The Syllabus, ORI, and Meta-ORI

A folk history from my mouth to your ear.

As I now understand it, open jurisprudence and open institution must precede open research. An open research institute (ORI) must be built by the scribes, the lawyers, the jurists.

Just as theology is the mother of science, so too is law the mother of research.

What are the fruits of the copyright and consensus regime? How has this arrogant individualist theology played out in the sciences?

I just released “ORI 100: Meta-ORI”, the second entry on my new Leaflet publication for The Syllabus.

The Syllabus is an open research institute (ORI) that heavily overlaps with Defender’s open research institute (ORI) which is often called “Defender’s ORI”. Both projects are chapters of Meta-ORI, which I will also very pompously refer to as the Open Research Institute (a bolded glyph of sorts).

This came to be because of some disagreements I expressed to Defender about the direction I saw in the outward presentation of his chapter, which I have attempted to summarize in this Leaflet post. In short, I wanted a cleaner separation between the overall mission of what he and I were going for with ORI (I am not claiming equality of vision or impact in this matter, but fact is I was the second member of his Discord!) and what his specific projects and focus in ORI were at the time. This has led to an ongoing conversation on the distinction between individual ORI chapters (open research institutes known to other open research institutes) and the grander Open Research Institute project.

My take on it is that the Open Research Institute is best defined by a protocol in which everything under the umbrella of the Open Research Institute is available for use (of any kind) by those in the Open Research Institute, up to and including monetization without attribution, so long as the resulting work is also placed under the umbrella of the Open Research Institute and made available to participants in the network of the Open Research Institute.

(I am having a little too much fun.)

As for explaining what The Syllabus is doing… I will just post some screenshots from the Discord and use that as a quick introduction.

The Syllabus will be cultivating an open research institute (ORI) complete with its own literature and community as a demonstration of the ORI protocol, and also curate its discussions and explorations through the use of extensive private and public indexes. (This Substack post is an index!)

I will still post material like this post on Substack, written off the cuff. I will also continue The Bible for Systems Thinkers, which a few people have wanted to see continue. But I will likely keep up-to-date content elsewhere, just because the ongoing spat between X and Substack makes it annoying to use both these platforms. I am not a good fit for the community over on Bluesky, but the AT Protocol ecosystem is a good fit for me. (It reminds me a lot of the days of Jottit!) So, expect to see most of my longform writing over on Leaflet and my shortform writing on X (where I have the furthest reach and best established network). This Substack newsletter will henceforth be about retrieving links from elsewhere and putting them in one place in a somewhat conversational style.

I have no idea how to end this, except by saying that I am very excited. And so, I shall end this:

I am very excited.