KTP/
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created 24 August 2026 · last modified 24 August 2026
how the work is done

Methods.

The program treats methods as a public commitment, not an appendix. What follows is the working version of the protocols the papers depend on — reproducibility, scoring, the case-recoding gate, the statistical posture toward simulations, and the risks that the program is tracking and not pretending it has solved.

The 49-case recoding gate

The Trust Force Equation paper (P3) currently relies on 49 author-scored cases. Author scoring is a private taxonomy, not a measurement. Until the recoding gate closes, every claim that depends on these cases is contingent and is labeled as such on the Roadmap and Papers pages.

recoding gate
Paper 3 does not submit until a written coding manual is complete, two or more independent coders apply it, inter-rater reliability is calculated, and the value is reported in the manuscript itself — whether or not it is favorable.

Code, data, and the DOI commitment

Each paper ships with an archived code-and-data DOI deposited at OSF, Zenodo, or a comparable repository. The DOI is referenced from the cover letter, the data-availability statement, and the code-availability statement. The deposit is finalized before submission and is not revised after.

Simulations carry their seeds, their parameter sweeps, and their null models in the same archive as the figures they produced. A reviewer who wants to re-run any plot in any paper can re-run it end to end from the deposit alone.

Simulations are formal exploration, not validation

Stylized simulations probe the boundaries of the formal claims and check that the math behaves as advertised under known perturbations. They do not stand in for empirical data. The papers label them as formal exploration in the manuscript text, the figure captions, and the abstract.

Empirical validation arrives with the DP9 study (P4) at the earliest. Until then, no paper claims field support for any prediction. Reviewers who treat the simulations as evidence are engaging with a paper the program did not write.

Reviewer recruitment is parallel, not sequential

The program is recruiting three to five domain readers across commons governance, signed-network theory, percolation, and institutional repair. Recruitment runs in parallel with submission prep, not after. A list of named readers, with permission, will appear on /research/collaborate as it firms up.

risks the program is tracking

Naming risks publicly is itself a control. The list below names a concrete failure mode and the specific mechanism the program uses to keep that mode in check. The controls are commitments, not aspirations — if a control is dropped, the corresponding risk should be assumed to be active. Operational red lines for KTP are named separately in the canon's limits.

Overclaiming
The phrase “general theory” stays at program level. Paper 1 makes one claim — Ostrom's principles read as maintenance functions on a percolating trust network. Abstracts and cover letters are written to that scope and no wider.
Reviewer rejection
Submitting a wide framework to a narrow journal is a predictable way to be desk-rejected. Paper 1 is sized to a commons-governance journal first, with a complex-systems journal as fallback. Subsequent papers are sized to their target venues before they are written.
Weak empirical base
Simulations are labeled as formal exploration in print. The DP9 empirical study (Stage 6) exists precisely so the program eventually has a falsified or surviving prediction in at least one real domain.
Author-only scoring
The Trust Force paper does not submit until external coders have applied a written manual and inter-rater reliability is reported in the manuscript itself.
DP9 overreach
Until the empirical study completes, DP9 is named as a candidate principle and written as a hypothesis. Promotion follows data, not enthusiasm.
AI section distraction
The AI institutional alignment paper (P5) is held until Paper 1 is in review and one of the empirical or operational modules has cleared its own gate.
Website grandiosity
Limitations and falsifiers are surfaced on the same level of navigation as the claims. The voice is meant to be quiet enough that a skeptical reader keeps reading.
Fragmenting attention across too many papers
The critical path is fixed. Modules outside the path do not advance until the path itself has moved.
How to cite
APA 7th ed.

Perkins, C. (2026, May 6). Methods. Kinetic Trust Protocol. https://kinetic-trust-protocol.net/research/methods
Plain text

Chris Perkins, "Methods," Kinetic Trust Protocol, https://kinetic-trust-protocol.net/research/methods (accessed May 6, 2026).