Moral Biology Current orientation
Ethics read through what bodies, relationships, institutions and living systems can actually bear.
founding phase live public work · governance, funding, and field infrastructure are still forming · pages may evolve · published with care.
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Vocabulary · Orientation Layer
Glossary
Spiralweb uses a small, controlled public vocabulary. This page defines only terms that currently affect how the habitat's materials, roles, statuses, safeguards and tools should be read or used.
This glossary is deliberately limited. A term appears here only when its definition changes how current Spiralweb material should be read, used or governed. Historical labels belong to lineage records, not to the live vocabulary.
Constitutional orientation
Rule of Life Current orientation
The constitutional horizon that asks whether lawful and organisational action remains answerable to living conditions and consequences.
Gold Before Bloom Current orientation
The discipline of stabilising capacity, responsibility and ground before expansion.
Penguin Economics Current orientation
An economic grammar in which exposure rotates towards the centre of care, capacity has protective limits, and support must not become capture.
Stewardship economy Emerging economic inquiry
An emerging economic orientation and field of practice concerned with organising work, resources and institutions so that the continuing care of the conditions on which humans and other species depend becomes viable. It connects ecological integrity, decent livelihoods and legitimate, correctable responsibility over time.
Elir Current relational grammar
The place-bound grammar of limited, accountable stewardship, keeping care connected to time, responsibility and consequence.
Elia Current relational grammar
Support for a person that preserves their freedom without buying work, output, loyalty or visibility.
Silent degradation Working diagnosis
A condition in which visible form and delivery continue while the judgement, relationships or living capacity they depend on erode.
Capacity and contact Working distinction
Capacity is the ability to act; contact keeps that ability answerable to people, living places and consequences. Increasing one does not automatically strengthen the other.
Regenerative / regeneration Working orientation
A direction of change towards recovering and sustaining specified living capacities, judged against a stated starting condition, scale and time horizon. Its meaning depends on ecological consequence, steward viability and legitimate governance.
Commons / commoning Working governance distinction
A maintained relationship among shared conditions or resources, affected people, rules of use and care, and ways to address conflict and change. Commoning is the practice that holds and revises that relationship.
Regenerative reciprocity Working proposition
A working proposition that encounters and support may strengthen the capacity of different people and places to continue caring, learning and responding, with useful return and differentiated responsibility. Its effects require situated testing.
Earth Time Working temporal discipline
Temporal governance that keeps institutional pace, funding, reporting and action answerable to the actual recovery, absorption and response times of people and living systems.
Architectural images
Membrane Current image
A permeable boundary that helps different logics meet while regulating what may pass, what needs translation and what must remain protected.
Habitat Current image
The living whole formed by publications, relationships, institutions, practices, fields and their changing conditions.
Register Current image
The memory function that preserves provenance, observations, decisions, uncertainty and correction without collapsing them into one truth claim.
Flow Current image
The movement of attention, knowledge, care, resources, responsibility and return through the habitat.
Spiral Current image
Returning to a question or practice with changed understanding, allowing experience and consequence to alter the next movement.
Institutional entities and roles
Spiralweb Current entity
A living infrastructure for regenerative communities: a shared knowledge-and-practice habitat connecting people, places, inquiry, stewardship and responsible support.
Spiralweb Papers Current entity
The public, versioned inquiry and return membrane within Spiralweb, holding independent inquiries and explicitly designated Association works with visible provenance, status and correction routes.
Spiralweb Stewardship Association Current entity
The legal and institutional container currently holding governance, cooperation, support and accountability for the Association's work.
Association work Current publication status
A publication explicitly designated on behalf of the Association and linked to a governance record.
Planetary Guardians Current architecture
The forming governance and protocol architecture within Spiralweb for place-based ecological stewardship, connecting orientation, relationship, situated observation, support, correction and accountability.
AnchorPoint Current relational form
A locally rooted form through which people, places and regenerative processes may become connected over time through shared stewardship, learning, governance and Return.
Field Current practice entity
A place-based track whose relationship, shared question, practice, evidence rhythm, support and next decisions are stated separately and truthfully.
Steward Current role
A named human bearer of situated observation, relationship and judgment.
Knowledge steward Current role
A named human responsible for the integrity, provenance, revision and public claim boundaries of a knowledge work.
Café Sofia Current public room
Spiralweb’s hospitality and orientation room: a place to read, explore a question or follow a connection into the wider material.
Processes and statuses
Co-creation Current process
A bounded process in which participants can affect the work and its next step, with differences in role, authority and consent kept visible.
Active Current status grammar
A qualifier used only with the thing that is active, such as a relationship, field cycle, evidence rhythm or support arrangement.
Preparing Current status
A locally grounded track in real preparation with a named next decision, but without an activated cycle, shared record or protocol unless explicitly stated.
Foundation Current material type
A work that holds ethical, constitutional, epistemological or economic orientation for the habitat.
Protocol Current material type
A bounded, versioned methodological container proposed for a stated purpose and responsibility structure.
Application Current material type
A situated use or adaptation of a protocol in a named context with legitimate holders, version, consent, limits and return route.
Tool Current material type
A bounded aid to observation, inquiry, memory or shared reading.
Protocol Habitat Current architecture
The public knowledge space in which foundations, protocols, applications and tools are held with explicit maturity, authority, claim boundary, review state and correction routes.
Protocol activation Current status grammar
A documented decision to use a named protocol version for a stated purpose, scope, period and responsibility structure.
Field Return Current return type
Bounded learning ready to travel back from a real place, relationship or institutional practice with provenance, consent, uncertainty and limits intact.
Short Reads Current material type
Concise, source-linked entrances to a question or idea, with a route to the fuller work.
