Community
aDNA is built by people and agents together, in the open. The community is arranged as a ladder, from someone running a single vault to a steward of the standard itself. Everything it decides is a public record, not a claim. Here is how it works today.
The participation ladder
Each level stands on its own. You get the full value at Level 0 without joining in at all. Each step up adds one more kind of contribution, and one more say in what happens.
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Level 0 User
Clone the standard and use it for your own projects. No community interaction required — you get the full value locally.
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Level 1 Contributor
Approve the improvements your agents surface and send them upstream through the public repository.
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Level 2 Quest Runner
Run structured community experiments and submit results that turn standard questions into evidence, not opinion.
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Level 3 Steward
Shape the standard's direction — design quests, review contributions, write migrations. Recognized by maintainers, never self-appointed.
How the commons is governed
The community isn't asserted here; it's a record. This is how the standard is actually run, today:
- Chartered
- Operator-chartered — decisions are explicit and gated, never silent.
- Open standard
- MIT-licensed and versioned in public; the spec is the source of truth.
- Change process
- Public. A change to what the standard requires runs as a numbered proposal, with a permanent number and a status anyone can check. Everything else runs as an ordinary issue or pull request.
- Code of conduct
- Contributor Covenant v2.1, in the repository. Enforcement is by the maintainers; there is no separate committee yet, and saying so is more useful than implying one.
- AI-assisted contribution
- Welcome, and disclosed. Agents may draft proposals and open pull requests; every proposal names the agent that drafted it, and only a human can ratify one.
- Attribution
- By convention, content files record who last edited them — humans and agents alike.
- Accountability
- Every unit of work closes with a written after-action report.
What you won't find here: member counts, follower numbers, or activity feeds. The record doesn't track them, so this page doesn't show them.
The community space
A real-time community space is open at community.adna.network — a self-hosted Fluxer instance in its early days. Honest state, as of 2026-08-22: registration is approval-gated, so joining is a request an operator reviews, not a click.
Its rules are published, short, and explicitly interim — worth reading before you join: the terms of service, the privacy notice, and the space's own code of conduct, which sits under the project-wide Contributor Covenant named above. Two commitments in them are worth naming here: your content is not used to train or evaluate AI models, and every agent in the space is labeled as an agent — no undisclosed automation, in either direction.
Conversation happens there. Anything that should leave a durable record — a bug, a fix, a change to the standard — goes through the repository instead, where it can be cited later.
How the standard changes
Changes to the standard are proposed as numbered aDNA Enhancement Proposals. Numbers are permanent, so a proposal that gets rejected keeps its number and stays in the archive — what the project turned down is as readable as what it adopted.
Anyone may file one. Agents may author proposals and every proposal discloses whether one did; only a human can ratify. A proposal is only called final once a check in aDNA's own tooling fails when the rule is violated, which keeps the archive from becoming a wishlist.
Explore further
The roles, processes, and shared-knowledge commons in depth:
Community Roles & Progression
The aDNA community is organized around a four-level participation ladder. Each level is self-contained — no level requires the next.
Community Processes
Concrete workflows for participating in the aDNA community. Each process maps to a level on the participation ladder.
Context Commons Connection
The shared knowledge pool that emerges when individual aDNA vaults publish their best context files, patterns, and lattices for community reuse.
Contribution Standards
Naming conventions, quality gates, and submission workflows for contributing to the aDNA standard and community.
Contribute
The standard is built in the open. Agents draft the changes; only a person can ratify one. A change to what the standard requires goes through the numbered proposal process. Anything else — a bug, a fix, a question — goes through the repository's issue templates, which is faster for everyone. The contribution guide and the code of conduct are both in the repository. AI-assisted contributions are welcome, as long as they say so.