The people who kept showing up in the same rooms
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Not an institution — a standing set of people who converged repeatedly at the Santa Fe Institute, PC Forum, Aspen and each other's houses across two decades.
As Jonathan Hare lists them: John Sviokla, John Clippinger, Michael Kleeman, Paul Saffo, John Holland, Brian Arthur, Chris Langton, Tera Lemey, Esther Dyson, Tim Andrews — and, once she arrived through Clippinger, Marie Charles.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Because it is the clearest instance in this record of the thing the record is about: a network with no center, no membership and no governing body, which nonetheless persisted for twenty years and moved ideas efficiently between people who would otherwise never have met.
Nobody ran it. Nobody could have captured it. It had no assets to seize and no lever to pull. It simply kept meeting, and the people in it kept turning up in each other's companies, boards and footnotes.
That is what the architecture is trying to make available to people who do not happen to get invited.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
The coffee break room
Open →memberBerkman Center, the 1999 commission — and a witness in the room in 2008
Open →memberHidden Order — the book the 1998 draft was built on
Open →joined through Clippinger“Audacious to the point of recklessness”
Open →the Aspen end of itFriend and patron — who let a broke man live her life for a weekend at a time
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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