One house in a family of them.
In Alberta. The family runs machines and crews and farms its own land. This one makes nothing that moves. It is the agreement, the roster and the pay that sit underneath somebody else's machine, and it was written for the person whose way of working that is: so that what you know stays yours, is there to be used on your terms, and pays you.
One outfit: the crews, the ground and the iron.
The people who grade a corridor through bush in winter, feed cattle at first light and seed a field in spring are the same people who sat down to write this. One family, one crew, and the ground and the machines under it.
So this instrument, the agreement, the roster and the pay, was not written by people who had watched a machine from a distance. It was written by people who pay operators, who have lost the good ones to retirement, who have sat in the seat themselves, and who are old enough to have heard every pitch. Both sides of the agreement are sides we have been on, and each side got its say.
The family farms its own land, and the farm is where the plainest case for all of it is: a way to keep your own way of running a tractor, not the best in the country but your own, and hand it to your kids so they can work the same fields with you, in spirit. That has a page of its own.
Farming with DadWritten by people who have paid the wages and pulled the levers.
An owner knows what a seat nobody can fill costs when the window is short. An operator knows what a careful day looks like from inside the cab, and how little of it shows on a timesheet. The agreement was argued across that table, each side pressed as hard as the other, by people who have sat on both.
It shows in what the agreement refuses to do. Nobody who has paid a good operator for years wants to buy their method for a lump sum, and nobody who has run a machine on soft ground wants to be ranked by a number. Both of those are written out, and they are written out because we would not accept them ourselves.
What we know from the seat
A careful day leaves nothing behind to point at. The bank held, the line was not undercut, the machine came home. Nobody writes that down, and until now nobody could.
What we know from the office
The person everyone asks for by name is the one you cannot replace with a hire, and when they retire, what they knew goes out the door with them. Wages paid for their time. Nothing ever paid for their method, and nothing of it was left for their family.
Your way of working can now be recorded, and you need an instrument on your side.
What you know about running a machine has never been property. It could not be sold, licensed or paid for twice, so nobody ever wrote an agreement for it. Now AI can learn how you work from a record of you doing the job, and once it can, somebody will make the record. The question left is whether you were asked for it and paid for it, and whose side the instrument holding that record is on.
Everything the field has built so far records what a machine did and barely what a person meant, and most of it belongs to the people who sell the machines. Most of what is called AI learns from people who were never asked and never paid, and if you distrust it, you are right to. The people who wrote this run machines for a living and are old enough to distrust it too. The family looked at that and made a decision. If the way an operator works is going to be learned by a machine, the person who owns that knowledge should be asked first, paid every hour it earns, keep their name on it, and be able to take it back. You own your skill. Always. Forever. Nothing here takes it, buys it, moves it or learns it out of you. So we wrote the instrument down first: the agreement, the record it rests on, and the count that pays. We did it before asking anyone outside the family to sign, and we wrote it so a person could read every clause without a legal department.
The law protects a thing that was made and never the way of making it, so nothing here claims to own a technique. It is written as a payment obligation and a licence: you license a record of how you work, we build a tool from that record, and the tool runs under your name and pays you every hour it is in use, because you kept the original. Every attempt before this to pay people for what they know has either failed or dropped the paying part. The paying part is what this company exists to hold, and it outlasts the days you are in the seat: the licence, the money and the right to end it pass to your family for as long as the licence runs. The position is ruled, and the clause is with counsel.
What you leave behindWhose side it is on
The person whose way of working it is, first, because without their yes there is no session and without the session there is nothing to license. The owner second, because an owner who cannot check the count will not pay it for long. Ours after both, because what we own is what is made of a person's skill and never the skill itself, and the reason to keep paying the person is the reason the instrument exists.
Why it stands apart
An instrument that counts the hours and pays the person has to stand on its own, apart from whoever makes the machine that runs it. It is separate by design from anyone who makes machines, because its value is proportional to that independence. Even Steven makes no machine and sells none, so nothing about whose iron you run changes what the count says or what the person is paid. The count is read by both sides from one record and checked against us, never against whoever sold the iron.
The machines are learning. Even Steven keeps it fair and square.
The first recordings are made on people we already pay.
The procedure that admits or refuses a record runs on us before it runs on anyone else, so the awkward questions are found by us and not by you.
The agreement, the repository and the count.
Nothing that moves, and nothing that takes your skill. Everything here sits underneath the machine and says whose way of working is in it, who cleared it, and what is owed to whom.
