ORI 101: ORI Onboarding

On the back of DefenderOfBasic having released the latest homepage for his ORI chapter (2026-04-14 EDIT: Also see Shadow Rebbe's onboarding article ), I am continuing from ORI 100 to explain how you, someone who wants to participate in (or even found) an open research institute , can get started.

This is a starting kit that outlines and describes technologies (tools, cookbooks, and frameworks) which you can use to begin creating a community and literature.

None of these items are strictly necessary; your open research institute could simply be a groupchat, or even your own personal notebook. But if you want a simple guide, you have come to the right place.

I will update this page over time; just trying to get this out there, since I have heard that there is a lot of new interest in ORI!

Tools

This is a list of applications which you can use out of the box.

personal knowledge management system (PKMS)

Obsidian

stable permalink social media

X / Twitter

Bluesky - built on AT Protocol

Reddit

walled garden social platform

Discord

Mastodon - built on AT Protocol

Slack

Facebook

static blog post or website creator

Substack

Leaflet - built on AT Protocol

Markdown Space

Cookbooks

Frameworks

Knowledge as building blocks. Like a university's syllabus of course prerequisites and corequisites, a literature might have many dependencies which not all interlocutors share.

Map what you can teach each other and where you have common ground. Defender's ORI uses the A / B / U review system , where an A is a novel true statement or idea, a B is a known true statement or idea, and a U is a false or unverifiable statement or idea.

I have my own criticism of the A / B / U model , but I still present it as something that might help you if "installed" into your community, esp. if it is not grounded in a clear tradition.

Save and write clear atomic descriptions of singular ideas which you can reference. LessWrong has a very good example of this . Their page of concepts serves as, within the context of their collective knowledge management system, an index of evergreen notes. Having something like this at your disposal can help your community be on the same page. Using Wikipedia (or another online encyclopedia specific to a field, like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ) can be a great supplement at first, but building your own community writings can clear up any fault lines that appear.

Social media as a roleplaying game. The exact type of game is decided by the players. Within the ORI literature, the base layer of the game should be positive sum; if the network of hyperlinks is bigger, there is more architecture for everyone to use! (Of course, competition for attention itself might be zero-sum. How do you win there?)

Focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of. There is also a place for polemics and for complaining about things you hate, since it can better clarify what you love. But in the end, a corpus cannot only be about what it is not, but rather about what it is. Existence is goodness , so there is no replacement for building up what is. Think of the parable of the wheat and the tares , where the tares are allowed to grow among the wheat but are thrown into the fire after the harvest. If your enemies are truly wrong and are utterly unrepentant, let them and all their works perish with time.

The public domain is a social media platform . Borrow freely from materials that are available to everyone, and participate in a literature extending far beyond our own timelines.

Remember: everyone's work automatically becomes ORI-compatible when it enters the public domain. This means that everything is, given enough time, part of the Open Research Institute. It is inevitable.