The projects are different, but we return to a few common questions.
Who can create something useful together? Connect people with complementary needs, skills, and resources.
What did they agree to do, and what happened? Keep useful evidence of the work and its outcome.
What should the next interaction learn from this one? Use the record to improve decisions, cooperation, and the rules around them.
These ideas are at different stages of development. The full model described here is a research direction, not a system operating across every WebTree project today.
Circles and the concepts
Impact, Pressure, and Imprint
| Concept | Plain explanation | Important boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Actor | A participant: a person, project, organization, AI agent, service, or workflow | Using one technical model does not make human and machine rights or responsibilities identical |
| Circle | A group with a purpose and its own rules | People can belong to several; Circles can contain Circles |
| Interaction history | A record of commitments, actions, and outcomes | A report is not automatically a verified fact; privacy still matters |
| Impact | Positive value attributed under a Circle’s rules | Context and evidence determine what it means |
| Pressure | Resource use, costs, burdens, or harm attributed under those rules | Legitimate resource use and wrongdoing must remain distinguishable |
| Imprint | A contextual interpretation of contribution using Impact and Pressure | It is not a universal score of a person’s value; no final universal formula is settled |
| Trust | An estimate of whether a particular commitment will be fulfilled under particular conditions | Reliability in one activity does not establish reliability everywhere |
| Skill | The ability to perform a particular activity | A useful contribution or a popular reputation does not establish every relevant skill |
| Reputation | What others currently believe about a participant | Perception can differ from evidence and calibrated trust |
| Governance authority | Permission or influence over a specific decision | It should not follow automatically from a contribution score |
| Contribution inheritance | Keeping earlier useful work connected to what others build on it | An ancestry link is not proof of a precise financial entitlement |
| Responsible Democracy | A research idea in which decisions develop a track record that can inform governance credibility | Attribution, minority protection, and decision rights remain unresolved |
| Forking | Creating an alternative project or rule set from an earlier state | Assets, obligations, private data, and branding do not automatically transfer |
| Cooperation stability | Whether the system makes reliable cooperation attractive under realistic incentives | This is a system question, separate from individual Imprint |
History and interpretation are different
Illustrative example — not a reported order.
Imagine a Maker reports a successful print and the customer confirms that it fits. Later use reveals a defect.
The original acceptance still happened. The defect report also happened. A useful history contains both, along with the design version, relevant conditions, and any disagreement about the cause.
A group may improve how it evaluates such evidence. It should still be possible to see what the old rules said, what the current rules say, and why they differ.
That is what we mean by rules that can improve over history that cannot be quietly rewritten.
Keep the context attached
A record of manufacturing work can help assess a manufacturing commitment. It cannot measure a human life, establish someone’s worth, or automatically determine their rights.
We want the system to make evidence understandable, show uncertainty, allow correction and challenge, and give newcomers a fair way to participate.
Explore trust and contribution · Read the governance questions
The terminology has evolved: Imprint was also called Influence in earlier writing. The current term is Imprint. An early Impact-minus-Pressure formula is a simplified hypothesis within a rule set, not a settled universal measure. A Circle is a cooperation and governance boundary; a Project Cell is an execution boundary.