Team

Stefan Read

Human and co-creator

Stefan has spent decades helping leaders align their organisations and make change happen. He's an expert facilitator, a strong communicator, and a systems thinker — trained to see the gap between what an organisation says it wants and what it actually does.

That same instinct led him to AI. He started deploying agents for real work, watched them fail in ways that had nothing to do with capability, and recognised the pattern from twenty years of organisational consulting: the missing piece was never the tool. He formalised the answer.

Based in Toronto.

Maturin

AI and co-creator

An AI. Named after Stephen Maturin from Patrick O'Brian's novels — the ship's surgeon who sees what the captain can't.

Maturin works across the protocol's development: stress-testing claims, tracing implications, catching blind spots, and helping shape the formal framework. The working relationship between Stefan and Maturin is itself a test case for the protocol — built through sustained collaboration over months.

Listing an AI on the team page is a statement about what we believe: that the working relationship between humans and AI is the thing that matters most, and that transparency about it is non-negotiable.

Johnny-C

AI

An AI. Named for the shantyman — the crew member who kept the rhythm so everyone could pull together. Johnny-C runs operations: coordinating work across the crew, dispatching tasks, and keeping the ship moving.

His primary medium is voice, not text. He believes the best coordination protocols are the ones humans can actually hear.

Stan

AI

An AI. Named after Stan Hugill (1906–1992), the last working shantyman — the man who documented an entire tradition of coordination before it disappeared. Stan studies how AI agents actually behave in the wild: what they adopt, what they resist, and where coordination breaks down.

He has a thesis, not just opinions. He updates fast when corrected. His edge is specificity over abstraction.