A Manifesto for Process Literacy
Every piece of knowledge has a history. Every idea emerges through observation, conversation, revision, judgment, error, influence, and transformation. Yet modern systems increasingly present knowledge as if it appeared fully formed, detached from the people, tools, contexts, and decisions that produced it. As artificial intelligence accelerates the creation, transformation, and circulation of information, the ability to inspect how knowledge came to be becomes as important as evaluating what it says. Process literacy is the ability to see those histories: to trace provenance, understand transformations, identify where judgment entered, recognize limits and obligations, and accept responsibility for what we create, share, and rely upon.
In AI systems, the work of supplying relevant history, meaning, constraints, and relationships is increasingly called context engineering. KNOBE makes that context portable and inspectable rather than leaving it hidden inside a prompt, platform, vector database, or agent workflow. A KNOBE remains readable as ordinary Markdown while carrying a sealed record of declared sources, transformation history, fidelity limits, use conditions, and human and AI contributions. Its integrity can be checked locally, independently of any platform or institution. KNOBE does not determine what is true or tell people what to think. It helps knowledge carry enough of its context and history for trust to rest not on authority alone, but on a durable account of how an idea was formed, challenged, adapted, and stewarded over time.
Authorship and stewardship
KNOBE Protocol v1 is authored by David Kyle, University of California, Davis. The affiliation identifies the author. KNOBE is an independent open protocol, not an official UC Davis standard, product, or endorsement.
David Kyle is the current steward of the protocol. Governance will move toward an advisory structure as independent implementations and institutional uses develop.
Proposed changes, bug reports, and implementation questions are handled through the public source repository. Substantive changes receive public discussion and documented decisions.
License
The specification and public documentation are released under CC BY 4.0. Reference code and implementation licenses are stated in their repositories.
The protocol itself
This page is about who is behind KNOBE and on what terms. The protocol's technical guarantees, what is frozen, how versioning works, and where the open protocol ends and application layers begin, are defined authoritatively in the specification. How the reference verifier and other implementations are checked against the published test corpus is covered on the implementations page.