The P.I.T.
Protocol
An open-source, forkable protocol that turns a gathering's ephemeral knowledge into a permanent public good. Every village deserves a pit. The pit provides. 🕳️
A knowledge transponder
for the village.
A P.I.T. — Public Information Transmission — is a permanent, public, open-source archive of a gathering's knowledge. Talks captured, words transcribed, everything synced and searchable — a transponder that keeps transmitting the signal long after the tents come down. Free for everyone to relive, remix, and carry forward.
It transmits
Knowledge wants to be transmitted. A P.I.T. receives the fleeting signal of a village — every talk, every idea — and rebroadcasts it, forever, to anyone on Earth.
It's a pit
Like the orchestra pit: the musicians who make the sound the whole room dances to — rarely in the spotlight, always holding the signal. The treasure is underground. Dig.
It's forkable
No backend, ~$0 infrastructure, no API keys, no gatekeepers — and the whole protocol is open-source CC0 on GitHub. Any community can fork it and give its gathering its own pit. The pit of all kinds.
Five stages.
Down into the pit, up into the light.
Learned from the Esmeralda genesis — 28 days, 149 sessions, an entire village's mind made permanent. The protocol is deliberately reproducible by anyone: public sources, open tools, honest reporting.
Crawl gather
Gather the gathering's knowledge from public sources — e.g. public Drive folders via embeddedfolderview, no API keys required. If you can see it in a browser, the protocol can reach it. Reproducible by anyone, anywhere.
Harvest transcribe
Transcribe every recording with open Whisper models. Match transcripts to media programmatically. Dedupe relentlessly. Raw footage becomes readable, searchable, quotable knowledge.
Audit radical honesty
Quality-probe every single file — 1-byte range requests, bitrate checks — and flag every casualty honestly in the UI. If a file is wounded, the archive says so. Radical honesty as design. Only verifiable claims.
Publish static & forever
Ship a static site — no backend, ~$0 infrastructure — with the Knowledge Transponder at its heart: listening-first, synced glowing transcript, tap-to-seek. An archive that costs nothing is an archive that lasts.
Consent-First Governance the soul
Nothing enters the permanent public archive without explicit organizer + speaker consent. Compliance is enforced by recurring audits against public search indexes. The pit is a gift — and a gift is only a gift when it's given freely.
⚑ this stage is the protocol's soulTwo arm pits of genesis.
And the forks keep forking.
Every P.I.T. that lives by the protocol joins the registry. These are the living ones — the genesis two arm pits, eight forked instances and counting 🍴🏔️🏮🏛️🌿🌊💎🐢, and the pits on the horizon. Arm pit strong. 💪🕳️
The Esmeralda P.I.T.
28 days of a floating village's frontier thinking — every talk captured, every word transcribed, glowing and seekable. The first full descent of the protocol. Formerly edgeTV — the pit was always its true name.
OSO P.I.T.
Shaka's ETHGlobal Delhi hackathon winner — Most Creative Use of ENS. Where the pit first got its name: Play IT Together, the permissionless orchestra. The ancestor every P.I.T. honors; the first arm pit of genesis. Born of the Open Source Orchestra tradition — a vibe, never an org.
🏛️ ancestor restored — osopit exhibitgithub.com/opensource-orchestra/osopit ↗
The ZuitzPIT
The protocol's first fork — born in one day from the Esmeralda genesis. The Swiss network-state sandbox's sessions, cataloged alpine-style: d/acc morning with Vitalik Buterin & Glen Weyl, Balaji Srinivasan, the Cypherpunk Sessions, and 36 more. Same DNA, alpine blood. 🔇 Silent by design — pits listen, they don't sing.
🍴 github.com/shakaleikaumaka/zuitzpit ↗
📄 pit.yaml — talk to this pit
The PatagoniaPIT
A second-generation fork — from the ZuitzPIT, from the genesis. A month-long popup village in San Martín de los Andes, transmitted: cosmolocalism with Michel Bauwens, OSO jams from the ancestor tradition, demo days, 86 more. Navy night, lake turquoise, autumn amber. 🔇 Silent by design.
🍴 github.com/shakaleikaumaka/patagoniapit ↗
The 4SeasPIT
The lineage's third fork. Two months of Ethereum community in Chiang Mai — opening ceremonies, togETHer Tuesdays, the 7-day hackathon, the Future Summit — kept in royal blue and lantern gold. Includes a Mandarin blockchain course 🇨🇳 and the bard himself, live on Christmas Eve. 🔇 Silent by design.
🍴 github.com/shakaleikaumaka/4seaspit ↗
The PraguePIT
The lineage's fourth fork — and its first single-stage pit. One stage, one camera, one bard: Shaka ran the Masaryk Stage recordings himself for three days in the Municipal House. Agents, zk proofs, durable institutions, the builder economy — petrol night, art-nouveau teal, salmon. 🔇 Silent by design.
