Our Philosophy
Where our values come from, what we take them to mean, and what makes them true
Village exists because communities deserve infrastructure that serves them, not the other way around. The dominant platforms of the internet age were built on a bargain: free access in exchange for surveillance. That bargain has produced extraordinary wealth for a small number of companies while eroding the autonomy of billions of people. We reject that bargain — not with outrage, but with an alternative.
These are not claims we can prove. Values are not that kind of thing. What we can do is show where each one comes from, what we take it to mean when building this, what we therefore owe you — and what, if anything, makes that true.
Epistemic humility
What is at stake. Sooner or later somebody asks the software a question that is really a disagreement between people.
There is a boundary to what can be stated clearly. What lies beyond it is not thereby unimportant: there are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words, and they make themselves manifest. They are simply not the kind of thing that can be settled by saying them.
What we take it to mean. Some questions have a right answer that a machine can work out, and some questions are arguments between people about what matters, which no amount of computing settles. Sorting one from the other is the design job, and in my view the second sort is the one that gets skipped, because it is where you have to say no. Naming the framework after Wittgenstein's book was not decoration. It was a way of committing ourselves to keep asking which sort of question is in front of us, and to say publicly where we think the line falls.
What we commit to. We will not build a system that settles a question it has no standing to settle, and we will tell you where we have drawn that line.
Pluralistic sovereignty
What is at stake. Somebody decides whose values the software serves. That happens whether or not anyone admits to deciding it.
Genuine values conflict, and they are incommensurable — there is no single scale on which the loss of one is repaid by the gain of another.
What we take it to mean. Two things people care about can both be worth caring about and still not convert into each other, so there is no exchange rate to look up when they collide. I understand why engineers want to treat that as a problem to be solved, but it is not one. It is the reason each community sets its own norms instead of inheriting ours, and the reason we will not take a disagreement, average it out, and hand back the average as the answer. If two people want genuinely different things, a position sitting between them describes nobody at all.
What we commit to. No outside body, us included, imposes a single ranking of what matters on your community. We will not average dissent away, and a minority position stays legible as itself.
Agency and consent
What is at stake. You can give a community its own space and still leave it with no real say, if the rules come from somewhere else and there is no way out.
Communities can and do govern shared resources themselves, durably, where their right to make their own rules and enforce them is recognised rather than overridden from outside.
What we take it to mean. This is the argument for why the rules are not ours to set. A community that cannot make its own rules, change them and enforce them is our tenant whatever the marketing says, and I would far rather build something people are able to leave than something they are locked into. Ostrom matters here because her work is empirical rather than hopeful: she went and looked at commons that had held together for centuries, and found they were governed by the people using them.
What we commit to. The rules your community runs on are yours to make, change and enforce, and we do not override them. Your records are yours to take with you in an open format, and yours to have erased, without needing our permission.
Nothing here is finished
What is at stake. You are usually handed software somebody else finished. Your choices are to use it as it is, or to leave.
Living things are not made by imposing a plan from above. They emerge through participation, adjusted a little at a time by the people who will live in the result. A pattern language is a set of generative rules that lets the inhabitants take part in the making.
What we take it to mean. This is the one I would most want understood, because it is what the Village actually is. It is a changeable template, and the changeability is not a feature we added, it is the shape of the thing. Governance rules arrive as packs a community adopts and then adjusts, rather than as settings we hand down. Feedback comes back at us from inside the thing rather than through a form nobody reads. And where our shape is simply wrong for a community, the right answer is that they can build on what sits underneath without our template in the way at all. Alexander is why I think a finished product would be a dead one.
What we commit to. The Village is a template you can change, not a product you have to accept. Where our shape is wrong for your community, you can adjust it, and where adjusting is not enough you should be able to build on what sits underneath without our template in the way.
Care for the vulnerable
What is at stake. Rules work best for the people they were written with in mind, and less well the further you get from them.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Elsewhere she describes what she means by it: suspending your own thought, leaving it available and empty, so the other person can enter it.
What we take it to mean. Software works by rules that apply to everybody who fits a description. Real people do not fit descriptions neatly, and in my experience the person who fits worst is usually the person with the least power to argue about it. So I do not think the useful question is how to build a caring system, which I am not sure means anything. The question is where our rules are going to fail somebody, and what happens to that person when they do.
What we commit to. Where our design would fail the person least able to argue with it, we will change the design rather than ask them to adapt.
Te Tiriti o Waitangi
What is at stake. Not everything that binds us is something we chose.
What we take it to mean. This has been tested once, which is the reason I would rather show it than describe it. We wanted to know whether a deliberation rehearsal should ever be allowed a controlled synthetic Māori voice. We asked Dr Karaitiana Taiuru, and he told us to keep the rule of no Māori voice and keep it safe. We kept it. He was also clear it was not a permanent no: the door opens when a tangata-whenua-controlled resource exists, and the permission comes from tangata whenua, not from us and not from whichever community happens to be running the rehearsal. Dr Taiuru has reviewed this work and continues to give feedback on it.
What we commit to. We will learn from Māori. Where we are given Māori advice, we will act on it or say plainly why we have not. It will not be filed. We will not generate a synthetic Māori voice.
What makes it true. Te Tiriti binds the Crown. It does not bind us in law, and we do not treat that as the end of the matter. We work in the country it made.
Why it is set out this way
A statement of values usually tries to prove itself, reaches for evidence in a direction evidence cannot reach, and settles for assertion instead. Values are not that kind of claim. They are inherited, and what can be examined is the inheritance — whether the idea is genuinely where we come from, and whether we have understood it or merely borrowed its name.
Proof belongs one level down, with the commitments. So each step above carries both, kept apart: where the value comes from, and what — if anything — makes the promise true. Where nothing does, it says so.