How do we use the power of AI in a way that’s aligned with our values?
How do we make an aligned AI available to our whole community, not just the tech-forward, to support our collective actions?
In what ways can AI uniquely benefit open source, free technology and the production of truly public goods?
Over the last 4 years I’ve been trying to talk about AI wherever I can: not to drive everyone nuts, but to help prepare the communities I care about for the coming reality.
That reality is here and the big questions are still largely unanswered. While some GOATs have been pushing boundaries in really inspiring ways, we still have a long way to go.
The Community Workspace is my first attempt to address these questions and make a contribution in a more generalized way. I tried to takes advantage of the work others have done and focus on filling in gaps in the communities I work and know.
At this point the Community Workspace is just a spec – not deployed software or tools – but the spec is where most of the work lies.
This post introduces the core idea to improve it before spending time on implementation.
Request for feedback on the Community Workspace Spec!
Keep Reading: Below is an excerpt from the spec (which you can read in full here). You can also complete the Community Workspace Setup Wizard (also just a draft version).
Give Feedback: You can email admin@our-sci.net with feedback, find me on Element/Matrix (gbathree), or reply to the post on the GOAT forum, or join the Ag in AI call on Friday Oct 23rd 2 – 3pm EST to tell me in person!
A shared software environment located on a community-controlled server to do community work. The workspace is used by community members and their AI agents to code, scope new projects, fix bugs, collaboratively research, assess community needs, provide access to outside groups, and anything else that could benefit from sharing knowledge, tools, agents, and model access.
A community plans its environment with the setup wizard, which writes the settings as files that go into git repos on the community’s own forge. Members reach shared agents through a few doors; every AI request the workspace pays for goes through one shared gateway with spending caps; and memory is kept in plain files: members’ own notes are checked and saved by the memory bot (still to build), and anything an AI drafted, or that changes how agents behave, is approved by a person. The picture shows the whole system; the two walkthroughs below it follow one process each, step by step.
| Value | What it means |
|---|---|
| Open Source, Open Weights | Open source is strongly preferred for every component. Exceptions are allowed where critical functionality has no reasonable open-source option, and exceptions should be documented. |
| Support Local, Hosted, and Mixed | This core installation should support local or hosted or a mixed setup. |
| Functional Core Out of the Box | The core installation should work for many communities, with minimal customization, out of the box. |
| Value Customization and Sharing | Customization should be easy to make and easy to share with others. |
| Easy Exit | Users and communities should be able to exit and copy their knowledge out easily. |
The workspace serves an open-source community’s contributors and stakeholders to develop a shared resource (a piece of software or hardware, documentation, a code or AI enabled process, a workflow, etc.).
Example Users
| User | Description |
|---|---|
| Developers | Professional engineers, the people building the actual resource. |
| Designers | Other professionals involved in scoping, UI / UX, process and product design, etc. |
| Support staff | Work directly to solve user and community issues: bug fixing, setup, using the resource, etc. |
| Other professionals | Instance managers, business and community development, etc. |
| Domain experts | Non-developers, and potentially non-users, who understand the domain in which the resource runs (a conservation planner understands agriculture, the domain of farmOS). |
| Advanced end users | Informed users who will spend time to give feedback, co-develop, or otherwise contribute to the resource. |
Different users use the environment through different doors like a coding terminal, chat interface, published forms, or published content on web pages. These doors provide the right interface for each type of user.
1. Community-owned and stewarded: The co… …(keep reading in full here, you can also test out the draft Community Workspace Setup Wizard )
Give Feedback: You can email admin@our-sci.net with feedback, find me on Element/Matrix (gbathree), or reply to the post on the GOAT forum, or join the Ag in AI call on Friday Oct 9th 2 – 3pm EST to tell me in person!
