Brand and domain naming

Working memo — updated 30 July 2026, supersedes the 12 July ClaimTrees decision

What we are naming (clarified)

We are naming this website, not a product/tool and not (yet) the underlying methodology.

The site is reference/vision/demo material — it presents LTP-inspired ideas, examples, and applications. It is not a tool for building trees or doing LTP; there is no app to log into.
The methodology itself (claim trees + annotation + collective alignment) may get its own name later, once there's an actual tool/product built on it. We are not trying to solve that naming problem now — splitting "site name" from "methodology name" today would add a second name to hold in people's heads for no current benefit. One name, for the site, for now.

Audience

People like collaborators at Second Renaissance and similar mission-aligned groups: smart, motivated by shared goals, but with little or no LTP background. Not TOC/LTP practitioners, not argumentation-theory academics. They are evaluating whether this is worth engaging with or adopting, not debating formal logic.

Job of the site

Primarily: help a visitor understand the idea and want to use/join it — explainer plus enough vision and demos that it feels worth adopting, not just an abstract theory. For some visitors, just "getting it" (understanding without immediate buy-in) is an acceptable floor outcome, but the site should reach for more than that.

Concretely, a visitor should come away understanding: structuring claims into trees, then annotating (and updating) the leaves and branches, is a much better way to collectively reason about things or build collective plans. LTP is the most thorough, best-realized process for doing that — the site borrows its rigor without requiring its vocabulary.

Naming brief (for the site name)

Non-jargon: LTP/TOC terms (Goal Tree, Current Reality Tree, evaporating cloud, etc.) are not branding-friendly and should not be required knowledge.
Descriptive/accessible: should give a reasonably strong sense of what the site is about on first encounter, rather than requiring a pitch first.
Intriguing, not just literal: should invite curiosity, not read as a dry internal tool name.
Interrogative, not declarative in tone: the underlying practice is about inspectable, updatable claims — self-consciously hypothetical, not settled belief. The name/framing should not oversell certainty. (Raised by David; the earlier "ClaimTrees" framing leaned too analytic/declarative for this.)
Room for the collective angle: the distinctive, differentiating part of what we do is turning this into a collective process — aligning diverse actors toward common goals/joint effort, not just one person's argument mapping. The name doesn't have to say "collective" literally, but shouldn't crowd it out either.
Avoid extra invented vocabulary: don't import a whole new domain-language on top of LTP's if we can help it — fewer new concepts is better.

Naming decision: Reason Commons

Decision — 30 July 2026

Top recommendation: Reason Commons

"Commons" = collective/shared resource, not one person's argument — carries the differentiator (collective alignment) without needing the word "collective."
"Reason" = broad, accessible, no LTP jargon, still signals logic/structure.
Tone reads as invitational/communal, not declarative — avoids the "claim = assertion" problem David flagged.
Fairly distinctive combo; low collision risk vs. "Common Ground" (see below).
Tagline could carry the mechanics: "Reason Commons: structure claims into trees, map evidence, grow shared understanding."

Other candidates, ranked:

Name	Why it works	Why it's not the top pick
Common Ground	Excellent double meaning: evidentiary "ground" + collective alignment. Warmest, most instantly graspable option.	Heavily used already (political orgs, nonprofits, apps) — weak distinctiveness/SEO, likely poor domain availability.
WhyTree	"Why" = interrogative mood directly; "Tree" = keeps the literal visual metaphor the demos actually show. Ownable, likely available.	Skews a little playful/light for a mission-alignment pitch; says little about the collective angle.
Groundwork	"Laying the groundwork together" — nice sense of foundational collective effort toward a goal.	Also a fairly common name (think tanks, NGOs use it); less evocative of trees/evidence specifically.
Open Questions	Most literal expression of the interrogative-not-declarative brief; matches the MOTIVATION.md framing almost verbatim.	Undersells the tree/structure/evidence mechanics — reads more like a blog/newsletter name than a site about a method.

We are dropping anything using "Claim" as the front-facing brand word (ClaimTree/ClaimTrees) — that's the specific thing David objected to (sounds asserted/declarative), even though "claim" can stay as internal working vocabulary for the tree's core object.

Decision: going with Reason Commons.

Open question carried forward

David has proposed candidate names for the underlying methodology (not yet the site): "Collective Thinking Processes," "collective alignment," "recursive alignment." These remain live options for whenever the methodology itself needs naming, but are out of scope for the current task of naming this site.

References

Project definition: README.md, MOTIVATION.md, and claim-tree-annotation.md.
Discord discussion with David (20–23 July 2026): drafts/from-discord.md.