About

Reason Commons is a project exploring a better way for groups to think together and turn that thinking into action. You hold your reasoning as living trees — a tree of change (what is the goal, what is blocking it, why) and a tree of action (what to do about it) — and you map evidence and discussion onto them, so a group builds one shared, inspectable structure instead of talking past each other in threads that never accumulate.

We are building AI tooling to make this cheap enough to actually use. AI drafts the trees from material you already have, and — the part we are most excited about — folds ongoing forum discussion back into them as structured annotations, so the analysis keeps improving over time instead of scrolling away.

The approach is grounded in the Logical Thinking Process, a forty-year-old method from the Theory of Constraints — the most thorough realisation of this idea. We keep its rigour without requiring its vocabulary.

There is no app to log into yet. There is a way of thinking, a demo of the four steps, an explainer series, and a live application of the method to one movement's strategy. Enough to judge whether it is worth adopting, joining, or funding.

Three strands

1. Tooling. AI-assisted software for creating, maintaining, and evolving analytical trees — goal trees, issue trees, problem trees — with an annotation layer that connects ongoing discussion to the structure so the trees stay current.
2. Community adoption. Working with communities already engaged in complex reasoning — AI governance, effective altruism, climate, social movements — to demonstrate the approach and develop the practices that make it stick.
3. Living laboratory. Applying the system within Second Renaissance, coordinating strategic thinking across an active community whose valuable contributions currently stay fragmented.

Who is behind it

A collaboration between Rufus Pollock and David Joseph. Rufus's thread: issue trees, SCQH, and structured problem-framing — a tool he wanted for more than ten years. David's thread: "Abductio," a proposition-decomposition process inside his Promise Protocol framework, and prior work with the Promise Foundation.

Related work: Promise Foundation · Provisio · issuetrees.com

Follow along / get involved

Development happens in the open on GitHub; planning is in issues. A low-volume update list is coming. For the fuller problem framing, see motivation.

For contributors

Repository layout, conventions, and the AI-agent skills are documented in AGENTS.md. Running the dashboard locally against a single project: docs/dashboard.md.