Overview
This wiki is the knowledge base for Cyberdesk, the Cybernetic Futures
assistant on cybernetic-futures.org and the community forum. It is published as a
static site from cyber-base-vault/wiki/; the vault is the source of truth, and
the site is built from it.
Its subject is Beer’s Viable System Model, stated as the imported sources state it. Every claim about the model is meant to carry a locator in Beer’s texts, and interpretation, extension and critique are kept visibly separate from what the sources actually say. It is a reader’s wiki, not a sales surface: the project’s positions are recorded together with their counter-arguments, and what the project claims is kept apart from what is established in the wider literature.
How material enters
External material is declared in import/sources.yaml, scanned by
import/scan.py into a manifest, and ingested from that manifest into the wiki
pages. The source tree is read-only — it is never modified — and every page says
which source it rests on and what that source’s own status is. A draft is
presented as proposed, not as established.
Sources
Each source set has a home page, and its pages are published under a site directory of the same name.
- Pure VSM — the source set — the working manuscript of the book that presents Beer’s VSM in his own words, part by part: its overview, five parts and an appendix. Imported draft, not project canon.
Nothing else has been imported yet.
The rest of the wiki
- Bibliography — the Beer texts the project’s work rests on, used and planned, with the edition used, ISBN and page-offset notes.
- Concepts — the ideas and themes the sources introduce: variety-and-regulation, recursion, system-one … system-five, algedonic-signal, law-of-cohesion.
- Entities — people, organisations, systems and books: stafford-beer, viable-system-model, cybersyn and the eight Beer works.
Status
The wiki rests on one imported source set — the Pure VSM manuscript (Draft 0.8, not canon) — and holds no critique of the VSM yet: the project’s third principle is unmet here so far. Vault conventions live in the vault’s own schema; its history is in the vault log.