Kit of Parts

The interoperable form of a Prototype: whole parts, freely combined and sequenced, so one Prototype serves a thousand sovereign expressions.

A Kit is what makes a Prototype adoptable without being imposed. Each part is a whole capability in its own right and a part of the greater whole — a Holon in design form. A community takes the parts it needs, in the order its situation calls for, and the result is theirs: the same Prototype, a thousand different embodiments, none of them a franchise.

That is the load. A system distributed as a single indivisible package can only be accepted or refused, so it spreads by conversion and fails by rigidity. A Kit spreads by use. Instantiation is then honest rather than grudging: local reality demands compromise, the compromise is the data, and what was changed flows back into the Kit so the next community inherits it.

Its discipline is Interoperability. Parts must actually fit — which in this Field means the Minimum standards of interoperability the Operating System names: the same card shape at every level, the same week and the same turnings kept by the sun, the same words on line one translated freely with lines kept in order, an address for every player and every line, the Record's numbers meaning the same thing everywhere, proposals as the way shared things change. Meet those and two Cells that have never met can read each other.

The Kit is also the answer to the regrowth question. The Golden Seed is the smallest part of the Kit — the text from which the rest can be regrown by a community holding nothing else. A hand copy on any paper counts exactly as much as a printed one.

Also called: The Kit Stands on: Prototype · Archetype · Holon Opens onto: Instantiation · Interoperability · Minimum standards of interoperability · The Kit · FSx In play: Met at the table in the first season, in the cards a Cell actually picks up; met at the Home when two Cells read one another's sheets. Sources: The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, Meta Layer ("the interoperable form of a Prototype: whole Parts, freely combined and sequenced"; the page states Work In Progress) · The Creative Cascade (root page, mature) · Kit of Parts (root page) · The Great Weaving — Concept Ledger, A.5 (a proposal, recorded as such) · lionsberg.wiki: Kit of Parts. Open: The Field carries both Kit of Parts here and The Kit in the agents' domain; whether they are one concept at two scales is not stated anywhere.