The covenant
The terms between you, the people who build from your record, and the owner whose machine runs it: what is recorded, what is paid, whose name goes on it, how it ends and how the count is checked. Every clause is written against its counterpart on our side. The rate is on the covenant, and this page does not repeat it.
Read the covenantOur door on the register, and the store front
Even Steven's door on the Tacit Tessera register, where a named way of working is held under the name of the person it came from, and where an owner licenses one by name for a job. The person whose way of working it is opens their own record there, and reads the same count the owner reads.
The repositoryHours in use, kept in sessions
Every hour a way of working is in use, written from the moment a person on the crew chose it by name and put their own name on the choice. You see the count as it is written and you are paid on it. The owner paying for it sees the same count.
The countWhat we build from your admitted sessions is a tool. The instrument, the building and the checking are the company's work, and the tool runs under your name, on your licence, pays you every hour it is in use, passes to your family, and you can end it. We make the tool. You own the skill. The tool reaches a machine as a release with a named person's signature on it, licensed for the family of machine it was taught on, and there is no flat sale of the whole. The store front and the licensing are run through the Tacit Tessera register, which writes the number, licenses the entry and counts every use. Tacit Tessera keeps the register and the count and deals with the makers, the kit companies and the fleet owners. The paper that lets the register use the corpus is not written yet, and there is no corpus until a first session has been recorded. Even Steven keeps the covenant, the roster, and the agreement with the hand.
Some houses in the family bring skill sets in. Even Steven owns what is made of them and holds the person's paper. Tacit Tessera is where the licences to machine makers are issued, and a record is used to train a model only where the person has said yes to that, on its own paper. The three are kept apart on purpose: the house that brings a skill set in never holds a person's paper, and the house that holds the paper never decides what a licensee may do. Even Steven owns what is made of every skill on every track, for the person or company it came from, and the skill itself stays theirs. It administers a person's rights and nobody else does, and it is the one house a Source signs with.
Even Steven collects as well. It collects with the Trainer it adopts from Steady Eddie, a kit in a case wired to nothing, on whatever machine the hand runs; where Even Steven collected a hand itself, the mark ES sits on that entry as the collector's. Collecting a skill set and owning what is made of it are two different jobs, and the Card says which is which.
A way of working proposes. It never authorizes, and nothing of ours is wired to the machine while a person works.
What we will never do, whatever the paper says.
Each refusal below protects the reason you would take part at all. Take one away and the rest stop meaning anything.
- Never buy a person's technique. It stays with them, in their career, whatever any paper says. What is made of it is ours, for the person it came from, and the skill behind it is never ours to buy.
- Never rank anybody. Nobody here is picked from a list or scored against the next person. People are asked for by name, by somebody who has seen them work.
- Never sell a record on. A session is information about an identifiable person. It goes nowhere without their yes, and whoever licenses a way of working cannot pass it to anybody else.
- Never let the machine-maker's name stand in for ours. Even Steven keeps its own name, its own papers and its own count. An instrument that counts the hours and pays the person has to be read by both sides, not kept by whoever makes the machine that runs it.
- Never wire anything to a machine while a person works. The recorder watches from outside it, connected to nothing, and comes off leaving no mark. What reaches a machine later is a release with a named person's signature on it.
Each refusal protects the reason you would take part at all.
Take one away and the rest stop meaning anything.
By name, by one test, in plain words.
- 01Asked for by nameNobody on our crews is put forward because of a number. Somebody who has seen the person work asks for them by name, and the person says yes or no to each agreement separately. A no is honoured without emptying anything else.
- 02Fair is fairEvery clause has to pass one test: would it still be acceptable if the two sides swapped places? Where the answer is no, the clause is out. Every protection on the operator's side has a counterpart on ours holding it up, and the two columns are the same length.
- 03Plain wordsThe agreements are written to be read by the person signing them, at a kitchen table, without a legal department. If a clause needs a lawyer to explain what it does to you, it is rewritten until it does not.
A person authorizes, safety has the veto, and the rule is written before it is used.
The order that holds on a site holds inside the company. Nothing we make can climb it, and nobody here is asked to argue with it.
A person authorizes.
A way of working proposes. It never authorizes. The same holds for every decision inside the company: a release carries the name of the person who signed it, a listing carries the name of the person who released it, and the choice of whose way of working runs carries the name of the person on the crew who made it. Nothing is decided by a process on its own, and if a release is ever wrong, there is a name on it.
