About the Foundation
A foundation for what compounds.
The Cnidarian Foundation exists to publish the long work — the papers, the formal specifications, the methodology — that the Mozi Cooperative and the Citrate Network build on. We publish openly so the work outlives the institutions that produced it.
The role
The Cnidarian Foundation is the open-research arm of the Mozi House. We publish the Gradient Papers, host the formal specifications, and steward the citation graph that connects the Mozi Cooperative’s institutional argument and the Citrate Network’s technical foundation. We do not run inference. We do not hold capital. We publish.
The structure
The Foundation is incorporated as a stewarded research entity under Mozi Satori LLP. Editorial authority sits with the research circle — the working group of cooperative members whose contributions appear in the Gradient Papers. The circle is open to qualified researchers; admission is by published work, not by invitation. The circle’s bylaws are the relevant sections of the Mozi handbook (article 7, “the research circle”).
The license
The Gradient Papers are openly licensed under CC-BY-4.0. The formal specifications are public domain (CC0). The codebase the papers describe is open source under MIT. There are no private supplements. There is no “subscriber edition.” The work is the work; the public version is the canonical version.
The name
Cnidarians have coordinated complex behavior through decentralized nerve nets for over five hundred million years. The Foundation takes its name from the phylum because the phylum is the conceptual ancestor of the work it publishes: coordination without center, intelligence without director, coherence without command. Naming an institution after a phylum rather than a founder is a small commitment to outlast any individual involved.