The living archive of African languages, owned by the people who speak them.
A language school on the surface. A consented, community-owned speech corpus underneath. Diaspora families pay elders to teach them their language, and every lesson builds a speech archive that the speaking community owns and licenses. The lessons pay for the archive. The archive is what has real value.
A house is one language community's own contract suite: its council, its corpus, its consent records, its fund. Anyone can found one. Nobody can be admitted to, or excluded from, a registry somewhere, because there is no registry and there is no operator.
Everything with authority or money in it. There is no platform account, no admin key, no operator service, no custodial wallet and no payment processor anywhere in this system.
| Contract | What it holds |
|---|---|
house |
The council and its votes, the split, who may certify minutes, the register of licences, and the community fund itself |
consent |
What each speaker permitted, for which recordings, until when, revocable by them alone |
corpus |
How much of the corpus each speaker built, in verified minutes |
royalties |
Licence settlement in a Stellar asset, and perpetual speaker royalties |
account |
A speaker's own account: one key on her phone, guardians she chose, custodied by nobody |
Payment is a Stellar asset moving between Soroban contracts. Cashing out to local currency is the speaker's own business with any SEP-24 anchor she likes, and no part of this system stands between her and it.
Audio, transcripts, names. Never. Consent here is revocable, and revocable means the underlying data has to be genuinely deletable, which a ledger cannot promise. The ledger holds the consent record and its hashes, which is enough for a speaker to prove years later exactly what she was played and what she answered.
Anyone who tells you a speech corpus belongs on-chain is selling you something that cannot honour a withdrawal.
| Piece | State |
|---|---|
| Five contracts | Built, 70 tests green, including end to end against the compiled wasm |
| Elder recording app | Not started |
| Spoken consent flow | Not started |
| Learner village | Not started |
| Testnet deployment | Not started |
cd contracts && cargo testcd contracts && stellar contract buildThe wasm under contracts/wasm/ is committed so the end-to-end tests run from a fresh clone. After
changing a contract, rebuild and copy it across:
cd contracts && stellar contract build && cp target/wasm32v1-none/release/griot_*.wasm wasm/- ethics.md is the product, not a compliance chapter
- architecture.md for what is on-chain and what is not
- consent-model.md for what the registry actually enforces
- threat-model.md separates what is enforced from what is merely planned
- economics.md for the numbers that still have to be measured
- decisions.md for every choice made and why
- Consent is never a blanket agreement. Every use traces to a specific, granular, revocable permission from the speaker. If it cannot be traced, it may not be used.
- Speakers and their communities own the corpus. There is no custodian to reverse that later, because there is no custodian.
- No recording, transcript, name or personal data on-chain, ever.
- Voice synthesis permission is asked separately, always, and defaults to no.
- Some knowledge is sacred. The system can record something and never license it.
- The elder holds her own key. Anything else makes the rest of this decoration.
- Design for an elder with a basic Android phone, limited English literacy and an unreliable connection. If she cannot use it alone, the product does not work.
- Never show a crypto denomination to an elder or a learner. Local currency, always.