Reason Commons
Reason Commons
A better way to think together — and to act on it.
Talk a goal, a problem or a plan through with an AI, alone or as a group, and come away with a shared picture of what you are trying to achieve, what stands in the way and what you will do about it. Every contribution keeps its author's name, nothing counts as agreed until people accept it, and the next conversation starts where the last one ended. The point is that our thinking should accumulate.
There's no app to sign up for: it runs as a skill in Claude Code, Codex and similar agents.
Read a commons: a shared goal and the reasoning built around it, laid out so anyone can follow it. Ours, the accepted reasoning behind Reason Commons itself, sits beside a clearly labelled fictional example that shows everything a commons can hold, from disagreements to what happened when a change was tried.
On the questions that matter most, we generate plenty of heat and not much light. There is real discussion — on the forum, in long documents, in calls — but it repeats, it scatters, and it doesn't build; you can't point at a 200,000-word strategy and improve one sentence of it. We never build the cathedral, we just make a bigger mess. Trees are a way out: break a goal into the parts it actually rests on, so the whole and the parts stay connected and you can see how a single step — or a single objection — bears on what you're trying to do. Then the hard part, getting freeform discussion connected back to the tree without anyone doing tedious filing. It has to be close to effortless or it won't happen, and AI is what makes that possible now.
Lay out what a goal rests on, what stands in its way and what to do about it, with the whole and the parts kept connected.
The AI tooling we're buildingAI drafts the trees from what you already have, and folds ongoing discussion back in — so it enriches the conversation and improves the tree at the same time.
Try itInstall the ltp skill in Claude Code or Codex and talk a real problem through, alone or with your group.
Start here — the three-part series
The way in is a short scrolling series: why fixes don't stick, why reasoning has to be made visible, and the forty-year-old method that connects them. Then watch the method meet a real movement's strategy in The Forum Doesn't Remember. Full contents on the series page.
Demos & experiments — rough, unfinished, illustrative
Turning a room's scattered goals into one tree everyone can sign off on.
TalkA talk that performs the methodFive acts; the audience experiences the process before hearing its name.
The method underneath
The rigour comes from the Logical Thinking Process (LTP), part of the Theory of Constraints — a way of laying out a goal, the things blocking it, and the change that gets past them. Our Guide is a plain-language introduction, with a reading list if you want the books.
About
Reason Commons is a collaboration between Rufus Pollock and David Joseph. It has three strands: building the AI tooling; working with communities that already reason hard in public — AI governance, effective altruism, climate; and using Second Renaissance as a living laboratory. More about the project and the people →
