Knowledge systems for people, groups and organizations
CoExplorer offers the 4W&T system: four instruments that draw knowing out through conversation, from one person, from two, from a whole group, and a fifth that carries what was learned forward into anticipation and action. Everything learned is held in a knowledge graph that you own, with a record of how it came to be known.
Most of what an organization knows was never written down. It lives in how people notice, judge and decide, and it leaves when they do.
The tools meant to hold it treat knowledge as a pile of documents. Search finds files but not the reasoning that connects them. AI assistants forget each conversation when it ends. Groups meet, decide and move on, and a year later nobody can say why.
It finds where something was written, not how one idea depends on another.
Meetings and AI chats produce insight, then leave no durable trace of it.
Retirement, turnover and reorganization take tacit knowing with them.
Four W's and a T
Each instrument fits a different number of people and a different moment in coming to know something. They can be used on their own, but they are designed to hand work to one another, and all of them write into the same knowledge graph.
A quiet place for what is sensed before it can be said. Voice notes, sketches, links and hunches are captured from your phone and kept loose, so nothing is forced into a category too early.
Feeds the Workbench when something is ready to be talked through.A practitioner talks with a partner, human or voice AI, who asks, structures and plays back. Nothing counts as captured until it has been taught back and the practitioner says, yes, that is what I mean.
Live now as workbench.coexplorer.comStructured dialogue across perspectives, using Syntegration, Structured Democratic Dialogue, Open Space or World Café, so a group finds what none of its members held alone. Runs in a room, or over weeks in Confabula.
Convergence supported by the Augur ensemble.Newcomers find their own way through what has been captured, from any starting point and at their own pace. They explain back what they have understood, so they and you know when understanding has arrived and where its edge is.
Live now as wayfinder.coexplorer.comCarries what has been sensed and learned forward into models of what is coming and decisions about what to do. The reasoning is kept with the decision, so it can be checked when the future arrives and the model revised if it was wrong.
Where group conversation lives
Confabula is a conferencing space for conversations that run longer than a meeting: weeks, semesters, or years.
It follows the tradition of computer conferencing that began in the 1970s. Conferences hold items, items hold threaded responses, and every response keeps its history. What is new is that the conversation is connected to the knowledge graph, and that a group can call on AI companions without handing its judgment to them.
Five lenses for convergence
When a group needs to converge, Augur reads the conversation through five lenses at once and puts questions back to the group. It asks. People decide.
Each lens is an AI companion working from a different part of the cybernetic and systems tradition. They run in parallel on the same convergence item, so the group sees five different kinds of question side by side instead of one blended summary.
Tracks what has been taught back and agreed, and what has only been asserted. Keeps the protocol of the whole exchange.
After Gordon PaskReads the issue as a sign and offers hypotheses the group has not yet put into words.
After C.S. PeirceChecks whether the options on the table match the range of ways the situation could go.
After W. Ross AshbyMakes the group's model of the future explicit, and asks whether a threat touches core function or the capacity to repair.
After Robert RosenReads the transcript afterwards for what is changing, and for anything treated as fixed that is really in motion.
After A.N. WhiteheadAugur is the bridge between the Workshop and the Transducer: the point where a group's sense-making turns into an explicit view of what is coming and what to do about it.
The shared architecture
People, projects, ideas, claims, questions and decisions, with the relationships between them and the source of each. Documents stay as files. Evidence, interpretation, hypothesis and metaphor are kept distinct.
AI agents are organized like a team, not a pipeline. One layer asks what happened, one asks what it means, and one asks how the whole system is changing, with a supervisor watching all three.
Agents ask for a capability, such as transcription or reasoning, and the registry routes it to a cloud model, a local model or a specialist tool, keeping private material within its boundary.
Before an agent acts, it must say back what it has understood it is being asked to do, and have that confirmed. The same rule that tests a learner's understanding becomes a safeguard for AI agents, including against instructions slipped in from outside.
| Offer | What you get |
|---|---|
| Personal knowledge system | Your own graph, captured from phone and conversation and retrievable with sources, in a private instance you control. Wellspring · Workbench · graph |
| Expert knowledge capture | Guided voice sessions with your experienced people, structured and taught back, then opened to newcomers as a navigable course. Workbench · Wayfinder |
| Collective intelligence | A facilitated group process, live or in Confabula over time, with Augur supporting convergence and outcomes kept with their reasoning. Workshop · Confabula · Augur |
| Anticipation program | Work with leaders to make the organization's model of its future explicit, test it, and connect it to decisions. Augur · Transducer |
| Your own application | The 4W&T instruments adapted to your field, language and name, as with Orienting Reflex below. Code shared, records private. All five instruments |
| Design advisory | Guidance on ontology, agent roles, governance and the line between local and shared, for teams building their own. Architecture |
We run an isolated instance for you, in the United States or the United Kingdom.
Open-weight models run in your own country, on your own air-gapped system, or both, for sensitive or regulated material. Nothing needs to reach the internet.
A self-contained deployment on your own hardware. Your data does not leave.
Built first for ourselves
We use the system before we offer it. Each application below is a separate instance with its own records; the code and the instruments are shared.
A US–UK venture on sensing before knowing, in the clinic, in organizations and in society. The first named application of the 4W&T system, with a book in development. orientingreflex.com
A private, longitudinal graph of one practitioner's thinking, fed from phone and conversation, including the conversations in which the system itself was built.
A long-running conferencing history being brought into Confabula, so that past conversations can be searched, connected and continued.
Gordon Pask built machines to converse with, from Musicolour in the 1950s to THOUGHTSTICKER in the 1970s. They were partners in learning, not substitutes for it.
CoExplorer works in that tradition. The instruments rest on fifty years of research into how understanding forms in conversation and how it can be checked by asking people to explain it back. The regulating loops, in which each layer of agents watches and improves the one below, come from cybernetics. Voice AI, graph databases and capable local models have made practical what used to be theory.
We work in English first. Sensing is shaped by language and culture, and we welcome partners who want to develop the instruments in their own countries and languages. Read the methodology.
Tell us what knowledge you are at risk of losing, or what your group needs to decide, and we will say plainly whether the 4W&T system fits.
peter.tuddenham@coexplorer.com
Northern Virginia, United States · with partners in the United Kingdom