Written once,read by both
We are working toward companies whose knowledge is written once, in a structure that the people who run them and the agents working beside them can both rely on — so that what a company knows can be read, checked and acted on where it is needed, rather than reassembled out of wikis, decks, tickets and chat threads every time somebody asks.
Generated from the model, so the words below are its own — and in the one language it is written in. The rest of this site is bilingual; a translated copy would be a second thing to keep true, which is what this page argues against.
What it means
It holds when a company can answer a question about itself from the structure rather than from whoever remembers, when an agent answering the same question is held to the same evidence as a person, and when a claim that rests on nothing is visible as such instead of passing unchallenged. A reader can tell whether it holds by asking the same question twice, of a person and of an agent, and comparing what each had to stand on.
It does not ask a company to move what it keeps elsewhere. A fact the wiki, the tracker or the directory has authority over stays mastered there and is projected into the model by a sync that names it, so a company whose knowledge is legible this way still runs on the tools it ran on before. It is also not reached by describing more: a model nobody acts on has not made a company legible, whatever it contains.
Values
Adoption is not taxed
A meta-model is worth whatever gets adopted of it, so anything that makes adopting it cost more works against the one thing it was built to do.
We publish the vocabulary, the tooling and the talks under licenses that ask nothing back, and we bill consulting by the day rather than by the model, so what costs money is time and never what a company does with the model. Where a way to charge would have fitted we wrote down why it was refused instead of leaving it open: a seat count charges a company for being read, which a model meant for its people and its agents at once cannot bear, and a per-entry price charges it for the completeness the model exists to produce. Doing it without us is the normal case and the pages say so, because a model most people need help to adopt has not been made adoptable.
We never let the model cost more the more of a company, or the more of its agents, that reads it.
Describe the pattern, never the company
A meta-model that carries one company's tooling in its conventions has stopped being one, so the vocabulary states the shape and never who was found holding it.
The vocabulary names no company it was drawn from, quotes no company's internal conventions, and says nothing about the tracker, the wiki or the chat tool anyone runs on. Where an example would read better with a real company behind it we write the pattern instead, because a thin file per person is portable and the company that keeps one is not, and because a rule that only makes sense once a reader knows whose it was is a rule nobody else can adopt. Confidentiality is part of this and it is not the reason for it: a claim about the shape a company's knowledge takes has to stand without naming a company, or it was never a claim about the shape.
We never put a company's name, its tooling or its counts into the vocabulary.
Run on what we publish
A vocabulary its authors have not had to use is a proposal, and the only evidence that a type holds a real company is a real company being held by it.
We describe ourselves in the vocabulary we publish, in the open, in a repository anyone can read — and a second instance beside it describes a company of one the same way, so the vocabulary answers to more than one shape of company before it asks anyone else to adopt it. A type reaches core once a company has actually had to be described with it, which is why an instance is what finds a gap rather than a review of the schemas. Every surface we publish is derived from the model at a commit it names, so when a page and the model disagree it is the page that is wrong, and fixing it means fixing the model first.
We never ship a type we have not already had to use on ourselves.