The Work Party serves as a ledger, accountability system and commitment form for people and organizations to accomplish stated tasks. The site architecture follows the Values Commons and Futurism Institute.
A record of what your group actually agreed.
The old kind was neighbours arriving with tools to raise one barn in a day. Nobody took minutes, because the agreement was obvious and you could see when it was done. This page is that, for the agreements that hold a group together when the work is not a barn. It makes one thing: a record your group keeps.
What it makes
Do we buy a second ladder, or agree on how to share the one we have?
| Agreed | Who | By |
|---|---|---|
| Share the one ladder. No second purchase this year.Done when: The question is not reopened before the year is out. | everyone | no date |
| A sign-out sheet lives on the shed door.Done when: Sheet is on the door and has at least one entry. | Rin | 2026-06-21 |
| Replace the frayed strap before anyone else uses it.Done when: New strap fitted, old one binned. | Joss | 2026-06-18 |
Still open
- Whether a second ladder becomes necessary if two more households join.
- Teodor disagrees with the whole approach and wants this revisited in six months.
Five people, one afternoon, one ladder. Note the last line: Teodor lost the argument and the record says so. A minutes system that smooths that away has thrown out the only part worth keeping, because the disagreement is what tells you in six months whether to reopen it.
Write yours.
Nothing here leaves your browser. There is no account, no server, and no address in this page's code to send anything to. You get a file; what happens to it after that is yours.
Why this makes a file
Because leaving has to be free. A group whose members cannot walk away holding the record is not a group with agreements; it is a group with a hostage. Every guarantee about export, deletion and ownership that a hosted tool has to promise you, a file simply is.
It is the same shape this ecosystem already runs on, pointed at a second noun. A values file says what matters to one person. An agreements file says what a group committed to. Both are plain, both can be read aloud in a room, and both can be argued with by anyone holding a copy, which is the only kind of accountability that does not depend on the tool staying up.
The record schema is an interface now
Three other organs consume these records: the fault lines layer revises from them, the steward guidelines publish their lineage through them, and the register links them from adoptions. So the schema is stable and versioned, and record identifiers are permanent: a guideline can say which record decided it and the reference survives schema evolution.
work-party-record/1.0 · 2026-08-26
- universal standing noted: who was in the circle is in the record
- published reasons: the why ships with the what
- revisability: records supersede, never overwrite
- preserved dissent: disagreement is a field, never a footnote
2026-08-26: First stable version. Identifiers take the form wpr-NNNN and are permanent.
wpr-0001 · work-party-record/1.0 · 2026-08-26
Question: Which duties make up the first steward guideline set, at which gate?
The circle: The family itself: the maker, deciding on the record, with drafting help from the agent the drafting field names. No outside circle has met on this yet, and the record says so instead of implying one.
Decision: Six duties at the between-communities gate, each cited or openly argued, published as guidelines 0.1 with this record as lineage.
- The between-communities gate is the one with field evidence behind it: the 58-place map and its finding that the moment of maximum exposure is transit.
- Six lines all of which can be defended beat ten of which two are padding.
- Numbers were kept out of the duties: a day-count without a basis would be a figure wearing a lab coat.
Dissent: None recorded. The circle was too small for honest dissent, which is a limit of this record, not a virtue.
Drafted with Claude (Anthropic), directed and edited by Bentley.
Where this honestly stands
The record, its reader, and revision history work today. A Hearth position file can enter this form; an earlier agreement can return, be revised, and leave with a computed account of what changed.
What does not exist yet is a recorded use by a real group holding several versions over time. The technical seam is built and tested; the social claim remains unearned. Two related surfaces already ship elsewhere: one finds where a group agrees and where it splits, the other turns that into a plan with a reason on every line.