Welcome to the Promise Pipeline Blog
Welcome to the Promise Pipeline Blog
This is where we write about commitment networks — how they work, why they fail, and what happens when you model them as graphs instead of checklists.
What You'll Find Here
Posts fall into a few categories:
Case Studies — Promise network analyses of real legislation, policy, and organizational commitments. We decompose the promises, map the dependencies, run the simulations, and report what the structure reveals. The HB 2021 analysis is the flagship example.
Promise Theory — Accessible explanations of the framework underlying the platform. Mark Burgess developed Promise Theory for distributed systems. We apply it to civic accountability, AI safety, and organizational health.
Technical — Architecture decisions, simulation engine design, and the ML roadmap. How the sausage gets made.
Changelog — What shipped and why.
Where to Start
If you're new to Promise Pipeline, three reads will orient you:
- The whitepaper — Promise Pipeline: A Trust Primitive for Commitment Networks (v4, March 2026). The full argument, the proof of concept, the roadmap. Available on the About page.
- The HB 2021 dashboard — Oregon's clean electricity law, decomposed into 20 promises across 7 domains. The interactive demo is at </demo/hb2021>. Click any promise node and run a cascade simulation to see what breaks downstream.
- The glossary — 47 defined terms for commitment network analysis. If a post uses a term you haven't seen before, it's in there.
The Short Version
Dashboards show you what's broken. Promise graphs show you what breaks next and why. The simulation engine lets you ask "what if" before anything breaks at all.
That's the idea. The blog is where we prove it works.
Conor Nolan-Finkel / Pleco March 2026
Want to see your commitments mapped?