• conforms_to::[[Aspiration Form Contract]]
• in_domain::[[Deep Context Architecture]]
• authored_by::[[Deep Context Community]]
• has_lifecycle::[[Seed Stage]]
• has_curation::[[Working Draft]]

Participation Diversity Is Legible and Valued

The practice works toward a state where its measurement surfaces and practitioner norms treat different forms of participation — authoring, responding, curating, onboarding, connecting — as first-class kinds rather than as different volumes of a single "contribution" measure. Form-plurality becomes visible in how the practice talks about its contributors and in how the practice measures its own health.

Why It Is Worth Pursuing

Volume-only measurement of participation collapses orthogonal axes into a single ranking that depends on which axis the measurement privileges, typically authoring volume. The measurement mischaracterizes contributors whose dominant form is not the privileged axis — a response-dominant contributor with moderate authoring reads as "light participant" even when the response work is load-bearing for the community. The cost of the mischaracterization is twofold: contributors are misrecognized in practitioner discussion, and the practice's understanding of its own health is distorted by the measurement that informs it.

The plural-participation stance that the Deep Context practice holds — expressed at the vocabulary layer in [[Contributors Across Vocabularies Can Collaborate]] — generalizes beyond vocabulary to form. Contributors bring different naming traditions and different participation modes. A practice committed to vocabulary-plurality that collapses form-plurality is partially inconsistent: it preserves distinctions in how contributors name things while collapsing distinctions in how contributors participate. The two specializations compose into a plural-participation stance that operates at both layers.

The Aspiration is load-bearing for the curation-as-first-class-participation reading. Curation is a form of participation — arguably the form that keeps a graph legible under contribution pressure — but the current predicate vocabulary does not surface curation as a first-class form. Without the form's legibility, curation risks being read as back-stage work by contributors who see only the front-stage authoring layer. Naming curation as a form is the specific move that makes the practice's curation cadence visible to its contributors.

Current Gap

Predicate vocabulary already distinguishes authoring from responding (authored_by::, responds_to::) but no measurement surface reports form-plurality. The distinction is latent in the graph and absent from any reporting. A curator reading the graph by hand can see the distinction; no summary surface, dashboard, or review ritual presents it.

Practitioner discussion defaults to authoring-volume when talking about "contribution." Phrases like "how much did X contribute" implicitly measure authoring; the distinction between high-authoring-low-response and low-authoring-high-response contributors is not part of the default discussion. The vocabulary that would make the distinction natural is not yet in circulation.

Curation itself lacks a first-class predicate. The practice's predicate vocabulary has authored_by:: and responds_to:: but no curated_by:: or reconciled_by:: — a curator who runs a curation pass has no edge to the node whose drift they addressed. The curation work is visible only in the git history, not in the graph; it is back-stage by construction. The absence of the predicate reinforces the form's invisibility.

Onboarding and connecting as forms are not yet represented in the vocabulary at all. A contributor whose dominant work is welcoming new contributors, or whose contribution takes the form of connecting existing-but-disconnected nodes, has no predicate that would surface their work as first-class participation. Both forms appear in reported plural-contributor practice but are invisible to the graph.

Work It Asks

Name and validate at least three participation forms in the conventions. Authoring, responding, and curating as a starting set — each with a clear definition and with the predicate or predicates that surface each form in the graph. CONVENTIONS.md's semantic-predicate list gains the relevant entries; CLAUDE.md's working-assumptions section names form-plurality alongside vocabulary-plurality as a held stance.

Produce a form-sensitive measurement surface that reports contribution by form rather than by volume alone. The surface does not need to be a dashboard or a formal report — a narrative summary in the curation cadence that names who participated in each form, a periodic audit that counts edges by type, or a per-contributor page that aggregates their work across forms. The specific form of the surface is open; the commitment is that form-plurality appears somewhere visible, not only in the graph's edge structure.

