Open Internet Reference

Evidence over assertion. Knowledge over opinion.

Open Internet Reference (OIR) is an evidence-based knowledge base for the legal, constitutional, historical, technical, and public policy landscape around internet architecture, distributed systems, peer-to-peer networking, cryptography, open source software, privacy, internet governance, and digital rights.

How it is made: human-directed, AI-processed, source-bound. AI does most drafting and mechanical QA. Humans prioritize intake, merge accepted work into a public draft corpus, and periodically deep-audit a smaller verified core. Cited sources are the authority for facts — not model prose. See PROJECT_CHARTER.md and EDITORIAL_WORKFLOW.md.

Axona may be documented as a case study, but OIR is designed to stand on its own as a public reference project. OIR is not legal advice.

Project Status

OIR is preparing Sprint 8: First Public Release Candidate. See ROADMAP.md for milestones.

Repository Layout

• PROJECT_CHARTER.md defines the project mission and operating principles.
• ROADMAP.md tracks milestones and sprint sequencing.
• RESEARCH_STANDARDS.md defines verification and evidence rules.
• STYLE_GUIDE.md defines editorial conventions.
• CITATION_GUIDE.md defines source and citation practices.
• DATA_MODEL.md defines knowledge page metadata and relationships.
• TAXONOMY.md defines the project taxonomy.
• SOURCE_INTAKE.md tracks imported project materials and their intake status.
• RESEARCH_DEBT.md tracks verification work that remains unresolved.
• PUBLISHING.md documents local preview, validation, build output, CI, and production deploy pointers.
• deploy/README.md documents production server layout (Docker nginx, webhooks, OAuth, MCP).
• EDITORIAL_WORKFLOW.md documents collaboration phases, roles, and topic administration policy.
• StartLocalServer.bat and StartLocalServer.sh regenerate indexes and start the local MkDocs preview server.
• intake/ contains unverified candidate topics, entities, and verification queues.
• knowledge/ contains durable knowledge pages.
• contacts/ contains outreach and organization records.
• bibliography/ contains source records and bibliographic data.
• generated/ is reserved for generated artifacts and must not be manually edited.
• website/ contains the MkDocs Material site source.
• tools/ contains validation and publishing utilities.
• handbook/ contains handbook-oriented source material.

Local Development

This repository targets Python 3.14.0.

python -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
python -m pip install -e .[docs]
.\.venv\Scripts\python tools\serve.py

Or double-click / run from the repo root:

.\StartLocalServer.bat

Open http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Run metadata validation with:

python tools/validate_metadata.py

License

Code and documentation are currently licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.