A community canon is the short list of stories, songs and lists that the community commits to carry exactly, with named carriers and a written reference for each. Choose items by how costly an error would be and how hard the item would be to re-derive, and size the list to what the carriers can rehearse, because every addition takes rehearsal time from something already on the list.
Part of Standardized Narratives
A canon is a curated, maintained set of preserved narratives, each with its carriers, its fixed core and its verification record.
A Canon Is A Budget
Rehearsal time and carrier capacity are limited, so every item has an opportunity cost. A canon that grows without being pruned dilutes rehearsal until nothing is carried well. Selecting the canon is therefore a budgeting decision, and the answer should come from the community’s priorities, not from tradition for its own sake.
What You Need
- A candidate list — everything proposed
- A selection test applied to each
- A carrier plan — three carriers per item in separate households (Redundancy: Multiple Carriers)
- A written index of titles, owners and last verification
Method: Select With Four Questions
For each candidate, ask:
| Question | If yes |
|---|---|
| Would an error hurt people or waste scarce resources? | Strong case for the canon |
| Would it be hard or slow to work out again from scratch? | Strong case |
| Is it hard to put in writing or needed away from the book? | Memory is the right medium |
| Does the community already carry it reliably without effort? | May not need the canon’s overhead |
Candidates that answer “yes” to the first three are canon. Others are left to normal teaching (Teaching Methods) or to writing.
Typical categories, with the corpus pages that already cover the underlying subject matter:
- History — how the community formed and what it agreed; keep its record in Decision Archives
- Procedure — survival and craft sequences (Procedural Songs)
- Law and precedent — Precedent Records
- Warning — Warning Tales
Worked Example: Is The Canon Too Big?
Suppose a community can rehearse 8 hours of canon material per carrier per season, an assumed figure to be replaced by its own measurement, and each item takes 20 minutes to rehearse well.
- Item-rehearsals per carrier: 8 hours × 60 minutes ÷ 20 minutes = 24 per season.
- Total with 9 carriers: 9 × 24 = 216 item-rehearsals per season.
- If every item needs 3 carriers and each carrier rehearses it once a season, an item costs 3, so the canon holds 216 ÷ 3 = 72 items.
- If each carrier must rehearse each item four times a season, an item costs 3 × 4 = 12, so the same capacity supports 216 ÷ 12 = 18 items.
The figures are placeholders; the method is to count real rehearsal capacity and divide. Most communities find that spaced rehearsal, not storage, limits the canon.
Common Mistakes
- A canon chosen by prestige — the old, impressive story rather than the useful one.
- No pruning — remove items that no longer matter, and record the removal.
- No index — a canon nobody can list cannot be audited.
- Letting one faction define it — a community’s history and law belong to all; disputes about what belongs go through Conflict Resolution.
What’s Next
- Learn next: Procedural Songs — fixing the procedure items in song
- Combine with: Memory as Infrastructure — the register that tracks the canon