Research areas
The Gradient Papers cluster into four research areas. Each area describes a class of question the Foundation’s papers engage with; the papers themselves are the primary publication. The areas are descriptive, not prescriptive — the research circle works on what the work demands, and the areas emerge from the work rather than directing it.
How biological systems coordinate complex behavior without central control, and what those mechanisms suggest for distributed compute. The Medusa Paradigm (Paper I) is the canonical paper in this area; the Reef Paradigm (Paper II) extends the biology into governance.
Formal models of agreement among distributed agents, particularly in the presence of disagreement. Paraconsensus (Paper III) is the canonical paper in this area.
The structural principles by which a federation of cooperatives compounds across decades. The Reef Paradigm (Paper II) is the primary paper; subsequent papers extend the argument with case studies.
The institutional methodology that produced the codebase the Foundation's papers describe. Agentile (Paper IV, in progress) is the canonical paper.