There's a word that keeps coming up when you talk to people who build software for a living. The word is fork.

To fork something means you take an existing codebase — someone else's rules — and you branch off. You make your own version. You run it your own way. And nobody can stop you.

We're at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. At the Next Democracy Summit.

Ruzgar Imski is a Playnet contributor exploring organizations as games and games as organizations. How might we play organizations into existence? And in so doing overcome the division between game designers and game players, rule-makers and rule-abiders, between legislators and citizens.

Kate Lee builds systems too. What if you forked a city ordinance? What if you forked a federal statute? If code is law, put it in a repository, let people propose changes. Real changes. Actual line edits, submitted by anyone, reviewed in public, merged or rejected with a record of why. And underneath all of that is a harder question she keeps returning to — who owns your identity. Not your passport. Your digital twin. The version of you accumulating in systems you've never seen, built from searches and purchases and patterns and memories you didn't consciously hand over. AI is storing that now. Learning from it. And the person it knows best might be you — but you have no access to what it remembers. No access to your own externalized memory.

Tate Chamberlin put them in a room together. Two people who build systems and still want to talk about what those systems are actually doing to governance, to identity, to the idea of sovereignty in a world where code writes code and AI inherits the keys.

The game has been running for a while now. Someone designed it. It's up to us to change it. Today, Ruzgar, Kate and I are on a quest to open-source society and democracy.