Three small things, none of which is a result, but all of which change who can reach the lab and how.
Helena Dye joins as operations associate. Scheduling, correspondence, records, and the administrative half of incorporation and funding applications — the work that does not appear in any paper and without which the papers arrive late. The role is part-time and runs alongside a full-time job elsewhere, which is the honest shape of operations at a lab this size. It is also the first role here that is not a research role, and it is deliberately not advertised as unpaid volunteering: the limits page says why.
A standing partnership with the Sineidocracia movement. Felipe Pachano Azuaje, already listed here as a cross-disciplinary affiliate, coordinates its editorial committee; Murad Farzulla sits on that committee as a full member with a vote. Dissensus supplies the technical infrastructure — repository, typesetting, release process — and Murad is writing two of the manifesto's chapters: what an assisted-deliberation infrastructure would have to guarantee, and how one would actually be built. The movement owns its own work and can take it elsewhere at any time. That condition is written down rather than assumed, because a small lab supplying another group's infrastructure is exactly the arrangement that quietly becomes ownership if nobody says otherwise.
Its editorial committee is Felipe Pachano Azuaje, PhD, as coordinator, with Heidi Contreras, Romina Roca and Murad Farzulla as full members, and Alejandro Landaeta and Rafael Espín as observers. The movement's own site is forthcoming and will be the authoritative place for its people and its text; the above is a description of the partnership, not a roster we maintain.
It is worth being plain about why this partnership is interesting rather than merely cordial. The movement's intellectual tradition is not ours, its conclusions are not ones this lab would have reached, and its manifesto makes claims about legitimacy that overlap our own work without agreeing with it. That is the value. A one-thesis lab with no external friction starts agreeing with itself within about a year.
Thanks, too, to Apodex. Dissensus holds $500 in API credits under the Apodex Frontier Program, granted this month and running to November. It is the lab's only external compute support so far, and it came with no conditions attached to what we conclude. Unfunded labs should be legible about where their compute comes from, so: that is where ours comes from, and our thanks to them for it.
And a plainer open door. The join page has always listed specific tasks, which was useful and also misleading: the tasks are the gaps we happened to notice, not the boundary of what the lab will work on. So it now says what was always true. If you work on complex adaptive systems under competing objectives — multi-agent alignment, market microstructure, formal verification, political economy, or something none of us has thought to look at — write, at whatever capacity suits you, from one afternoon to a standing collaboration.
The same goes for groups rather than individuals. If your lab, institute, reading circle, student society or journal is working on adjacent questions, the useful first move is usually small: a joint reading, a shared dataset, a reciprocal review where each side tries to break the other's result, or simply naming each other as places to send people. We are particularly interested in groups whose conclusions we expect to disagree with.
And we are looking for external oversight — people or bodies willing to audit the lab's methods, sit in an advisory capacity, or check results it has a stake in believing. This is not a formality. A lab that only ever hears from people who agree with it is not being reviewed, and this one has already had to retract a result that survived its own internal scrutiny for months. If that is something you or your organisation would take on, the partnerships section says where to write.
If none of that warrants an email yet, the lab's Discord is open and commits you to nothing. Papers get argued about there before they are finished. Lurking is a legitimate use of it.
Collaboration proposals, as ever, to research@dissensus.ai.