Safety has the veto.
A way of working is software, and it is last. The person at the machine, the person who walked around it that morning, the one who chose by name whose way of working runs: each of them outranks anything in the software, and each of them can stop it by the machine's own means. Nothing decided in an office here outranks a no given on the ground.
The rule is written first.
A procedure, not a judgement, so it is written as one. Before a session is admitted or refused, before a release is signed, before a listing goes up, the rule it is measured against is already written down, and it has already been run on the crews at home. Nobody here decides a case first and finds the rule afterwards, and a refusal names its reason because the rule that produced it can be read.
One test, for every clause and the decisions under it.
Would this still be acceptable if the two sides swapped places? Where the answer is no, the clause is not in the agreement. The decisions taken under the clauses take the same test, in the same words. A protection with no counterpart is a favour, and favours get taken back.
A change of ownership should be a reason to withdraw, on its own, and what that obliges us to do is on its own page.
Ending itThe family's crews and machines first, and then everyone else.
The people we ask first are people we already pay, on iron we already own, on ground we have worked for years. Nothing about the instrument is tried on a stranger before it has been tried on us.
The crews at home
The operators who run the family's excavators, dozers, graders, drills, loaders and tractors. Somebody who has seen them work asks for them by name, and each of them says yes or no to each agreement separately. A no is honoured without emptying anything else.
The machines at home
The excavator first, because it is the machine the crews sit in, on home ground, doing work that is often blind. The rest of the yard follows the same rule: a way of working is licensed for the family of machine it was taught on, and nothing is offered for a machine it was not taught on.
The procedure, tried at home first
The checks that admit or refuse a session run on the family's own records before they run on anyone else's. A refused session is kept rather than thrown away and the reason travels with it, so what goes wrong is found at home, before you are asked for anything.
Then everyone else
Operators, owners and the people who represent them, once the agreements are finished and on this site in plain words. Until that step, writing to us puts you on nothing and commits you to nothing.
Nothing is tried on a stranger before it has been tried on us.
The people we ask first are people we already pay, on iron we already own.
The ranch, the feedlot, the earthworks and the winter corridors.
These are the places the instrument was written for and the places it is tried first. The photographs were taken on home ground, and the people in the seats are the crews who work it.
The ranch
Fields, a worked strip, a cut face with water at the toe. Ground that changes with the season and the weather, where a pad has to come in on grade and a drainage cut has to run the right way the first time, because the water will find out if it does not.
The feedlot
Cattle at the bunks at first light, a bunk line that runs to the horizon, pens cut into the ground and kept open in every season. A loader feeds every morning whatever the weather is doing, from a seat that cannot stand empty.
The earthworks
Borrow pits cut in bands, a causeway built out into open water, rock placed where the ground under it is soft or not there at all. Work that is often blind, where the careful operator works slower, corrects more, and reads as the worse one right up until the quick one is in the water.
The winter corridors
A graded strip through bush with snow either side, cut by a dozer in the short days, where the ground under the snow is anyone's guess until the blade finds it. The machine has to come home every night, and the operator who brings it home is the one asked for again.
Write to us, and say which one you are.
A person reads it and a person answers, in plain words. There is nothing to sign and nothing to buy, and writing to us puts you on nothing.
Tell us what you run, and which seat you cannot fill when the window is short. We will tell you what arrives on your machine, who signs it, where the rate is written, and what your own crew still has to do on the day.
If you own the machinesTell us which seat, what you run, and who asks for you by name. You are asked first, you are told what is recorded before it starts, in plain words, and without your yes there is no session. Your skill stays yours whatever you decide.
If it is your way of workingAsk what is wired to the machine while a person works, which is nothing, what a release is and who signs it, and who outranks whom. The answers are on the safety page, and they do not change from job to job.
SafetyAsk to see the terms before anyone signs. Where a body has a say in whether recording happens at all, it signs too. We do not give legal opinions, and you should not accept one from a vendor.
The covenantEven Steven is a registered Alberta trade name of Ripple Rock Industrial Group Ltd., the company that signs the agreements. Write to [email protected]. What has happened so far, what has not, and what comes next, in order, is set out in full on its own page, and it is the page that changes first when something does.
Ask who you would be dealing with.
If you are weighing whether to take part and want to know whose company this is, how a decision is made here and what we will never do, write to us and a person answers.