The Five Layers

The primary organizing structure for how OGM thinks about its own work. Coined in the early bootstrap period and used consistently across vision documents, sprint plans, and stewardship MOUs.

The five layers, in the order OGM uses them:

Infrastructure — platforms and protocols
Governance — how OGM and the commons are stewarded
Knowledge — mining, mapping, organizing collective knowledge
Services — facilitation, convening, consulting
Contagion — being out in public, modeling, speeches

The full canonical description is in the source: see OGM Structure/The Five Layers.md. What follows is a synthesis with quotes, plus pointers into where each layer is exercised across the wiki.

Infrastructure

"platforms and protocols for navigating towards truth for the good of all"

"collective sensemaking infrastructure / backbone"

"building and modeling the technical infrastructure for knowing and sharing what we know"

— OGM Structure/The Five Layers.md

Concretely, in the source, Infrastructure shows up as:

The OGM Wiki itself (Massive Wiki + GitHub + MarkPub)
Jerry's Brain (referenced from many places, see True Orphans re: a missing concept page)
Mattermost / Discourse / Google Group (per OGM Onboarding 101)
"Directories and profiles" (per OGM Infrastructure (Evolving))

There's a stated observation: "other groups, educators, etc. can tap into and use some of the same infrastructure with us."

Governance

The most-elaborated of the five layers in the source. Spans:

Stewardship — who stewards what
Funds — income, taxes, investment, disbursement
"Equitable distribution of value" — Fellowship structure, member contributions, payment for services
Multiple-kinds-of-value measurement
Decision-making and deliberation
Nomenclature and organization
Planning and reflecting

Source pages that elaborate Governance:

OGM Stewardship/ (39 source files — the largest single area)
Brain/Decision Making Processes.md — list of governance models
Brain/Governance Model Comparisons.md — outline only, see Orphan Gems
The Lionsberg-OGM MOU documents in OGM Stewardship/Documents/OGM Bootstrap MOU/ — core governance artifacts of the early period

See also Stewardship Hub in this wiki.

Knowledge

"mining, mapping, organization of knowledge"

"interconnecting maps"

"moving up and down the DIKW hierarchy"

— OGM Structure/The Five Layers.md

Knowledge in OGM has three threads:

Personal knowledge tools: Jerry's Brain, NeoBooks, the wiki itself
Knowledge kinds: somatic, scientific, folk wisdom, anti-knowledge/misinformation
The DIKW hierarchy: Data → Information → Knowledge → Wisdom — referenced in MOUs and infrastructure docs but no source page exists (True Orphans)

See Knowledge Architecture in this wiki for a synthesis of OGM's knowledge tools.

Services

"facilitating, convening, consulting service layer to help and empower communities to interact with what we know"

"empower orgs to shift to working within collective sensemaking and the commons"

"just-in-time connection of resources and relationships to worthy projects"

— OGM Structure/The Five Layers.md

The Services layer is described as both income-generating ("some services generate income") and commons-contributing ("some services consume resources but contribute to the commons"). It's distinctively not a pure-revenue layer.

In the source, Services shows up partially in:

OGM Stewardship/ documents around speakers' bureaus, consulting
Office Hours (OGM Culture/Office Hours.md) — convening as a service
Project pages where OGM members offer expertise

Contagion

"being out in public, using, doing"

"speeches"

"visible modeling of the platform"

"visibly modeling norms and behaviors"

— OGM Structure/The Five Layers.md

The most-stub-form layer of the five in the source — described in bullet points, not yet elaborated in narrative. It's the layer OGM does (when speakers go out and represent OGM publicly) more than it documents.

Cross-cutting note

The Five Layers are used throughout OGM Structure/OGM Infrastructure (Evolving).md as the actual organizing structure for sprint planning. Each sprint's tasks are listed under one of the five layer headings. The framework is therefore not just descriptive — it's operational.

Themes Hub — other theme clusters
Stewardship Hub — governance threads in detail
Knowledge Architecture — the Knowledge layer in depth
Sovereigns — what OGM means by "sovereign entities"

Sources:

OGM Structure/The Five Layers.md (canonical)
OGM Structure/OGM Infrastructure (Evolving).md (operational use)
Referenced from OGM Stewardship/ MOU documents and many sprint plans