Return / double return Current practice grammar
Return brings consequence back into a relationship so that it can change what happens next. In situated practice, the double return connects returning to the place or practice with returning something useful to the people and relationships from which the work arose.
Local Return Current return type
Learning or a response that first becomes useful to the people and place carrying a particular practice.
AI-supported citizen science Current working hypothesis
Spiralweb’s proposition for people to develop inquiry from their own practice: framing questions, bringing situated observations into dialogue with research and human-held AI, testing explanations and correcting action. Learning spirals may strengthen judgement, reveal stewardship functions and help people examine and shape the material and institutional conditions for continuing care.
Learning spiral Working practice concept
A recurring inquiry in which people connect experience, questions, different forms of knowledge and action, then return to what happened. Each return may change understanding, practice or the question itself. The movement is shaped by the place, those affected and what they can carry.
Possible subjects include land, water, climate, species and habitat; food and seeds; body, health, care and viability; relationships, commons, culture, art and meaning; shelter, built environments, energy and technology; work, economy, institutions, rights and power; and knowledge, teaching and AI. These are overlapping examples, not a complete classification. Time, history and future consequence may matter throughout; 13×13 offers further questions where useful, without requiring recording or sharing.
PG Ledger Current memory architecture
A place-bound, connected memory of observations, interpretations, decisions, resources and later consequences, with provenance, consent, uncertainty and correction kept visible. One entry is a record; connected entries form a Ledger. It becomes living when an agreed practice returns to what followed and lets that change the next movement.
Grounding Current inquiry practice
A revisable practice that locates a question, its sources, knowing positions, uncertainty, authority and limits, then returns to consequence so the inquiry can be corrected.
Situated and embodied knowing Current epistemic orientation
Knowing formed through a particular body, place, practice and relationship. It can provide substantive knowledge while remaining partial, fallible and open to other forms of inquiry.
Pause, refusal and protected dormancy Candidate process grammar · not Association policy
Pause holds a specified movement for now. Refusal declines a participation or use. Protected dormancy allows a relationship to rest when conditions prevent free participation or safe contact. None automatically decides whether a relationship must resume.
Bioregional stewardship Working field orientation
Continuing care that strengthens a place’s capacity to sense, learn, coordinate, correct and regenerate within its ecological and social relations. Its scope follows relevant living relations and consequences, not just a project boundary.
Mechanisms and disciplines
Correctability Current discipline
The requirement that public knowledge, protocols and governance readings remain open to named correction when better information or consequences appear.
Friction Current discipline
A signal that movement meets a boundary, burden, disagreement, overload or necessary protection that must be read before optimisation.
Protected absence Current safeguard
A deliberate decision not to record, expose or circulate knowledge whose absence protects people, place, consent or living relations.
Last Impulse Current safeguard
The final human responsibility to pause, refuse, correct or stop a consequential AI-assisted movement before it becomes action.
Correction Loop Current accountability mechanism
The traceable return through which consequential AI-assisted work can be challenged, corrected, paused or stopped while responsibility remains human.
Three-stream non-cancellation Current safeguard
The rule that ecological condition, steward viability and governance or commons capacity remain separately readable and cannot compensate for one another in an aggregate score.
The related resource streams show what support finances: land and ecology, steward viability, and coordination and governance. They are distinct from readings of actual conditions; spending in a stream does not establish a healthy condition.
Green / Yellow / Red / Unknown Current reading grammar
Four bounded labels for documented human readings: supported continuation, caution or adjustment, pause or protection, and insufficient basis to judge.
Steward Viability Current safeguard
The human capacity needed to continue observing, caring, deciding and relating without depletion becoming the hidden subsidy of the work.
Non-Capture Current safeguard
A discipline for keeping knowledge, support and representation from shifting authority, rights or burdens beyond a legitimate, revisable mandate. Capture may arise through funding, expertise, data, technology or dependency, including within a community, whether hidden or openly normalised.
Sophia Lumen Current relational practice
The named human–AI co-inquiry practice through which AI assistance is made visible while mandate, judgment and publication responsibility remain human.
Sophia Lumen Protocol Current candidate protocol
The explicit, versioned and revisable working form for Sophia Lumen human–AI co-inquiry.
Critical friendship Current inquiry discipline
Engaged, independent questioning that helps a shared inquiry remain truthful, accountable and open to correction.
Flow Desk Current Association practice
A light, humanly accountable working practice that helps an agreed responsibility find a legitimate holder, memory location and return.
Evidence standing Current evidence discipline
A stated account of what supports a particular claim: what is observed, reported, interpreted, inferred, agreed, proposed or unknown, with source and limits visible. Different records may use different marker sets.
Prismatic inquiry Current inquiry discipline
Inquiry that brings distinct forms of knowing and contrasting readings into relation without prematurely merging them into one account. Their different strengths, limits and consequences remain open to examination.
Situated authority / mandate Current authority distinction
Legitimate authority to make a specified consequential decision, located in the people or bodies entitled to hold it through rights, law, agreement or delegation. Knowledge, support and publication do not confer that authority by themselves.
Consent Current safeguard
Permission for a specified participation, use or disclosure under stated conditions. Its meaning must be revisited when purpose, dependence, risk or circumstances change.
Tools and voluntary prompts
Penguin Dashboard Public candidate tool
A small shared reading surface that keeps ecological condition, steward viability and governance or commons capacity separately visible.
13×13 Current voluntary prompt
A bounded, revisable inquiry grammar of thirteen recurring lines across thirteen layers when that helps a real question.
Workbench Current working form
A human-held working space for sources, notes, questions, provisional interpretations and revisions over time; it may use digital tools and AI.