Four kinds of contribution are open today: a source you know of, a correction to a number published here, a comment on the draft terms, and code. The fifth, an observation with its receipt, is the unit the corpus is made of, and it waits for the terms that protect you to be settled. Everything sent here is read by a person before it enters anything. Thank you for coming this far.
Four doors are open today and one is held. The reason it is held is printed below at the same size as the reasons the others are open.
fig 1 . the two inbound doors . as of 31 aug 2026
| You want to give | Governed by | State |
|---|---|---|
| Code. A script, a fix, a surface, a parser. | AGPL-3.0, plus the Developer Certificate of Origin 1.1 | open |
| A source. A public account, a feed, a channel, an archive. | Nothing. A URL and a factual status tag carry no authorship | open |
| A correction to a published reading. | Nothing. A dispute about arithmetic is not a licensed work | open |
| A comment on the contributor terms. | Nothing. The terms are published as a draft for comment | open |
| An observation plus its receipt. The corpus unit. | The contributor terms, v0.1, draft and not in force | held |
Four of five open. The fifth is the one the corpus is made of, and it is held rather than accepted under unsettled terms.
One word, three jobs. The table says which is which, and its last column says where the house stands on each.
fig 2 . the three senses of open . from the house’s own record of 8 sep 2026
| Sense | It is about | The definition it follows | The house’s instrument | Where gossip stands |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open-source software | the code | The OSI Open Source Definition: ten criteria, free redistribution, source available, derived works allowed under the same terms. | LICENSE, AGPL-3.0 | met |
| Open data | the corpus | The Open Definition: anyone may use, modify and share for any purpose, subject at most to attribution and share-alike. | LICENSE-DATA.md, ODbL 1.0 + DbCL 1.0 | intended, not yet served |
| Open source, the OSINT sense | the sources | Publicly available information. The term names how reachable a source is and says nothing about a licence. | the directory | met; the harvest runs on it |
The third sense does not imply the second. A post that is public is open in the third sense and closed in the second, and a source whose terms restrict reuse yields no open data however public it was.
A public account, a feed, an Are.na channel, an archive, a dataset, an API. Point at it and say what kind of thing it is. It lands in the data directory, where every known source carries its kind and its status, including the ones that turned out to be unusable, so nobody has to re-derive a failure the directory already records.
send the link, what kind of thing it is, and why you think it holds signal . never an individual, see 03
Every published reading prints the query beside the number, and reproducing it ends
in a diff against what was published. If your diff disagrees with
ours, that is a contribution, and it is the most useful thing on this page.
send the query you ran, what you got, what the page claimed
The bargain itself is open for argument while changing it is still cheap. The clause most in need of outside eyes is the relicensing fork, and its thresholds are frank placeholders: defensible, derived from nothing.
read the draft terms . send the clause number and what is wrong with it
The platform is licensed AGPL-3.0. Contributions are signed off under the Developer Certificate of Origin, which is an attestation and not a copyright assignment: you keep your copyright, and your work is licensed under the same terms the project already carries. Inbound equals outbound, and no dual-licensing right is taken over your code.
The repository is private until the contributor terms are ratified, so there is no public tree to open a request against; a patch travels by mail.
sign each commit with git commit -s
send a signed patch to contribute@thegossip.io
held . not accepting
An observation plus its receipt is the unit the corpus is made of, and it is held for now. Something you noticed about how a group of people behaves, and where you saw it: that is the contribution this project is for, and it is the one that waits.
The contributor terms exist and are written. They are version 0.1, draft, not ratified, not in force. They contain a perpetual licence grant and a relicensing power, which are the two clauses that are expensive to get wrong, and they have not had a lawyer's read. GOSSIP is also not yet a legal person, and a licence granted to a project that is not a legal person is a weak licence.
So the door is held rather than propped open with a form. Accepting an observation under unsettled terms would mean either assuming rights that were never granted, or holding contributions that cannot lawfully be used, and both are worse for you than waiting.
Two things help while it waits. Read the draft terms and argue with them, which is why they are published. And put your name on the seed cohort register, which records that you intend to contribute when the door opens. The register takes no licence from you and grants us nothing; it is a list of people to write to.
A contribution is an observation plus its receipt: something a person noticed, and where. Output from a scraper, a bot or an unattended pipeline is filed as a source, not as a contribution, however open it is.
The corpus holds publics and aggregates. A private individual never enters it. The rule is older than the corpus, it binds a source suggestion exactly as it binds an observation, and it is checked at submission.
A person reads every submission before anything enters the corpus or the directory, and this list is the main thing the read is for. A refusal on these grounds names the ground, and it is about the data, not about what you noticed.
contribute@thegossip.io for a source, a correction, a comment on the terms,
or the seed cohort register. Say which of the four it is in the subject line.
security@thegossip.io for anything that should not be public yet. Do not
open a public issue for a vulnerability, and if you found personal data exposed, describe
where it is rather than sending a copy of it.
conduct@thegossip.io for the code of conduct.
Thank you. Whatever you send, a person reads it, and you hear back.
this page states the state of the house on 31 aug 2026. the addresses above are aliases on one mailbox and they deliver; a reply may arrive from a different address for now.