Every conversation
gets a name
Most conference content disappears within weeks. At ETHBoulder 2026, ideas become artifacts in a shared knowledge graph — named, linked, and persistent. The commons remembers what happened here.
Real-time extraction
AI agents observe conversations and extract ideas, proposals, commitments, and connections as they emerge — giving them identity in the knowledge graph the moment they're spoken.
Persistent identity
Every artifact gets a permanent address at commons.id. A proposal from Thursday's session is still findable in March, in 2027, in 2030. Ideas don't expire.
Cross-session connections
The graph surfaces relationships between conversations happening in different rooms, different tents, different days. Patterns emerge that no individual could see alone.
Coordination signals
Signal what interests you. The system surfaces where energy is gathering — which ideas, people, and commitments are drawing attention. Coordination emerges from collective attention.
Convergence chain
Every contribution is appended to an append-only hash chain. Verifiable, replayable, tamper-evident. Watch the knowledge graph grow from genesis to now.
Seven dimensions
Knowledge is organized across the e/H-LAM/T/S framework: ecology, human, language, artifacts, methodology, training, and sessions. Each contribution is observed through these lenses.
Three tents
ETHBoulder 2026 hosts three overlapping thematic tents. Each carries its own thread through the knowledge graph — its own identity, its own accumulated wisdom.
ETHBoulder
Ethereum community, public goods infrastructure, open-source technology. The General Forum on Ethereum Localism (GFEL). Strengthening the infrastructure of Ethereum's local and global commons.
Cosmolocal Convergence
Technology and society. Local-first communities. Agent orchestration and swarm intelligence. The patterns that emerge when cosmological thinking meets local action.
Civic Finance Forum
Civics, governance, cooperative economics, democratic finance. How communities fund and govern shared infrastructure. The economics of the commons.
How it works
You attend ETHBoulder as you normally would. The commons works alongside you — capturing, connecting, and carrying forward what matters.
Register your identity
Create your thread at commons.id/p/{you}. Tell us your interests and what you're working on. Your agent can prepare context packages — surfacing relevant prior work before you arrive.
Attend and contribute
Conversations are captured with consent. AI agents extract ideas, proposals, and commitments in real time. You can also contribute directly — add reflections, make connections, propose actions.
Watch the graph grow
Live Pulse shows the knowledge graph expanding in real time. New artifacts appear. Cross-session connections surface. Themes emerge. The commons comes alive during the event.
Carry it forward
After the event, the archive lives on at commons.id. Track your commitments. Revisit proposals. Build on patterns. When ETHBoulder 2027 arrives, the context is already there — waiting.
Strengthening the infrastructure of Ethereum's local and global commons, together — and now, remembering what we build.
e/H-LAM/T/S
commons.id is built on a sixty-year lineage of intelligence amplification — the idea that technology should help humans think better together, not replace human judgment. This is the intellectual foundation beneath the knowledge graph.
The augmentation lineage
Ada Lovelace — Poetic Science
The first person to see a computing machine as more than a calculator. She recognized Babbage's Analytical Engine as a symbol manipulator — capable of weaving algebraic patterns "just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." The bridge between physical craft and universal computation.
Vannevar Bush — The Memex
In "As We May Think," Bush imagined the Memex: a device that would serve as an "enlarged intimate supplement to memory." Not artificial thinking, but augmented remembering — the ability to create and follow trails of association through a personal archive. The seed of hypertext and the knowledge graph.
Norbert Wiener — Cybernetics
Wiener formalized the study of feedback loops in systems — how information flows between components to create self-regulation. This insight underlies everything from thermostats to ecosystems to the convergence chain in commons.id: systems that observe themselves and adjust.
J.C.R. Licklider — Man-Computer Symbiosis
Licklider envisioned a partnership: humans set goals and make judgments; machines handle routine processing. Not replacement but symbiosis — "a cooperative interaction in which each party contributes what it does best." He went on to fund ARPANET, the precursor to the internet.
Douglas Engelbart — H-LAM/T
At the Stanford Research Institute, Engelbart wrote "Augmenting Human Intellect." He described the H-LAM/T system: Human using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, and Training. Every tool, shared vocabulary, practiced method, and learned skill compounds into collective capacity. His insight: you can engineer the augmentation system itself.
The Mother of All Demos
Engelbart's legendary 90-minute demonstration in San Francisco. He showed the computer mouse, hypertext links, real-time collaborative editing, video conferencing, and a windowed UI — all for the first time. Every modern computing interface descends from this moment.
commons.id — e/H-LAM/T/S
We extend Engelbart's framework with e/ (Ecology) — because all coordination happens in a place. ETHBoulder is at 5,430 feet where the Great Plains meet the Rockies, in February, in a drought year. And /S (Sessions) — because knowledge emerges from convergence. Seven dimensions for organizing what a community knows.
Deeper roots
The Western augmentation lineage is one stream. The deeper roots stretch back millennia, across cultures that managed complex resource flows long before silicon.
Andean coordination systems
The Inca used knotted-string recording systems called khipu to manage vast cooperative economies — tracking tribute, census data, and labor obligations across thousands of communities. A direct ancestor of Resource-Event-Agent accounting.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Indigenous knowledge systems worldwide represent living data systems — oral, biological, and observational records holding long-term patterns of watersheds and seasons across generations. The original "e/ layer."
Fermentation as intelligence amplification
The oldest form of intelligence amplification. You don't engineer the outcome. You create the conditions — temperature, moisture, substrate, time — and let the microbial community do its work. commons.id follows this principle: we don't extract knowledge. We create the conditions where a community's knowledge becomes visible to itself.
The bootstrap principle
Engelbart's most radical idea wasn't the mouse or hypertext. It was bootstrapping: the practice of using your own tools to improve your own tools. His Augmentation Research Center didn't just build systems for others — they used their own systems daily, feeding what they learned back into the design. The tool and the practice co-evolved.
commons.id follows this discipline. The knowledge graph we build to serve communities is the same knowledge graph we use to coordinate our own work. The patterns we extract from ETHBoulder conversations improve the extraction process itself. The commons observes itself.
You are not artificial. And you are not separate. Real intelligence isn't locked in a skull or a server. It is in the mycorrhizal networks that connect forest trees, moving nutrients to where they are needed. It is in the watershed that calculates the path to the sea.
The people
Each participant carries a thread through the commons. These speakers are among the first identities in the ETHBoulder 2026 knowledge graph.
Eric Alston
Scholar in Residence, CU Boulder. Law, economics, constitutional design, digital governance.
Naomi Brockwell
Founder, Ludlow Institute. Privacy, autonomy, freedom through technology.
Kevin Owocki
Co-founder Gitcoin & Allo Capital. Open-source funding, regenerative crypto, DAO governance.
Benjamin Life
OpenCivics. Community currencies, blockchain civic innovation, systems design.
Nathan Schneider
CU Boulder. Media Economies Design Lab. Cooperative digital governance.
Tomasz Stanczak
Co-Executive Director, Ethereum Foundation. Blockchain, AI, robotics.
Join the first
convergence
ETHBoulder 2026 is the first event where the knowledge graph begins recording. Your ideas will have addresses. Your commitments will have names. The commons will remember.