Mission & Vision

The mission

To foster knowledge creation and knowledge management.

The human psyche and human cognition have the potential to do much more — in particular when it comes to their interaction with the digital world — than what currently exists. The current digital ecosystem (operating systems, apps, the web, AI) still only scratches the surface of the potential of human cognition.

There is a big difference between having a ton of information online — as Wikipedia does — and understanding, at a technical and individual level, a complex topic the way a molecular biologist understands their field. Access to information is not understanding. IndieK is built around that distinction.

IndieK aims at fostering knowledge creation at the level of individual psyches. It also targets collaborative knowledge generation, via debating.

The vision

Two movements, one substrate:

1. The individual. A person building genuine understanding of a complex topic needs to externalise structure, not just store documents. They need to connect, contradict, revise, and re-read their own thinking over years — without their work being trapped in a vendor’s database or in a format that dies with the app that wrote it.

2. The collective. Understanding sharpens against opposition. IndieK treats debate as a first-class knowledge-generating activity rather than as social noise, and models it on the same substrate as individual thought.

Both rest on the same technical foundation: a durable, verifiable, implementation-independent knowledge graph archive that a person owns.

The bet

IndieK’s current bet is to leverage knowledge graphs with very loose restrictions on the data format:

• Versatile data may be attached to both nodes and edges. An edge is not a bare pointer — it carries content, and can be argued about, tagged and revised exactly like a node.
• Tags may be designed freely for both edges and nodes. IndieK ships no fixed ontology, no mandatory schema, and no imposed taxonomy. You invent the vocabulary your topic needs.

This looseness is deliberate. A rigid schema encodes someone else’s understanding of your domain; premature structure is the enemy of knowledge creation. IndieK constrains durability (content-addressed data, signed append-only history, archival-safe media types) and leaves meaning to you.

What that implies technically

The bet above is what produces the design choices documented in the format specification:

The products

IndieK is an ecosystem, split along a clear line: the format and the local tools are free and open source; the hosted, networked services are proprietary. See Introduction for how the pieces fit together and Licenses for the legal terms.

Free and open source

• The IndieK archival format — the specification on this site. Apache-2.0.
• ik, the Python CLI — the reference implementation for creating, reading, verifying and exporting archives. Apache-2.0. See the CLI reference.
• The IndieK Desktop App — a packaged backend + frontend that runs 100% locally and fully offline, taking local repositories as input. Because an archive is just a directory, a knowledge graph can be built collaboratively using nothing but git.
• indiek.org — this documentation site.

Proprietary

• Cloud-hosted knowledge-graph management web apps.
• A debating platform powered by a knowledge-graph backend.
• Premium tiers for cloud functionality.

The proprietary layer is built on top of the open format. It does not extend it, fork it, or gate it: an archive produced by a paid IndieK service is readable by the FOSS CLI, and vice versa.

Roadmap

Until 1 October 2026 the specification and the CLI should be treated as pre-1.0 and subject to change. The archival format is at version 2.0.

Where to go next

• Introduction — what IndieK is, all products, and how it works
• Format specification — the archival format in full
• CLI reference — every ik command
• Contributing — how to get involved
• Licenses — Apache-2.0 terms and what they cover