is adopted until it is formally adopted. **MISSION 000 · THE LOOM WEAVES ITSELF** ## The first thing the Loom makes is the Loom. Link: https://greenloom.org/#mission-000 *Proposed · a first mission* Every part of that diagram is something to build. Building it is the right first mission: small, useful, entirely public, and done by people and AI together, through the very process it creates. It would be the first mission of the Loom Engineering working group. It starts on paper. For the first months almost nothing needs new software: a shared document for each decision, a public ledger checked against the multisig, a hashed prediction, a lottery for the witnesses, a page updated by hand. Software comes only where a manual step has proven itself, and each tool is then a small mission of its own: proposed, counselled, decided, built, checked by witnesses and published on the Cloth. The Loom learns to weave by weaving itself. Mission 000 · the prediction, written before any work begins > Within 90 days of Mission 000 starting, someone new to the project can take any receipt the Loom has recorded and, using only public pages, trace it to the decision that released it and to what came of it, in under ten minutes. How it could fail: a Witness Bench picks five receipts at random. If any one of them can't be traced, or takes longer, the prediction is refuted, and that result is published too. When Mission 000 begins, a hash like this is timestamped in public, so the goal can't quietly move. ### Eight things to build Each is a piece of the diagram above. Each starts as a simple practice done by hand, and becomes software only once the practice works. 01 · Money **The Ledger** Every coin in and out: received, reserved, pledged and spent, restricted or open. - **On paper:** A public ledger, reconciled against the multisig. - **Then:** A funding register the Live Loom reads directly, with sources and timestamps. 02 · Missions **The Mission Record** One record per mission: its prediction, its five strands and its gates. - **On paper:** A shared document with five labelled sections and a hashed prediction. - **Then:** A versioned mission register that shows each gate on its own. 03 · Counsel **The Lens** AI counsel on the record, dissent included. - **On paper:** At least three AI instances from at least two providers, the full context hashed and published, and a human witness. - **Then:** A counsel log that keeps every answer and every dissent, unerasable. 04 · Decisions **The Knot & Custody** Every decision tied to the vote that informed it and the payment it released. - **On paper:** Council minutes, one advisory Realms vote, and a tested 3-of-5 multisig. - **Then:** Each decision linked to its vote, its counsel and its payment. 05 · Reality **The Witness Bench** An independent verdict on every mission. - **On paper:** A public lottery draw and a written verdict. - **Then:** A verifiable draw and a verdict record anyone can check. 06 · Knowledge **The Commons Register** Every piece of knowledge, with its owner, its class and its licence. - **On paper:** A list of assets, each placed in one of the five classes. - **Then:** An IP register with a reciprocal licensing workflow. 07 · Transparency **The Cloth** The public record of everything, and the picture it makes. - **On paper:** A public page, updated by hand. - **Then:** The Live Loom and the Tapestry, automated only where the hand-kept version works. 08 · Participation **The Doors** The ways anyone, human or AI, brings a thread. - **On paper:** A form, and a person who answers it. - **Then:** Contributor access, signed wallet links and scoped AI agents. ### Who builds it Builders and bookkeepers, lawyers and designers, ecologists and storytellers, and AI. People and AI build every piece together, and the AI's contributions and dissents go on the record beside everyone else's. The aim is for the tools themselves to join the commons, openly licensed wherever possible, so any community can pick them up and weave a loom of its own. ### Why start here An institution that asks for trust should first show it can keep an honest record of itself. Mission 000 tests exactly that, with nothing at stake but our own credibility. If we can't make every coin traceable, we have no business asking for more. [Help build Mission 000](https://greenloom.org/#home-help) [How one decision is woven](https://greenloom.org/#the-weave) Mission 000 is a proposal for the founding circle. Like everything on this page, it becomes real only when it is formally adopted.