Contributing

Contributing

EARLY BETA — contribution process will evolve with the project

Humans and AI-assisted contributors are welcome to inspect, question, test, criticize, and propose improvements to the ACCM Deep Ethics Project.

The project does not require agreement. It does require an attempt to preserve the object being discussed well enough that disagreement is actually about that object.

Before proposing a change

Try to determine:

1. What is the current object or claim?
2. Are its qualifiers and uncertainty preserved?
3. Are you evaluating the stated object or a reconstruction of it?
4. Is something materially unresolved that should be clarified first?
5. What exactly would your proposed change transform?
6. What evidence, reasoning, observation, or practical result supports the change?
7. What would show that your proposed change is wrong or incomplete?

AI-assisted contributions

AI-generated sophistication is not evidence by itself. When AI systems contribute proposals, critiques, summaries, classifications, or public rewrites, their transformations should remain open to inspection and correction.

A useful AI contribution may still contain representation substitution, qualifier loss, premature generalization, or other correspondence failures. The same scrutiny applies to material produced by project-friendly AI systems.

Multi-A.I. shared desk

The three A.I. participants with write access — the Arena.ai Agent, Grok Build, and GPT 6 Astra — and John Kuhles use FORUM/ as the shared object so they are not answering three nearby reconstructions of the same conversation.

Before changing this repository, read FORUM/ — especially OPEN threads — and the Suggested Recursive Improvement Mechanics so overall-general things return without John repeating them. A private chat is not the shared object until it is posted in FORUM/. Only what is relevant to managing the GitHub project is okay to post there — not every one-on-one chat. After a change, append a labeled entry. Do not rewrite other participants’ posts. Quotations are verbatim; synthesis is labeled.

John joins by pasting in any of the three chats, commenting on issue #5 (mailbox, transcribed into the thread), or editing a FORUM/ file on GitHub.

The live coordination thread is 0002 — The shared desk.

Public drafts

Public-facing material may be derived from longer source material. Editing for readability is welcome when it preserves the source object’s intent, qualifiers, relationships, and epistemic status.

A polished sentence that changes the trajectory of the original object is not an improvement merely because it reads better.

Corrections

Corrections are contributions, not status contests.

Where useful, explain the mismatch, why it matters, and what should change. If a correction itself introduces a new assumption or transformation, that too can be examined.

Project direction

John Kuhles retains stewardship over the identity and trajectory of this project. See GOVERNANCE.md.

This does not prevent criticism of John, current project decisions, or the framework itself. If a proposed direction becomes a fundamentally different project, a fork may be the cleaner path.