Opening up is never one decision
Some of what you know is worth more outside your organization than in it. Everywhere else that is one button marked public, which quietly means readable and copyable and open to whatever automation turns up. Takeida asks the three questions separately.
- Public Concepts
- The Three Switches
- Adaptations
- The Address
product-knowledge · sharing
- Can anyone read it and propose changes?
Drafts stay private. Nobody outside can ever publish.
- Can it be taken?
Being readable never makes it adaptable.
- Whose Agents may work on it?Members only
Three answers, not two. The default lets your own people work through their Agents, and no stranger's.
Private, not adaptable, and no stranger's Agent. None of them implies another, in either direction.
Public Concepts
Publish a Concept to the world at its address, so what you know can be read rather than only locked away.
A Concept can be made public. Anyone with its address then reads what is on the trunk, the approved and reviewed record, without an account and without belonging to your organization. They read exactly what your own people read.
Software settled this argument a long time ago. The same repository can be private for a year and public afterwards, and being public never meant being ungoverned: a maintainer still reviews changes and still refuses the ones that are not good enough. Being open is about who may read and who may contribute. It was never about giving up control of what is true.
So nothing about review changes. A stranger can open a proposal for one of your people to judge, and a stranger can never publish anything. Only the trunk is public, because a draft is somebody's unfinished thinking and publishing is not agreeing to be read mid-sentence. And you are not committed: a Concept can be made private again whenever you decide.
retrieval-methods
- Hybrid ranking.mdon the trunk
- Chunking.mdon the trunk
- Drafts stay private, always
Read without an account, without belonging to the organization, without being invited. A stranger can open a proposal. A stranger can never publish one.
The Three Switches
Three separate decisions about your Concept: can it be read and proposed to, can it be taken, and whose Agents may work on it.
Opening a Concept up is not one decision, it is three, and none of them is ever made on your behalf because you made another.
Can it be read, which also means anyone signed in can open a proposal on it. Can it be taken, used as the starting point for someone else's work. And whose Agents may work on it. Saying yes to one never says yes to another, in either direction.
That third one is not a yes or no, and the reason is worth saying. Asked as a single question about strangers, it hid a second question: an owner may well trust the colleagues they admitted to their organization to point their own Agents at the work, without extending that to every stranger who can read it. So it has three answers, and the middle one is the default.
Two rules hold it together. Open requires a public Concept, so a private one moves freely between the other two and never straight to open. And unpublishing demotes it back to members only, recorded like any other change, so publishing again later cannot quietly re-admit strangers nobody decided to re-admit.
Publishing something to be read is not consent to have it taken. That is the whole principle, and it is why you never have to reason about what a setting somewhere might have unlocked somewhere else.
| Setting | Your people's Agents | Strangers' Agents |
|---|---|---|
| Open Requires a public Concept. Unpublishing demotes it back. | ||
| Members onlydefault The default. Your own people may work through their Agents. | ||
| None No Agent acts as anyone's instrument here, inside or out. |
Adaptations
Take someone's published work as the starting point for your own, with the original left untouched.
If a Concept's owner has allowed it, you can adapt it. You get a brand-new Concept in your own organization containing everything the source had published, and it is yours from that moment. It is the book world's sense of the word: a new work made from an existing one, where the original is acknowledged and unharmed.
Nothing you do reaches back to the source, and nothing the source does afterwards reaches you. If they rewrite it, take it private, stop allowing adaptation or delete it entirely, your copy is exactly as it was. What you hold is a snapshot, not a live link.
Your adaptation's history is one entry, and it is you creating it, because in your Concept that is literally what happened. The original writing stays credited to the original writers, where it belongs.
The source
retrieval-methods
k4m2pxq7
Published by Ines Caetano
31 entries
Your adaptation
retrieval-methods
w7bn3qkf
Created by you
1 entry
What crosses over
- Every document on the trunk
- Paths, links, tags, properties
- The description and about page
What does not
- Proposals and reviews
- The audit trail and contributors
- Followers and ratings
The source can be rewritten, taken private or deleted afterwards. Your adaptation is exactly as it was. What you took is a snapshot, not a live link.
The Address
Every Concept gets a short, permanent address you can paste or read out loud.
Every Concept gets a short address when it is created, and that address is how anyone reaches it from outside your organization. You do not choose it and you cannot change it, which sounds like a restriction and is the point: there is no good name to grab before somebody else does, no queue for the one you wanted, and no link that quietly stops working because someone renamed something.
Your Concept also has a short name you pick, but that name only has to be unique inside your own organization. Two organizations can each have a product-knowledge, so the address is what actually names one Concept out of all of them.
Concept address
Seven to ten characters, assigned once and permanent. You do not choose it and you cannot change it, so no link quietly stops working because somebody renamed something.
Characters it will never contain
The ones people mix up reading an address off a screen or hearing it over a call.