The Substrate is the shared enabling infrastructure for Hitchhiker projects. It is the **soil**, not the platform: a common layer that quietly supports Hitchhiker Guides, events, and mutual governance without owning or centralising them.
# Purpose The Substrate exists to: - Let many different Hitchhiker Guides co-exist and cross-link - Support events and gatherings that create real-world trust - Enable mutual governance across projects without a single owner - Keep the technical stack swappable while social commitments remain stable It is designed so that new guides, clubs, festivals, labs or archives can plug in and participate without asking permission.
# Core Ideas The Substrate is based on a few simple ideas: - **People first**: identities and relationships outlast any single app - **Stories as structure**: guides, events and decisions are all forms of shared narrative - **Federation by default**: many servers, sites and tools, loosely joined - **Composable governance**: rules you can read, remix and ratify together, not hidden in terms of service These ideas shape how we design Hitchhiker Passport, Anarchive, and other shared tools.
# What The Substrate Provides At a high level, the Substrate supports four kinds of capability. - **Identity and presence** Lightweight, human-facing identities (passports, badges, handles) that can move between guides, events and tools while still respecting anonymity and safety where needed - **Shared memory** Federated pages, timelines and archives that remember what communities do together, from tiny experiments to long-running projects - **Coordination of events** Ways to propose, schedule, adapt and document events so that they feed back into guides and archives instead of disappearing into chat logs - **Mutual governance** A fabric for agreements, norms and decision-making that communities can inspect, test in practice and fork when needed, inspired by Community-Driven Development
# Not A Platform The Substrate is deliberately **not**: - A single app - A single company or foundation - An app store or marketplace - A social network with global feeds and follower counts Instead, it is a **set of shared protocols, practices and reference implementations** that many platforms and tools can use. You can stand up your own instance, your own wiki, your own festival tooling, and still be “on” the Substrate.
# Layers Of The Substrate You can think of the Substrate as four loosely coupled layers. - **Social layer** Agreements, rituals, codes of conduct and playful norms that define how we behave together at events, in guides and in governance circles - **Narrative layer** Stories, pages, timelines and maps linking guides, places, people, and decisions using tools like Federated Wiki and the Anarchive Substrate - **Coordination layer** Event calendars, task boards, signalling channels and role systems that help people self-organise without central command - **Technical layer** Protocols, schemas, file formats and reference services that keep everything interoperable while remaining replaceable Each layer should be understandable and remixable by communities, not just implementers.
# Hitchhiker Guides On The Substrate Hitchhiker-style guides (to cities, movements, species or practices) share a common pattern when they live on the Substrate. - Each guide is a constellation of pages, events and people - Each guide can run its own stack, but speaks a shared “substrate language” for identity, pages and events - Guides can link to each other, re-use components and share governance patterns without merging communities This allows a new Hitchhiker Guide to start small and still benefit from the wider ecosystem.
# Events On The Substrate Events are treated as **first-class citizens** of the Substrate, not just announcements. - An event is a temporary micro-governance space: who is invited, what is allowed, how decisions are made - Events produce artefacts: notes, recordings, decisions, follow-up tasks, which flow back into guides and archives - Events can be local, hybrid or fully online, but they all share a minimal common structure for identity, consent and attribution Festivals, assemblies, pop-up labs and quiet reading groups can all be described using the same basic vocabulary.
# Mutual Governance On The Substrate Mutual governance means we: - Prefer agreements that people can read and discuss together - Record decisions in places that are easy to reference and critique - Allow communities to fork constitutions, processes and roles when the fit is wrong The Substrate supports this through tools like the Hitchhiker Constitution and Community-Driven Development, making it easier to: - Draft and revise shared rules - Run participatory processes (assemblies, proposals, trials) - Translate lived practice into evolving documents
# Relationship To Tools And Apps Any given tool (chat server, wiki engine, voting app, calendar system) is **a vehicle on the Substrate**, not the Substrate itself. - Tools are expected to come and go - Data and agreements should remain legible across tools - Communities should be able to migrate without losing their memory or governance history A reference stack might include things like federated wikis, public key identities, event schemas and open formats, but no single piece is mandatory.
# Evolution Of The Substrate The Substrate is itself governed by the communities that use it. - Changes to core concepts, schemas or protocols are treated as constitutional questions - New reference implementations are explored experimentally before being recommended - Critique and playful misuse are welcomed as tests of robustness Over time, the Substrate should become a shared commons: a set of gently evolving agreements about how we connect guides, events and governance without centralising them.