The story is Ernesto Sirolli's, from Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!, and the method he built from it — Enterprise Facilitation — is the method this volume is trying to copy. Two of his rules matter most here:
“You never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody.” You do not arrive with ideas. You do not call a meeting, because the people with something to build do not speak at meetings. “You become a servant of the local passion.”
Applied here: this volume has no view about which questions African scholars, archivists, curators, lawyers or economists should be pursuing, and will not acquire one. It is not a research agenda with slots. The chapters already written are the author's own work and are offered as examples of the standard, not as a direction of travel.
The honest corollary, stated where it costs something: Chapter 2 is itself an instance of what Sirolli warns about. It is a chapter about the custody of African scientific objects, researched from Newark, New Jersey, from published sources, without a single conversation with anyone at the institutions concerned or in the countries of origin. It is careful about what it does not know and it marks its open questions, and that is not the same as having asked. It should be corrected by people who were never consulted about it, and this page exists partly so they can.
Sirolli's second rule is that no one person has the full set. “We have never met a single human being in the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money.” Product, marketing, financial management — three capacities, rarely two in one person, almost never three.
Scholarship outside an institution has its own trinity, and the same arithmetic.
| Capacity | What it is | Who usually has it |
|---|---|---|
| The ground | The object, the archive, the field site, the language, the community memory. Knowing what is actually there and what the record omits. | People where the thing is. Frequently unaffiliated, frequently uncited. |
| The instrument | The statute, the contract, the acquisition file, the accounting standard. Knowing what governs the thing and what it forecloses. | Lawyers, archivists, registrars. Rarely in the same conversation as the first. |
| The address | Publishing it so it resolves — sources fixed, claims marked, corrections visible, and still there in five years. | Almost nobody, because it is unrewarded work. |
This volume offers the third, and will help you find the second. If you have the ground — if you know something about an object, a route, a collection, a contract or a history that is not written down at an address anyone can check — that is the part nobody else can supply and the only part that matters. The rest is craft and can be arranged.
It is the series standard and there is nothing else to it. Every claim resolves to an address, or is marked open.
There is no length requirement, no format requirement beyond a web page, no fee, and no affiliation requirement of any kind. There is no editorial board, because there is nobody qualified to sit on one.
Anything in the volume's three axes — history of science, custody, transmission — or its economic half. Some shapes that would obviously belong:
Write to g6llc@proton.me and say what you are working on. Not a proposal — there is nothing to propose to. Just what you know and what is missing from it.
If it is useful, there is a standing forum where these questions are argued before they are written up: the G6 Chamber, which is deliberately not a terminal — no subscription, no seat fee, no data licence, and no requirement to hold a chair in order to take the floor. Ask and you will be let in.
That this becomes a well-intentioned outsider's project about a continent, staffed by people recruited to its author's questions. The measure of whether it worked is simple and checkable: in a year, what share of the chapters were written by someone who did not need this page's permission or its framing — and how many of them corrected it.