Common Ground Protocol

Much of our work on CGP comes from a familiar frustration: seeing something that needs attention and struggling to do anything about it. Bringing it up may lead to another meeting or another form to fill out, while the people involved still have little room to change how they work.

As more people become involved, we tend to rely on rules, measures, and layers of approval to coordinate. These help us manage complexity, but they also shape what we pay attention to. What fits a report is simpler than what someone knows through experience. People making decisions may have little contact with the consequences others are living with.

When these arrangements cause problems, we often add more oversight or another procedure. Sometimes that provides necessary protection. Sometimes it adds work without addressing what people were struggling with in the first place.

We are living beings, part of the living world. We need care, rest, nourishment, relationships, and the ability to participate meaningfully in what affects us. We depend on other living beings and on ecological conditions that sustain us. Everything we call an organization exists within those relationships.

Yet much of how we organize starts with what can be counted, afforded, and controlled. The distance between those priorities and what sustains us is the concern behind CGP.

We want to explore how people can bring more of what they know through living and working into the decisions they make together. That becomes harder across distance, different circumstances, and competing interpretations. It is the challenge we are developing CGP to address.

CGP is intended to help people connect what they observe, how they understand it, what they think is needed, and what they might do together.

Today, those connections are often difficult to follow. An observation gets buried in a report. People debate a proposed solution without examining the need behind it. Someone adapts an approach, but the reasons for the change disappear as documents circulate.

We are developing a shared structure through which these contributions can remain connected, with their authorship, context, evidence, and history available for examination.

Someone encountering a claim could ask what supports it, where it applies, and what challenges it. Someone considering a protocol could explore why it was proposed and what people experienced when they tried it. A revision could preserve the path that led to it.

This is what we mean by common ground. People have enough context to understand what others are expressing and explore how their perspectives relate.

It does not require consensus. We may agree to try something for different reasons. We may understand another person’s concern without sharing their interpretation. Keeping those differences visible gives us more to learn from as we act.

We call this continuing practice co-regulation: people sensing what is happening, responding together, and adjusting through experience. People already do this in everyday relationships. CGP is an attempt to support it across greater distances and complexity.

The foundation is distributed so that people and communities can retain their contributions across connected applications. No single repository, institution, or AI should determine the account everyone else must accept.

CGP is in an early stage of architecture, specification, and validation. We are working through how its concepts translate into records, relationships, and tools people could use.

The work has grown from the earlier rProtocols model into a broader foundation for connecting understanding and action. Current development includes:

• Defining how observations, evidence, claims, needs, protocols, and consequences relate.

• Developing publishing and exchange structures using AT Protocol.

• Preserving authorship, version histories, and connections between adaptations.

• Working through privacy, consent, and stewardship.

• Testing distinctions between what someone observes, how they interpret it, and what they propose.

• Preparing formal schemas and implementation experiments.

CGP is foundational to other Radical World projects, including Open Social Protocols (OSP). OSP explores ways people can make their approaches to organizing explicit, personally adopt commitments with others, and revise them through use. CGP would help keep those commitments connected to their origins and consequences.

Related work includes the Life Space Protocol, a framework for locating the living processes involved, and LifeFingerprint, an approach being developed to assess how protocols affect life.

These ideas are still being refined through writing, review, technical work, and test cases. We need practical use to discover where they help and where they need to change.

A great deal of understanding is lost between noticing something, discussing it, making a decision, and finding out what happened.

Consider people trying to reduce the time spent on documentation in a hospital. Nurses know where it takes them away from patients. Others understand why particular records are needed. Patients have their own experiences of what receives attention and what gets missed.

Bringing those perspectives together could help people identify a change worth trying. They would still need to follow what happened afterward. Did more time become available for care? Was useful information lost? Did someone else end up doing more work?

CGP is intended to help keep that learning connected. The original concerns would remain available alongside the proposal, its revisions, and people’s experiences of using it. Others facing a similar situation could examine that history without assuming the same response would work for them.

This is important beyond any one decision. A need should remain visible when a proposed solution fails. A concern should not disappear because most participants are satisfied. People should be able to adapt an approach without losing what others learned before them.

AI could help people navigate this material, compare interpretations, and understand complex proposals. Its contributions would need to remain identifiable and open to challenge. Decisions, commitments, and responsibility remain with people.

We also know that collecting more information can become another burden. Participation has to offer people meaningful ways to influence what happens. Otherwise, we risk reproducing the frustration that brought us to this work.

The possibility we want to explore is that more of what people experience can inform how they act together — and that consequences for people and the wider living world can change what they pursue.

We are looking for people who want to work through these questions with us.

You might have experience of a situation where important knowledge never reached the people making decisions. You might be developing a different way to organize, or working on tools that could help people connect their understanding. You might see a problem in our assumptions that we need to address.

Contributions can include reviewing the model, bringing examples, examining evidence, developing tools, or helping design practical trials.

A useful place to begin is with something you know well. What are people trying to do? What are they experiencing? Where do their understandings differ? What would help them decide what to try, and learn from what follows?

Those are the conversations we want to build from.