The social fabric of complex and healthy societies is composed of many interlocking social agreements involving many community subsets.

We provide a grammar and implementation of a set of open protocols and standards for spinning up all kinds of small social agreement units and weaving them together in a meaningful and easy to use way.

The Weave:

• allows groups to embody their social context without any centralized infrastructure
• enables collaboration with fit-for-purpose group-ware Tools
• makes "own-your-data" real by design
• allows you to search all of your data across the groups you are part of
• grows with network-effects as Tools are added to the ecosystem
• centers groups and their members, not large corporate silos

What we now call "The Web" was the result of three critical new open standards: HTML, HTTP and the URL. These allowed anybody to publish documents and link to them from other documents. The advent and Javascript and CSS made it so these documents were both beautiful and as functional as any computer program.

But none of those open standards enabled creation and management of social context by groups. So, that critical function has become siloed into the big corporate websites: Facebook holds group's "Page", GitHub holds your code, GSuite holds your collaboration tools.

Holochain is an open standard that delivers creating small functioning units of social context, in a way that is both scalable, and decentralized. To that we now add the Weave Interaction Pattern, an open standard for creating, searching, linking and organizing these social context units into complex social fabric that yields "The Weave".

Our Methodology

Many deep infrastructure projects are built by creating a very detailed specification, and then building to it. With The Weave, this is not our way.

Instead we have built Moss, as a reference frame and discovery tool to understand what needs to exist inside The Weave, as we begin using it organically ourselves to grow our own social fabric. The concepts described in this website emerged over time, beginning from what was at first just understood as a distributed groupware platform, and are now solidifying into a more formal protocol with the Weave Interaction Pattern described above.

We expect this to become more formalized over time, but for now we want it to emerge from the experience and needs of actual groups using this framework. Thus we are not prematurely creating a "hard-spec" of for the WIP

Building Tools

Coding a Weave Tool is a matter of updating a standard Holochain hApp in a few ways.

It's trivial (a 5 minute task) to simply update your hApp to run in the context of a Weave Frame, it takes a little more work to add support for other aspects of the Weave Integration Protocol, but each of these affordances (searching, linking, embedding, creating) can be added one piece at a time and are not a heavy lift.

An good approach for newcomers may simply be to clone any one of the Moss Tools (clicking on the icon takes you to each Tools's github repo), and modify it to your needs. That's what we often todo!