Plain, precise definitions of the terms used in the paper. Where a term names something still being built, it says so.
The Village. A private online home for a community, run on infrastructure the operator owns in New Zealand and the EU, built so the community owns what happens inside it.
Sovereign record. The community’s own ledger of decisions and records. Append-only (entries are added, never quietly rewritten) and tenant-scoped (each community’s ledger is its own).
Tamper-evident seal. A cryptographic signature over a record’s canonical form, made with an Ed25519 key, such that any later change to the record breaks the seal. It shows tampering; it does not prevent someone with access from writing a new record.
Ed25519. A modern public-key signature scheme. The private key signs; anyone with the matching public key can verify, without the private key.
did:web. A way of publishing a public key at a web address the community controls, so a seal can be checked against a key that is provably the community’s own, not one we assert on its behalf.
Offline verifier. A small standalone program — no platform code, no network call — that recomputes a record’s canonical hash and checks its signature on the reader’s own machine. It is how a member confirms a record is untouched without trusting us.
Tenant / tenant-scoped. A tenant is one community’s data boundary. Every database query is scoped to a single tenant, so one community’s contents cannot surface in another’s.
Fail-closed. A design choice: when something goes wrong, the system refuses rather than guesses. A query with no tenant context returns nothing; a synthesis that would break a rule is refused, not stored.
Situated AI. Models that run on the operator’s own machines and are grounded in one community’s own material — of the community, rather than a single large model trained on everyone and answerable elsewhere.
Open-weight model. A model whose weights are published and can be run on hardware you control, rather than reached only through a vendor’s remote service. The Village serves open-weight models (Qwen-class) on its own GPUs.
The Assembly. A Village deciding something that matters: members propose, argue, and record where they stand, and the disagreement is kept rather than settled by weight of numbers.
Dissent-preserving synthesis. The step where models draw a whole deliberation together into a legible result under a hard rule enforced in code: they may find the shape of a room’s thinking, but may not average its people away. A minority position survives, named, with its reasoning.
Objection types. When a member objects, the objection is typed — safety, values, effectiveness, process, resources, or other — and carried by name into the result, so a values objection is never quietly folded into a number.
Federation (Consolidated Village Consensus). Reconciling many Assemblies into one account of where a whole population stands, under the same no-averaging rule. Real code, currently off by default and run on a rehearsal footing — a capability, not yet a standing service.
Agentic infrastructure. The layers above a Village in which a model does more than answer — it acts, within the community’s own rules, on a record it cannot forge and under the community’s own law. Being built; named here as direction, not finished work.
Safe ground / sovereignty. Hosting and law under jurisdictions that protect the community — New Zealand and the EU — with no US-owned dependency in the serving path, so no foreign platform or law can reach in and reset the terms.