Books as tools for AI agents.

When you're drafting a charter, planning a workshop, or thinking through a strategy, your AI assistant should reach for the book that knows. Cited, scoped, grounded in the source — not paraphrased from training-data fog.

Browse the catalog ↓ Commission your own →

Example session

You

Drafting a co-op water-governance charter. What does Bollier say about nested authority for shared natural-resource commons?

→ think-like-a-commoner
   assess_ostrom_principles("water commons")

Claude

Ostrom's eighth principle: commons that are part of a larger system must be organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises. Authority to appropriate, monitor, enforce, and resolve conflicts must be shared across levels — local to regional to national — rather than concentrated at one. Spanish huerta irrigation and Los Angeles groundwater management are both real polycentric water-commons cases.

Think Like a Commoner, Ch. 2

Example session

You

Designing voting for a platform-coop migration. What does Schneider mean by "implicit feudalism", and what should we install against it?

→ governable-spaces
   diagnose_implicit_feudalism("platform-coop voting")

Claude

Implicit feudalism: a platform governed by a single owner with unchecked, arbitrary power over participants — no meaningful voice, exit, or ownership stake for members. Countering governance forms named in the book: federated subsidiarity (authority distributed across nested levels), community ownership of the governance layer itself, and modular politics — composable governance modules participants can adopt and revise.

Governable Spaces, Introduction

Example session

You

We're stalling on first-time contributor onboarding. Audit the project against what Fogel says.

/audit-oss scanley --focus contributor

Claude

Each interaction with a user is an opportunity to get a new participant. Finding: first-time bug reports get terse "send more info" replies without context. A snarky response loses the potential contributor; a sympathetic one that explains what's needed and points to a how-to-report-bugs page converts the same person into a long-term participant. Fix: write the page (Subversion-style) and rewrite the default issue template to lead with empathy and link to it.

Producing Open Source Software, Ch. 8 — "Treat Every User as a Potential Participant"

The case

Why books need translation.

Training data is fuzzy and uncited. Copyright and paywalls block direct retrieval. Even when full text is available, dumping a 200-page book into an agent's context is wasteful and unreliable.

Translating a book into a structured catalog of cases, frameworks, glossary, and quotes turns it into something agents can call — scoped to the question, cited back to the page.

Read the methodology

The catalog

Public MCPs you can install today, private builds available on request, and queued additions in flight.

MCP Democracy tech

Governable Spaces

Nathan Schneider, 2024

Schneider's framing of democratic design for online life — 13 tools for diagnosing implicit feudalism, finding precedent democratic-medium cases, and surfacing governance forms (sortition, federated subsidiarity, plural voting).

View / install →

MCP Commons

Think Like a Commoner

David Bollier, 2024

Bollier's commons framing — turned into 12 tools for naming enclosures, finding precedent commons, walking Ostrom's 8 design principles, and reframing market-mind problems.

View / install →

SKILL Open source

Producing Open Source Software

Karl Fogel, 2023

Karl Fogel's canonical guide to running open-source projects — turned into a Claude Code skill (claude-audit-oss) that audits OSS repos against Fogel's chapters.

View / install →

MCP Facilitation Private

Facilitating Deliberation

Kimbra White, Nicole Hunter, and Keith Greaves, 2023

MosaicLab's facilitator's reference — 12 tools for designing and running deliberative democracy processes, from macro/micro design templates through readiness assessments to in-room activity selection.

Request access →

MCP Democracy tech Coming soon

Plurality

Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang & Plurality Community, 2024

Glen Weyl + Audrey Tang on plural-voting and digital democracy — queued, will ship as a public MCP under CC0.

Coming soon

Commission

Have a book or methodology of your own?

If you're an author, publisher, consultant, or methodology owner with content you want made callable for AI agents, get in touch. We work with public-license and copyrighted source material both.

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