Acknowledge form-plurality in curation rituals. When a curation pass reports on the period's work, it names not only the nodes authored but the responses added, the curation moves made, the onboarding work done, the connections surfaced. Curators' own work is part of the report; form-specific contributors are recognized alongside volume-dominant authors. The acknowledgment is the practice's operational commitment to form-plurality.

Consider whether curation itself needs a first-class predicate. Candidates: curated_by::[[Curator Name]] on a node that received a curation pass, preserved across subsequent revisions; reconciled_by:: as a counterpart to authored_by:: for reconciliation work; per-pass curation_of::[[Period]] edges that aggregate a curation ritual's output. The specific predicate choice is open and belongs in the Predicate candidates section of CONVENTIONS.md; the commitment is that curation gets surfaced in the graph, not only in the git history.

Surface at least one contributor whose dominant form is not authoring as a recognized full contributor in practitioner discussion and in the measurement surface. The specific contributor is not the point; the point is that the practice demonstrates it recognizes form-plurality operationally, not only as an abstract commitment.

Progress Recognition

At least one contributor whose dominant form is not authoring is recognized as a full contributor in practitioner discussion. The recognition shows up in how the contributor is described — "X maintains the graph's response density" or "Y carries the onboarding work" — rather than "X contributes at moderate volume."

Curation passes report form-plurality alongside volume. The curation output for a period names which forms were active, who carried each form, and how the forms composed into the period's work. Form-plurality is part of the report's standard structure rather than an occasional note.

At least one contributor explicitly cites a non-authoring form as their primary contribution and the citation is acknowledged in the practice's measurement surface. The contributor's framing of their own work ("I mostly respond and curate; I do not often author") is recognized as describing first-class participation rather than lighter participation.

At least one first-class predicate for a non-authoring form (curation, response, onboarding, connecting) is added to the local vocabulary after the predicate candidates section has surfaced the candidates for deliberation. The addition demonstrates that form-plurality is making its way into the graph's structure, not only into the practice's discussion.

Form-sensitive measurement reveals patterns that volume-only measurement would miss. At minimum, one curation-pass report names a finding that required the form-sensitive view — for example, that a contributor's form-shift from authoring-dominant to curating-dominant signals a transition to long-term contribution — and the finding is acted on.

Sources

• [[Participation Takes Different Forms Not Different Levels]] — the grounding Observation that identifies volume-only measurement as a mismeasurement and names form-plurality as the alternative frame.

Relations

• grounded_in::[[Participation Takes Different Forms Not Different Levels]]

  • The Observation supplies the empirical grounds and the framing; this Aspiration targets the practice-level response. Without the Observation, the Aspiration would read as a preference for richer measurement; with it, the Aspiration is a specific response to a specific measurement artifact.

• grounded_in::[[Vocabulary Diversity Is a Feature]]

  • The sovereignty stance that justifies plural-participation at the vocabulary layer extends to plural-participation at the form layer. The same argument that vocabulary-plurality preserves encoded meaning argues that form-plurality preserves participation modes the volume-only measure would erase.

• grounded_in::[[The Second Cycle of Contribution Happens]]

  • A second cycle reached by narrowing to one participation form is not the plural-participation second cycle the project holds; the form-plurality Aspiration is the specific form-layer expression of what sustained plural participation requires.

• composes_with::[[Contributors Across Vocabularies Can Collaborate]]

  • Adjacent specializations of the same plural-participation stance at two different layers. Contributors Across Vocabularies targets vocabulary-plurality; this Aspiration targets form-plurality. Both are load-bearing; neither subsumes the other. The two compose into a plural-participation stance that operates at both layers.

• informs::[[Newcomers Cross the Second-Cycle Threshold]]

  • Second-cycle contribution may arrive in a different form than first-cycle contribution. The contributor-transition Aspiration's progress-recognition markers need to be form-sensitive for the transition to be measurable; this Aspiration's work is what makes form-sensitive measurement possible.