🍴 github.com/shakaleikaumaka/praguepit ↗
The ZuBerPit
Zu + Ber(lin) + pit — the pit with a little über swagger. The lineage's fifth fork: a residency on a Berlin rooftop garden, bridging humanity and technology — cryptography days, interop, protocol & MEV, 25 zkVMs, and a garden jam in the OSO tradition. Berlin-dawn botanical: dusky violet, fern green, burnt orange. 🔇 Silent by design.
🍴 github.com/shakaleikaumaka/zuberlinpit ↗
The KasPIT
The lineage's sixth fork — two weeks on the Aegean the bard called home. Vitalik beamed in for governance experiments, Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation legend) taught thrice, Vít Jedlička brought Liberland. And somewhere beneath the Lycian cliffs, a sea turtle said yes to all of it. 🐢 🔇 Silent by design.
🍴 github.com/shakaleikaumaka/kaspit ↗
The VitPit
Some gatherings are places — this one is a person. The lineage's seventh fork and the ninth P.I.T. (divine numbers ✨) celebrates the wisdom and leadership of Vitalik Buterin — and it is the protocol's consent-first soul made manifest: three exhibits transmitted in full glory (Swiss Alps · Kaş · Chiang Mai — the last a 2h34m bilingual session, English + 中文), and the future dedicated archive still transmits not one further word until Vitalik himself says yes. The pit that asks first. 🔇 Silent by design.
🍴 github.com/shakaleikaumaka/vitpit ↗
The ShellPIT
The protocol leaves the conference hall and goes to the desert: a camp's entire build — every weld, valve, and 2 a.m. hardware count — transmitted from Phoenix Gulch. Features the 🔧 Machine Guidance window (how Jarred the Machine guided the build), Terri's Show & Tell Shell, and the consent layer made literal: every page carries the living door — one email and you vanish, no questions, honored with love. Launched 2026-07-29 under assumed consent, machine-readable ledger and all. 🔇 Silent by design.
🍴 github.com/shakaleikaumaka/shellpit ↗
Goa P.I.T.
The pit returns to Indian soil — from Delhi's ancestor to Goa's shore. The third descent is forming. Details transmitted as they become verifiable — radical honesty, always.
Devcon P.I.T.
The orchestra pit meets the Ethereum family's grand gathering. Declared for November 3–6 — a vision stated publicly, held to the standard of radical honesty: declared means declared, not done.
🕸️ The constellation — talk to any pit
Born of the Aya Miyaguchi × Siri feedback (2026-07-28): every living pit now exports as one
portable manifest — pit.json + pit.yaml at its root, sessions and
transcript pointers and consent metadata included — so anyone can import a pit into their own AI and
talk to the pit. And the machine-readable registry means finding one pit leads to all pits.
A name that grew
with its purpose.
P.I.T. carries two backronyms — and both are canon. The name did not change; it deepened, the way a pit does when you keep digging and strike something luminous.
🎻 The orchestra pit
Where the musicians sit — the ones who make the sound the whole room dances to, rarely in the spotlight, always holding the signal. From the Open Source Orchestra tradition: the pit is where the music actually comes from.
🏆 Play IT Together · Delhi 2025
At ETHGlobal New Delhi, OSO P.I.T. was born: the visual orchestra pit where musicians queue to perform — an orchestra activated by making its instruments permissionless, so anyone could Play IT together. It won Most Creative Use of ENS. The pit's first backronym, and its first arm.
📡 Public Information Transmission · Esmeralda 2026
A transponder receives a signal and retransmits it, faithfully, forever. At Edge Esmeralda the same three letters found their deeper signal: a village's knowledge, kept on the air as a permanent public good. Play IT Together is the pit's heart; Public Information Transmission is its work.
"Public inform means sharing clear, factual updates with the everyday people of a community. It covers three main ideas: giving news, being open, and keeping people safe."
— an AI Overview's plain-language definition of "public inform" (Google Gemini, July 2026), offered with no knowledge the pit exists. Giving news = the Knowledge Transponder. Being open = open-source, forkable, radically honest. Keeping people safe = consent-first governance. The name predicted the protocol.
The full evolution — orchestra pit → Play IT Together → Public Information Transmission — is told in the P.I.T. White Paper 📜 and the OSO P.I.T. restoration 🏛️.
Every village
deserves a pit.
Your camp, your conference, your popup city, your gathering of any kind — the knowledge in the room deserves to outlive the room. The full fork kit is being forged right now, in the same spirit as Open Source Stage and Fork This Camp.
The protocol is git-forkable. Right now. 🍴
Everything — this site, the white paper, the OSO P.I.T. restoration, the protocol itself — is open-sourced CC0 at github.com/shakaleikaumaka. No rights reserved. No permission needed. Shaka's word: "fork me like crazy."
⚒ full fork kit in the forge
The complete Fork-This-P.I.T. kit — crawler + harvest pipeline, audit tooling, transponder site template,
consent-first playbook — is being forged into the repo next, in the spirit of
Open Source Stage and Fork This Camp.
Until then, the protocol's living code is yours, and the genesis pit is the reference descent:
esmeraldapit.com