MyZubster: Building a Provenance Network for Knowledge, Skills, and Real-World Exchange
We started MyZubster with a simple real-world question:
What happens if I give someone my kefir culture, they reproduce it at home, document what they learn, and eventually pass both the culture and the knowledge to someone else?
That small experiment is evolving into something much larger.
We're building MyZubster as an open-source system for representing how resources, knowledge, and skills move between people while preserving provenance and uncertainty.
The core loop is simple:
Share → Try → Observe → Improve → Share again
From a kefir culture to a provenance graph
Milk kefir is our first real-world prototype.
Instead of storing only:
Daniel gave kefir to Nicola
we want the system to represent the actual lifecycle:
Daniel's culture → Marketplace listing → Nicola accepts → Hand exchange → Nicola confirms receipt → Nicola maintains his culture → Observations → Future donation
Every transition is a separate event.
If something hasn't happened yet, the system shouldn't pretend it has.
If a quantity, temperature, timestamp, outcome, or condition wasn't recorded, it stays:
UNKNOWN
This principle has become one of the foundations of the MyZubster Knowledge Protocol.
Knowledge is another transferable resource
Then we realized the same model can describe learning.
Daniel has been helping Nicola work with GitHub, Docker, and the MyZubster ecosystem.
That creates another graph:
Daniel → Nicola learns → Nicola attempts → Observable artifact → Nicola can teach another person
But there is an important rule:
Evidence is not inherited.
If Nicola teaches another participant, that participant must create their own evidence.
So the graph becomes:
Daniel → Nicola → Person B → Person C
while every edge has independent provenance.
From fermentation to a general knowledge network
The repository has now expanded beyond fermentation.
Current and newly introduced domains include:
KF- — Fermentation
SND- — Sound systems
DEV- — Programming
UNI- — University/research
PET- — Animals
PERM- — Permaculture
MUS- — Music
ART- — Art
SPT- — Sport
MA- — Martial arts
This allows very different communities to use the same underlying protocol.
A tekno musician could teach someone how to operate or assemble part of a sound system.
A musician could teach another person DJing, production, rhythm, or an instrument.
An artist could teach drawing or comics.
A calisthenics practitioner could document teaching a particular progression.
A Thai-boxing practitioner or coach could document a bounded training session.
The domain changes.
The provenance model doesn't.
Turning skills into marketplace objects
We're now extending the MyZubster marketplace concept so that an offer doesn't necessarily represent a physical object.
It could represent:
a resource, a lesson, mentoring, a workshop, a demonstration, or a collaboration request.
A skill exchange can therefore follow:
Teacher → Skill Listing → Learner Accepts → Session → Participation Confirmation → Attempt → Evidence → MyZubster Record
And eventually:
A teaches B → B reproduces → B teaches C → C reproduces
This creates a distributed graph of practical knowledge.
Physical and knowledge graphs can intersect
The interesting part is that MyZubster can maintain two separate graphs.
A physical-resource graph:
Daniel → Kefir → Nicola → New culture → Future recipient
And a knowledge graph:
Daniel → Nicola → Reproduced skill → New learner
They can reference each other without becoming the same thing.
Receiving kefir doesn't prove that someone knows how to maintain it.
Reading a Knowledge Card doesn't prove that someone performed the procedure.
Teaching a skill doesn't prove that the learner mastered it.
Each statement needs its own evidence.
Where blockchain fits
Blockchain is intended as an optional provenance layer.
We're deliberately avoiding the shortcut:
blockchain = truth
It doesn't.
An on-chain record can establish that a particular commitment or declaration was recorded.
For MyZubster, we therefore distinguish states such as:
RECORDED
from:
ONCHAIN_RECORDED
The latter should only exist when we have an actual network and verifiable transaction/record identifier.
A transaction hash doesn't automatically prove competence, lesson quality, physical delivery, professional qualifications, or the truth of every statement committed to it.
Those remain evidence problems.
Evidence states
MyZubster currently works with a deliberately small evidence vocabulary:
PERSONAL_PRACTICE
TRADITIONAL_PRACTICE
OBSERVATION
EXTERNAL_SOURCE
VERIFIED_GUIDANCE
And there is another important constraint:
More observations do not automatically produce VERIFIED_GUIDANCE.
Verification requires an explicit review step.
That prevents a community voting mechanism or simple repetition counter from silently transforming popular claims into verified knowledge.
The implementation
This isn't only a concept document.
The repository already contains tooling for:
canonical Knowledge Cards;
domain validation;
evidence records;
claims and sources;
knowledge relations;
reproductions;
knowledge versions;
collaboration requests;
verification reviews;
integrity checking;
graph persistence;
transactional record/graph updates;
recovery logic;
a read-only Knowledge API;
a browser-based Knowledge Explorer.
We've also started creating real cross-domain records.
For example:
DEV-001 — Nicola's observable MyZubster/Docker/comics project artifacts
DEV-002 — Nicola's reported learning/onboarding path
ART-001 — Daniel's comics practice
SPT-001 — Daniel's calisthenics practice
MA-001 — Daniel's Thai-boxing practice
For claims where supporting evidence hasn't yet been attached, the system explicitly preserves that limitation rather than manufacturing provenance.
Current development status
Our last confirmed complete local run was:
110 tests / 110 passing
That result predates the newest domain and Knowledge Card additions, so we're not claiming those latest changes as tested until the next complete run.
That's another principle we're trying to follow throughout the project:
don't convert an expected result into an observed result.
The public Knowledge Explorer is available here:
MyZubster Knowledge Explorer
The source code and current protocol development are here:
MyZubster on GitHub
At the moment, GitHub contains newer work than the production Knowledge Explorer deployment, so the repository is the source of truth for the latest development.
What's next
The next major step is moving the new Skill Marketplace model from protocol documentation into structured schemas and runtime records.
The target lifecycle is:
Listing → Acceptance → Session/Exchange → Evidence → Knowledge Graph → Optional on-chain commitment
After that, we can start testing the protocol with more real people and very different types of knowledge.
Kefir is just the first physical experiment.
The broader question behind MyZubster is:
Can we build an open provenance graph showing not just what people say they know, but how knowledge and resources actually move, get reproduced, change, and get passed to the next person?
That's what we're trying to find out.