Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) describes the parts any self-governing system needs. Project Cybersyn in Chile was designed with it, and so is this one. A plain-words summary of the model is in memory/collective/viable-system-model-basics.md.
The mapping
| VSM system | Role | In Commonweal |
|---|---|---|
| System 1: Operations | The units doing real work, as autonomous as possible | The commonwealths (neighbourhoods, towns, cities, regions) and the people, communities and guilds within them. They run their own affairs. onboarding brings people in. |
| System 2: Coordination | Stops units getting in each other's way | Shared open standards that make every part compatible, plus introductions and shared records, so groups can see each other and avoid clashes or duplicate effort. |
| System 3: Control | Shares out resources and looks after the whole, now | mutual-aid-matching matches offers to needs, and administration carries out the routine decisions in Commonweal's mandate. |
| *System 3\: Audit** | Checks that records match reality | memory-keeping: provenance, expiry and correction of records. |
| System 4: Intelligence | Looks outward and ahead | knowledge-commons: learning, teaching and bringing in new knowledge and technology. |
| System 5: Policy | Sets identity and purpose | The people's state, answerable to the people, who hold final authority. It sets identity/ and the mandate through governance. Commonweal holds these principles; it does not write them. |
| Algedonic channel | Pain alarm that bypasses the hierarchy | algedonic-signal: urgent need goes straight to whoever can act. |
Recursion
The VSM is recursive: every viable system contains viable systems and is part of a bigger one. Commonwealism builds society the same way. A neighbourhood commonwealth is a viable system inside a town commonwealth, inside a regional commonwealth, inside the Nation, which is the commonwealth of commonwealths.
Each commonwealth runs its own Commonweal on the same open code and national standards, and each treats the levels around it the same way: respect the autonomy of the level below (subsidiarity), coordinate across the level it is working at, and pass upward only what the higher level needs, which is totals, trends and alarms, never detail about individuals. The national standards are what make every level compatible with every other.
Where the AI sits
System 5 is the people's state and, above it, the people, never the AI. Commonweal's model and prompts implement Systems 2, 3, 3\* and 4, plus the alarm channel. Its authority in System 3 is exactly the mandate it has been granted, and accountable humans can always overrule it. This is deliberate: a viable system whose identity is set by its machinery is not self-governing.
This is a snapshot of the public Commonweal brain, dated 2026-10-28. The original document remains the source of record.
Read the exact source on GitHub ↗