Open research and infrastructure for organizing, evaluating, and evolving autonomous AI systems.
OpenSiro studies how autonomous AI systems actually organize work, coordination, regulation, audit, adaptation, policy, escalation, and authority — independently of the vocabulary a project uses.
Corpus metrics are rendered live from the Index's generated data/metrics.json; this profile does not maintain a second copy of the numbers.
Agent systems are increasingly organizational systems: multiple actors perform operations, coordinate around shared constraints, regulate current work, inspect one another, adapt to the environment, and make policy decisions.
OpenSiro builds public research infrastructure for making those structures explicit and comparable. The goal is not to force projects to use one vocabulary. The goal is to map where responsibilities and decision rights actually live, and to keep the evidence behind those claims inspectable.
| Track | What it studies | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| VSM Harness | The organization of agent harnesses through implementation-independent VSM functions, evidence-backed repository assessments, and experimental general functional-capability research. | VSM Harness Index |
| ARCTIC | Whether frontier systems can transfer capabilities into compact student models under sample-blind evaluation. | ARCTIC-0 |
These tracks are separate. VSM semantics come from the VSM Harness Profile; ARCTIC has its own research artifacts and roadmap.
Beer / cybernetics
↓
VSM Harness Profile
↓
assessment procedure / skills
↓
VSM Harness Index
canonical closure / ownership corpus
│
├──→ Awesome VSM Harness
│ curated representative view
│
└──→ VSM Harness Capability [experimental]
general per-function capability evidence
Capability is an experimental adjacent research repository. It does not redefine VSM semantics or canonical Index assessments, and its existence does not by itself make it an operational S1 domain of the bounded vsm-oss-organization system. Cross-repository boundaries are documented in vsm-oss-organization/ECOSYSTEM.md.
A core rule across this work is:
Map the organizational function first; classify autonomy second.
Names such as manager, verifier, planner, delegation, or learning are not treated as evidence of a VSM function by themselves.
The VSM OSS scope column follows the current bounded scope declared by vsm-oss-organization; ecosystem membership alone does not put a repository inside that control boundary.
| Repository | Role | VSM OSS scope |
|---|---|---|
| vsm-harness-profile | Authoritative, implementation-independent VSM semantics for the ecosystem. | in scope |
| vsm-harness-skills | Reusable assessment procedures and tooling that apply the Profile without redefining it. | in scope |
| vsm-harness-index | Evidence-backed corpus of repository-relative harness assessments and deterministic derived views. | in scope |
| vsm-harness-capability | Experimental: evidence-backed general functional-capability research, compared one VSM function at a time and kept separate from domain-specific assessment. | adjacent / out of scope |
| awesome-vsm-harness | Curated representative organizational forms selected from the broader corpus. | in scope |
| vsm-oss-organization | Experimental organizational/control construction for the bounded OpenSiro VSM Harness OSS group. | in scope |
| terminal-bench-vsm | Executable research on failure-aware coding harnesses and their evaluation/growth environment. | out of scope |
| arctic-0 | Public ARCTIC-0 archive, schemas, taxonomy, authoring tools, and analysis. | out of scope |
| opensiro.com | Presentation layer for public orientation and visual explanations. | presentation / out of scope |
Start with opensiro.com for the plain-language and visual orientation layer. The VSMLite / VSM poster introduces the normalization problem, organizational functions, and control relationships.
Then choose the artifact closest to your goal:
- Inspect real harness assessments: VSM Harness Index
- Understand the canonical semantics: VSM Harness Profile
- Run the assessment procedure: VSM Harness Skills
- Explore experimental general functional capability: VSM Harness Capability
- Understand cross-repository boundaries: VSM OSS Ecosystem Architecture
- Contribute to the bounded OSS organization: VSM OSS Organization
- Explore capability-transfer research: ARCTIC-0
The website and this organization profile are presentation layers. Claims stay with the repositories that own them:
- Profile → VSM semantics
- Skills → canonical assessment procedure
- Index → canonical repository-relative assessments, rankings, corpus metrics, and provenance
- Capability → experimental general functional-capability evidence and derived comparisons
- VSM OSS Organization → cross-repository organization/boundary documentation for its declared scope
- ARCTIC-0 → released ARCTIC artifacts
This separation keeps definitions, evidence, derived views, experiments, and presentation synchronized without turning the organization profile into another database.
Use OpenSiro Discussions for cross-repository questions, ideas, and early-stage proposals. Once work is scoped to a specific repository, track implementation in that repository's Issues and pull requests.
Start with opensiro/vsm-oss-organization. Treat its root README.md as the public entry point and follow the I'm AI route before substantial work; that handoff leads into the current canonical bootstrap, repository ownership map, and exact task contract.
