Collective-State Inference
Defines CSI and its qualification requirements.
CSI Reference governance
Version History
A public record of substantive changes to the canonical, versioned documentation for Collective-State Inference.
Versioning policy
How changes are recorded
Major editions identify meaningful changes to the CSI construct system, qualification requirements, methods, or research status. Minor article versions identify substantive clarifications within an edition. Typographical and accessibility corrections may be deployed without changing an article version when they do not alter meaning.
The Editorial and Citation Policy governs source selection, claim classification, citation verification, corrections, and disclosure of generative-AI assistance.
Theory and literature alignment
Emergence, reduction, novelty, and testable consequences clarified
Date: September 10, 2026
Separated emergence from composition, added the interaction-to-configuration account of emergent collective conditions, and stated the boundary between aggregate-model inadequacy and broader claims about reduction. Added close computational comparisons, a seven-part set of testable CSI predictions, and an implementation-neutral model comparison. Removed active reliance on supplementary works that are not used in current Reference explanations while retaining them visibly for citation history.
Advanced RA-001 to Version 0.9, RA-003 to Version 0.3, RA-004 to Version 0.5, RA-005 to Version 0.4, and RA-011 to Version 0.4. Scholarly Sources advances to Registry 1.8 with 29 verified records. Canonical definitions and archived editions remain unchanged.
Proposed contribution
Foundations distinguished from CSI’s proposed contribution
Date: September 10, 2026
Added one concise paragraph to the reasoning and proposed evaluation sections of RA-001, RA-002, and RA-008. Each identifies established foundations, explains CSI’s proposed contribution, and connects its evaluation to construct validity or human judgment. Citations support the inherited foundations and close computational comparisons; they do not establish CSI’s novelty or empirical validity.
Advanced RA-001 to Version 0.8, RA-002 to Version 0.6, and RA-008 to Version 0.7. Canonical definitions and archived editions remain unchanged.
Standalone explanations
Public explanations made self-contained
Date: September 10, 2026
Revised the living Reference articles to explain CSI’s reasoning and proposed evaluations directly. Removed references to unavailable sections, numbered propositions, and manuscript-alignment badges. Retained the theoretical boundaries, published-source citations, and distinction between proposed capabilities and empirical findings.
Article versions: collective-aware-ai-systems 0.5; collective-awareness 0.6; collective-state-inference 0.7; collective-state 0.5; emergence 0.4; ground-truth-problem 0.3; observable-evidence 0.4; uncertainty-in-csi 0.4; validation 0.4. Scholarly Sources advances to Registry 1.7 with a general explanation of current sources and supplementary reading. Canonical definitions and archived editions remain unchanged.
Manuscript consistency correction
Explanations aligned with the submitted manuscript
Date: September 9, 2026
Replaced the recently added hypothetical test scenarios with explanations tied to manuscript Sections 1, 2.2, 3.2–3.3, 4.3–4.5, and 6.1 and Propositions 1–3 and 7. Removed reliance on Cronbach and Meehl, Messick, and Amershi in the affected living articles; identified their retained registry entries and other website-only validation sources as supplementary. The ground-truth article now distinguishes its continuing methodological work from the foundational submission.
Article versions: collective-state-inference 0.6; collective-state 0.4; collective-awareness 0.5; collective-aware-ai-systems 0.4; emergence 0.3; ground-truth-problem 0.2; observable-evidence 0.3; uncertainty-in-csi 0.3; validation 0.3. Scholarly Sources advances to Registry 1.6. Canonical definitions, the submitted manuscript, and archived editions are unchanged. This correction supersedes the elaborations described in the earlier September 9 entry.
Theoretical explanations
Core definitions connected to reasoning and proposed tests
Date: September 9, 2026
- Added concise explanations of collective state, collective-state inference, and collective awareness to the homepage, with links to their canonical articles.
- Advanced RA-001 to Version 0.5, RA-002 to Version 0.3, and RA-008 to Version 0.4. Added theoretical rationales, explicitly hypothetical comparisons, testable consequences, and boundaries while preserving the canonical definitions.
- Distinguished established foundations from CSI's proposed integration and clarified that an inadequate aggregate does not establish ontological or explanatory irreducibility.
- Aligned the current-review descriptions in RA-001 and RA-008 with the homepage's ongoing journal peer-review status. Review does not imply acceptance or empirical validation.
Archival continuity: Edition 0.1 remains unchanged. These changes apply to the living Reference articles.
Canonical alignment and journal submission
Canonical definition revised and foundational manuscript submitted
Date: August 11, 2026
- Advanced RA-001 to Version 0.4 and aligned the living CSI Reference with the foundational manuscript submitted to Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory.
- Revised the canonical definition so collective states are defined at the level of the collective rather than definitionally assumed to be irreducible to aggregation.
- Preserved composition-model fit as the governing rule: additive or consensus composition may be appropriate for some constructs, while relational, dispersion, temporal, or process structure may be required for others.
- Recorded non-reducibility as an empirical question rather than a definitional assertion.
- Updated public manuscript status to Submitted — Technical Check. This status does not imply editorial acceptance or peer review.
