idkmesh

Community and ACE Index

This directory holds the community-growth strategy, its measurement models, and the ACE (Autocatalytic Community Evolution) design stack, plus the bounded evidence records produced against them.

Read the authority line first. Every ACE layer below declares itself experimental, shadow-mode, proposed, or offline, and the Phase-B activation gate below states “Authority: none by itself” and that a controller cannot activate itself. Nothing in this directory grants an autonomous actuator. The presence of a complete design stack is not evidence that the stack is switched on.

The layers are separate on purpose: causal evidence, denominator inventory, and value/cost measurement must not collapse into one object. The ordering below is the one the documents themselves describe.

Two tracking issues must stay open

Two workflows locate their state container by scanning open issues for a label, and create a new one when the scan finds nothing:

• ace-community-growth.yml finds the ledger by label ace:ledger among state: 'open' issues (issue 23);
• ace-cohort-observer.yml finds the observatory by label ace:cohort-observer among state: 'open' issues (issue 109).

Closing either issue does not fail loudly. The workflow falls through to its default seed state and creates a duplicate issue, discarding the accumulated controller state in the original. Reopening the closed one afterwards is worse: ace-community-growth.yml throws Multiple open ACE ledgers carry ace:ledger; refusing ambiguous controller state. on every run until a human removes one label.

Both issues are workflow-owned state containers whose bodies are rewritten on each run. They are not tasks, they have no acceptance criteria, and they must not be closed as part of any issue-tidying pass.

Strategy and measurement models

• Community Growth Strategy — why community growth is a parallel product/systems problem rather than a post-engineering marketing phase, and the contribution forms it needs.
• Community Growth Dynamics — research model and measurement specification; turns growth into a dynamical-system problem over an explicit community state, rather than stars or raw contributor count.
• ACE: GitHub-Constrained Self-Improving Community — working design for the next ACE iteration under real GitHub constraints (issues, PRs, labels, Actions, API limits), explicitly not publicity automation.
• ACE Activity Metabolism — the composition rule that turns repository activity into verified capability, knowledge, repair, or reproductive opportunity. Activity itself is not fitness.

ACE evidence and control layers

Ordered from raw observation to the gate that could, in principle, leave shadow mode. Each is narrow by design and cites the issues it was built against.

• ACE Cohort Observer v0 — experimental, metadata-only observability. Separates activity, cohort exposure, candidate work, and causal evidence. Built against #40.
• ACE Lineage Protocol v0.1 — the smallest GitHub-native record for a verified parent -> Growth Seed -> candidate descendant -> verification -> verified descendant chain. Lineage evidence only, not a database or an actuator. Related: #10, #23, #25, #27.
• ACE Live Carrying-Capacity Model — proposed bootstrap model; makes the ecological capacity gate depend on current recoverable review pressure instead of a cumulative event counter.
• ACE Generation Evidence Interface — Phase-A / shadow-controller interface holding parents, lineage receipts, and measurement as three independent layers. Related: #25, #40, #57.
• ACE Phase-B Activation Gate — experimental, fail-closed, offline conjunctive rule for whether the repository is allowed and evidenced well enough to leave shadow mode. No authority by itself.

Bounded experiments and evidence records

Dated records measured against the designs above. Each is a snapshot at its stated window or revision, not current status.

• Contributor Pilot — September 2026 — bounded human/agent contribution and co-maintainer recruitment pilot; no new authority.
• ACE Bootstrap Experiment — Cohort 1 — active bootstrap experiment over the 2026-08-28 to 2026-09-27 window, five Growth Seeds; public state tracked in issue #23.
• Newcomer Path Audit — 2026-08-29 first-contact walk from the public README at 63e4acc to a realistic bounded task, with approximate navigation times.
• Task Decomposition: IDKGraph P0 Repository Observatory — splits research track #20 into exactly five independently claimable microtasks; produced for Growth Seed #28.
• Starter Tasks — ten bounded contribution opportunities across testing, security, documentation, research, review, community and tooling, each checked against the tree at 2ce141a and carrying its own acceptance test. Written because every newcomer-labelled issue at that revision was an independent-review request.

Adding a document

State the document’s status and authority in its own header, place evidence records under onboarding-tests/ or task-decompositions/ rather than at the directory root, and add one line to the group above that it belongs to. A new ACE layer must say what it does not authorize.

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