Socratic Hearth is an experimental diplomatic and civic participation form. It will become an adoption record of guidelines and a forum of forums. Practicing consensus through healthy debate and AI generated counterpositions to one’s formed worldview are other goals.
The Hearth is a Futurism Institute property, and a position written here is a plain file in the pattern Values Commons keeps, so it stays the writer’s own.
A place to be argued with.
Almost every place built for public argument is shaped like an arena: positions face each other, a crowd watches, and the reward goes to whoever performs best. Winning an arena is a different skill from thinking, and this page is shaped for the second one.
What changes when the shape changes
Three things, and none of them is a moderation policy. A hearth is small enough that people can hear each other. Nobody is performing for spectators, because there are none. And the record of what was said belongs to the people who said it rather than to the platform hosting them.
The consequence is unglamorous: you can change your mind here without it costing you anything. In an arena, changing your mind is a loss in front of an audience. The shape of the room produces that.
Write a position you could be talked out of.
Four fields. Where you stand, how firmly, the strongest case against you as its holder would put it, and the observation that would move you. Everything stays in your browser.
The last field is the one that decides whether the rest is a position or an identity. A stance with no reachable observation behind it cannot be argued with, only agreed or disagreed with, which is what an arena is for.
What a session does with these
People arrive holding one each. The shared stance is computed from what they brought, so it is reproducible by anyone with the same files, and where the group splits, the split is published rather than settled by a tiebreak. The question is genuinely undecided or the meeting is an announcement and should have been written down instead.
What comes out is a document the group keeps: the question, who was present, what was agreed, and what stayed open. That part has its own address, at The Work Party.
How far a position travels
Trust here is short-range, and the reason is measured. A checker handed the answer succeeds almost always; a checker that has to reconstruct the answer before it can judge succeeds three times in a hundred. Every hop a vouch travels is one more step from the thing itself and one step closer to reconstruction, so confidence does not decay gently along a chain. It falls off a slope that has been measured.
So this is a design for a room, and for rooms that know one other room. That is a smaller claim than a network.
Where this honestly stands
The deliberation engine is built and running: you can find group agreement and make a shared plan today, on files, with no server deciding for the group. What does not exist yet is a public place to do it with strangers, because that needs a hosted origin and this project will not ship a participation promise it cannot keep.
There is no waiting list, no email capture, and no launch date invented to fill the gap. When there is a room, this page becomes it.
The adoption register
A position here begins as something one person could be talked out of. The register holds the far end of that arc: what a group, having deliberated, publicly committed to, while keeping it revisable. An adoption without a review date and a revision condition is refused; that is the entry bar, and it is the socratic part.
| Who | What | Standing | Dissent | Review by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Futurism Institute and its satellite pages self-adoption | The humane-web standards 1.1 | standing since 2026-08-20 | None recorded. | 2027-02-20 |
| Values Commons / Conscious Consuming self-adoption | The humane-web standards 1.1 | standing since 2026-08-20 | None recorded. | 2027-02-20 |
| The family, toward its own readers self-adoption | Steward guidelines: between communities 0.1 | standing since 2026-08-26 | None recorded; the deciding record (wpr-0001) names the circle’s smallness as a limit. | 2027-02-26 |
External adoptions: none yet. This line changes when it is true, and not before. When a review date passes without re-affirmation the entry renders as lapsed, automatically: a register that never lapses is a wall of plaques. A group adopts by publishing its own adoption file wherever it keeps its records and pointing this page at it; the record stays the group's and leaves with them.
Part of a working set
The Futurism Institute builds tools that show their work.Conscious Consuming ranks everyday choices by what you value. Kosplora does the same for what you want to learn. This is the layer where those private judgments meet other people.