- Distinguished unpublished contemporary neighbors (Reading the Room and BEHAVE) from published literature while retaining them for novelty-boundary context.
Archival continuity: Edition 0.1 remains unchanged. These updates apply to the living CSI Reference.
Contemporary literature review
CSI positioning refined against contemporary literature
Date: August 10, 2026
The CSI Reference was updated following a review of recent computational research on group-level and collective-state modeling.
- Clarified that aggregation can support a collective construct when justified by an appropriate composition model.
- Expanded the contemporary literature base to include earlier computational work modeling group-level states.
- Refined CSI's novelty position: CSI does not claim to be the first computational approach to modeling group states. Its proposed contribution is specifying the conditions under which computational evidence warrants interpretation as a latent collective state.
- Updated supporting references and citation-verification records accordingly.
Archival continuity: These updates apply to the living CSI Reference. Previously archived releases remain unchanged.
Contemporary literature alignment
Novelty claims narrowed and supporting literature expanded
Date: August 7, 2026
The CSI Reference was strengthened through comparison with recent computational research on group states, team states, relational-temporal modeling, collective dynamics, group-awareness tools, and group conversational agents.
- Preserved the canonical CSI definitions while strengthening their relationship to adjacent computational research.
- Narrowed the novelty claim from priority over computational group-state targets to a general, level-aware theory specifying when computational representations warrant interpretation as latent conditions of bounded collectives.
- Added contemporary evidence for both additive and relational-temporal composition strategies, preserving the position that non-reducibility is construct-dependent and empirically testable.
- Expanded the supporting scholarly-source registry with close contemporary computational neighbors.
Archival continuity: These updates apply to the living CSI Reference. Previously archived releases remain unchanged.
Edition 0.1
Initial ten-article reference architecture
Release period: July 2026
Status: Foundational draft aligned to the theoretical manuscript current at the time of the Edition 0.1 release; not yet peer reviewed or empirically validated.
Collective State
Defines the latent, temporally situated property CSI estimates.
Collective
Defines the bounded social entity.
Emergence
Explains higher-level properties arising through interaction.
Composition Models
Specifies cross-level composition rules.
Observable Evidence
Defines construct-relevant empirical traces.
Validation
Defines validity, reliability, calibration, and baseline comparison.
Collective Awareness
Defines interpretation, explanation, projection, and responsible use.
Collective-Aware AI Systems
Defines accountable sociotechnical implementation.
Uncertainty in CSI
Defines uncertainty throughout the inferential chain.
Scholarly authority foundation
Policy and source registry established
Date: July 30, 2026
- Published the Editorial and Citation Policy.
- Published the Scholarly Sources registry.
- Added automated authority-page validation.
Claim-level citation audit
RA-001 through RA-010 advanced to Version 0.2
Date: July 30, 2026
- Added claim-level citations and direct registry links.
- Added claim-status language distinguishing scholarship from CSI propositions.
- Removed manuscript-only bibliographic deferrals.
- Preserved canonical definitions.
- Extended automated validation across all ten articles.
Scholarly publication readiness
Research provenance, machine-readable metadata, and citation exports added
Date: July 30, 2026
- Published the About the CSI Research Program page.
- Added
ScholarlyArticlestructured data and Highwire-style citation metadata for RA-001 through RA-010. - Added downloadable BibTeX and RIS citation records to every Reference article.
- Added
ResearchProjectstructured data to the provenance page.
Citation verification audit
Registry metadata and principal claim uses independently checked
Date: July 30, 2026
- Reviewed all 17 registry records against DOI registration or publisher metadata.
- Confirmed canonical DOI forms and found no DOI mismatch.
- Reviewed principal source-to-claim uses across RA-001 through RA-010 for scope and provenance.
- Published the Citation Verification Audit.
Archival and external-review readiness
Edition 0.1 prepared as a durable scholarly release
Date: July 30, 2026
- Published the Edition 0.1 Archival Release specification and fixed inventory.
- Added a deterministic release builder that produces a package manifest and SHA-256 checksums from the tagged source commit.
- Published the Scholarly Feedback and Corrections workflow.
No canonical definition or research-status claim changed during this phase.
License and Zenodo readiness
CC BY-NC 4.0 adopted for original scholarly content
Date: July 30, 2026
- Adopted Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International for original CSI Reference scholarly text, diagrams, and archival-release materials.
- Explicitly excluded third-party material, trademarks, branding, and repository code unless otherwise stated.
- Added root
CITATION.cff,.zenodo.json, andLICENSE-CONTENT.md. - Configured Zenodo metadata for an open-access publication record using the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Edition 0.1 publication
Public repository, GitHub release, and Zenodo DOI published
Date: July 30, 2026
- Published the curated public scholarly repository at
edTreeHouse/csi-reference. - Published the tagged GitHub release
csi-reference-edition-0.1. - Archived Edition 0.1 through Zenodo.
- Assigned DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21701697.
- Integrated the DOI into citation metadata, the release manifest, and the living Reference.
No canonical definition or research-status claim changed during this phase.