Reference Community Public Interface

Status

This is the first public interface of the AIFC reference community.

It explains what is public now, what is intentionally not public, and how deeper participation may work later. It is a working interface, not a membership system, certification service, or finished community platform.

Identity

The AIFC reference community is the first community using AIFC on itself.

Its role is to create, test, explain, and improve the AI-First Community Standard in public enough for others to understand the pattern, while protecting the operational knowledge that should not become public by default.

Purpose

The reference community exists to make AIFC practical.

It should show how an AI-first, human-managed community can:

• keep a source of truth,
• publish a readable standard,
• preserve the story of its own evolution,
• expose stable public interfaces,
• distinguish public knowledge from internal work,
• use AI deeply without making AI the owner of purpose, responsibility, or direction.

Public Surface

The public website currently exposes three main paths:

• Standard: the highest published AIFC standard version, with older versions kept available for citation continuity.
• Story: the public narrative of how AIFC emerged and how the reference community is being built.
• Reference Community: this public interface, describing the community boundary, public signals, and future participation layers.

Current Participation

At this stage, public participation is intentionally lightweight.

A public visitor may:

• read the standard,
• read the story,
• follow published updates,
• subscribe to the newsletter.

A newsletter subscriber is not a community member. Subscription means interest in updates, not role-based access, voting rights, operational responsibility, or membership status.

Boundaries

The public interface does not expose everything the reference community knows or does.

The following are not public by default:

• internal cockpit reports,
• private planning notes,
• unresolved working context,
• sensitive operational knowledge,
• restricted prompts, workflows, or agent instructions,
• participant-specific data,
• security-relevant details,
• draft decisions not ready for publication.

This boundary is part of the AIFC pattern: a community should be understandable from outside without leaking its operational DNA.

Future Interface Layers

Future versions may add deeper interfaces, but each layer must have an explicit purpose, access rule, and responsibility boundary.

Possible future layers include:

• Registered observer: a known person who can follow more structured updates.
• Invited candidate: a person being evaluated for a possible role in the community.
• Onboarded member: a participant with identity, role, scope, permissions, and responsibility.
• Role-based interface: a different cockpit or work surface depending on what the participant is allowed and expected to do.
• Assessed community: a future community that wants to compare its own structure with AIFC.

These are future possibilities, not current promises.

Community Commitments

The reference community should keep its public interface aligned with the same principles it asks other communities to follow.

It should:

• make public promises carefully,
• record meaningful decisions,
• preserve stable versions of the standard,
• keep public content human-readable,
• keep source-of-truth records machine-processable where useful,
• distinguish public, internal, restricted, and critical knowledge,
• avoid presenting future capability as current service,
• keep human responsibility visible.

Open Questions

This interface will evolve as the reference community learns.

Current open questions include:

• Which feedback channel should public readers use first?
• What should be visible to a registered observer?
• What minimum identity and responsibility rules are required before any login-based interface exists?
• Which parts of the cockpit can become public without exposing internal work too early?
• How should external communities ask to compare themselves with AIFC once the standard is mature enough?

Source of Truth

This interface is governed by the reference community source records and by the AIFC standard section on community interfaces.

The current source files include:

• reference-community/source/purpose-and-values.md
• reference-community/source/public-journey.md
• reference-community/source/community-profile.md
• aifc-standard/50-interfaces/AIFC-050-community-interface.md