The shared library of the Relational Technology Project — every entry as a markdown file, mirrored nightly from the database. The git history is the commons' public changelog.
Browse it rendered at relationalbuilder.org/commons — theme guides, a story wall, a map of how everything connects. This repo is the same commons in its rawest, most portable form.
content/
recipe/ practices with steps, ready to run on your block
tool/ working neighborhood software, remixable in Relational Builder
story/ first-hand accounts from real blocks
prompt/ starting points for building your own version
framework/ the thinking underneath the practices
methodology/ how the RTP builds, documented
reference/ the wider library the commons learns from
commons.json every entry in one machine-readable file
connections.json the steward-confirmed graph between entries
Every file carries YAML frontmatter (title, kind, tags, attribution, license, lineage) and links its connections as relative paths, so the graph works on GitHub and in local tools alike.
Obsidian: clone the repo, open the folder as a vault, and the commons opens as a graph — backlinks, tags, search, the lot. git pull keeps it current.
The commons lives in a database, stewarded through RT Studio and grown through Relational Builder. The database is canonical. A nightly workflow runs scripts/mirror.mjs — which anyone can run, no keys needed — and commits only when something actually changed. Read the commit log and you're reading the history of the commons: what was added, what was revised, when the ecosystem grew.
Pull requests are welcome — as suggestions. Because the database is canonical, a merged edit here would be overwritten by the next mirror run; so instead, a steward reviews your PR, applies the accepted change upstream, and the next mirror commit makes it real (we'll close your PR with a link to that commit, and credit travels with the change). See CONTRIBUTING.md.
- Neighboring Recipes — the hand-written, forkable cookbook of neighboring practices. About fifty practices live in both places; for those, the database entry here is canonical and the Neighboring Recipes file is listed as a source in its frontmatter. The cookbook keeps its own voice on purpose.
- Relational Builder — the open-source app builder the commons feeds.
Entries marked RCL-1.0 are shared under the Reciprocal Commons License v1.0 — free for neighbors, communities, and place-based organizations; commercial platforms, services, and AI systems need permission. Attribution travels with every entry: keep the credit attached when you reuse or republish. Entries derived from other publishers (the civic-media shelf) name and link their original source, which governs their terms.