Knowledge Commoning Across Bioregions with Darren Zal
From Pattern Language to Living Infrastructure
In February, fresh off ETH Boulder — where “knowledge commoning” had just emerged as one of the hottest topics in the decentralized space — Darren Zal of Symbiocene Labs came to our Network Assembly to share something quietly revolutionary: two AI agents, one built for the Salish Sea and one for the Cowichan Valley, already in conversation with each other via the KOI protocol.
Darren’s work weaves together three threads: bioregional organizing (coordinating 10+ groups across Cascadia to map shared assets, problems, and solutions), knowledge infrastructure (the KOI protocol — “duct tape and WD-40 for knowledge management” — built with BlockScience and Regen Network), and a community of practice on how to abstract place-based wisdom into patterns that can travel across bioregions without flattening local context.
The deeper question underneath all of it: how do you build a knowledge commons that supports a genuine plurality of worldviews — that nests from the personal to the city to the bioregion to the inter-bioregional — without forcing everyone onto the same ontology? Darren calls this the challenge of ontological commoning, and the Salish Sea agent he demos live is an early, working answer.
If you care about bioregionalism, decentralized knowledge infrastructure, or what agentic AI looks like in service of place-based community — this one is for you.
Darren Zal is co-founder of Symbiocene Labs and an organizer with Regenerate Cascadia and the Greater Victoria Seed Group. This session was recorded at the OpenCivics Bi-Weekly Network Assembly on February 17, 2026.