ORI is the largest open trust network in your world.

When you meet someone who flies under the "ORI" banner, it doesn't tell you anything specific about what they know or believe, or how much you should trust them. What it tells you is that they consent to an intense and fairly invasive protocol for exchanging truth & testing for trust.

A poetic way to think about it is that ORI is trying to be the largest, beautiful, but coherent story that anyone can contribute to.

The ORI story evolves towards coherence (1) across its members and (2) with reality. Coherence does not mean uniformity - it means high bandwidth positive sum interaction.

When I talk about onboarding people to the ORI org, I mean "org" in both senses of the word: an organization, with jobs to do & resources to allocate, and "organism". We regularly test information propagation across the network, the same way a body does to make sure all cells are still responsive and the organism can see exactly what is "part of the organism" and what is not.

- Defender, April 13, 2026

See: "I started writing a fictional autiobiography set in the real world" by Defender, Aug 12, 2024, for Defender's introduction to the ORI story.

Current Priorities

• A/B/U onboarding book
  • The purpose of this book is to act as a fundraiser for the project, and to spread one key piece of the meta protocol. This is the communication protocol that allows you to map someone's mind & worldview, even if you're the only one using it. If both use it, then it significantly speeds up calibration & information propagation across the network
  • See A_B_U.html for a concise technical explanation, "How we grade presentation night" for a layperson explanation, and "Why A/B/U is so useful for me" for a personal reflection from Alex.
  • I would like this book to introduce the concept of "pay on receipt of A". Like maybe the book is only $5 but if you got a lot of "world model updates" from it you are encouraged to pay more, or pay only after reading to signal your support of it / don't pay if you learned nothing.
• Anatomy of an Internet Argument
  • The purpose of this project is to scale the adjudication of conflict in the court of public opinion. Instead of a million people trying to figure out whether to trust a person, we perform the adjudication in a way that everyone can see and contribute to without duplicating efforts.
  • This also is another vector of onboarding - the propagation of this project transforms hostile, unproductive conversations on the internet to mutually beneficial positive sum ones.
  • See project page on GitHub for all the links.
• RSS based social media / visualizations
  • The ORI social network exists across the entire internet, it is the slice of people adhering to protocol, regardless of whether they are on Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, Instagram, Youtube, or IRL spaces
  • The purpose of this project is to create the minimal infrastructure to opt into aggregate & visualize your place & influence on the network.
  • TODO add a project page with inspiration / links / visuals. "Sacrifice a Shibboleth for Science" is a tool that would fall under this umbrella.
• Resource allocation protocol(s)
  • TODO - this is about how to reward good work across the network, with real money, or fake money. Pointers here are funds that do retroactive, "no strings attached" grants like Analogue, and this visual metaphor about solving a maze by exploring the full space, then retroactively rewarding any thing that helped the path of the solution.

Onboarding (WIP)

1. Write your ORI entry point
   • See examples: (1) Sam Senchal, Observer Theory, Computational Theology (2) Othmangba, Governance Memory Systems (3) Patcon, Multiplayer Cognition Tools (4) [video] David Rug, Collective Dreamweaving & Memetics (5) Defender, A Beginner's Guide to Culture Science (6) John Ash, Ŧrust Demystified (7) Morphenius, Subjective Science (8) Mohsen Ashraf on understanding Islam's true referent
   • ---
   • Essentially, anyone with a "now page" is following ORI protocol. The ORI entry point is slightly different in that it is meant to be "your highest A, broadcast to the widest possible B floor"
2. Find the others
   • Watch the first minute of "How to semantic search the internet"
3. Once you find your place in the network, help build & maintain the network for others