The Hitchhikers Workshop โ a one-pager for a university partner
A facilitated masters-level course where the cohort trains its own local AI,
writes across three forms, builds its own evaluator, and leaves holding
books, papers, and verifiable provenance. This page merges the two threads
the idea grew from: the air-gapped babblefish workshop, and the
universities-as-partners vision from the Hitchhiker timeline sessions.
The course in one paragraph
A shared, air-gapped local AI (no cloud โ the room's thinking never
leaves the room) sits in a flight case in a seminar room. Each week the
cohort writes one understanding across three tongues โ sci-fi narrative
(casting forward), poem (compressing to human-readable), formal
paper โ and a blind, hash-drawn gate checks the understanding survives
translation. A different student stewards the machine's training each
week: the model is grounded in the cohort's own consented words โ audio
notes, drafts, transcripts โ until it is, literally, a mirror of the room.
The cohort's capstone is re-fitting the evaluation harness itself: they
graduate owning the examiner, not just passing it.
What students walk away with
- Three bound artefacts โ a Book of Poems, the Collected Papers, a Story
Anthology (print-ready, produced by the course's own pipeline); - verifiable provenance โ a hash chain proving they began this
machine's training (every student stewards one week; every fold is signed
and re-derivable offline); - a working evaluation harness they amended themselves โ metric, blind
gate, hard constraints โ a transferable research artefact; - consent literacy in practice โ every expression enters the corpus under
a signed, withdrawable consent line (IEEE Std 7012-2025 / MyTerms โ the
machine-readable personal-terms standard).
Why a university โ and which
The timeline vision names the partner profile precisely: niche-research
universities outside the top-tier model-aligned institutions โ departments
that want sovereign compute and their own corpus, not a subscription to
someone else's frontier. The course runs on one commodity machine; the
department keeps the model, the corpus, and the method. Summer intensive
timing ("after the universities are broken up") or a semester seminar both
fit; the format is a natural node in a "global erasmus" knowledge-
exchange โ cohorts at sister institutions each train their own mage, and the
methods federate while the corpora stay home.
What the institution provides / what arrives in the flight case
| the university | the workshop |
|---|---|
| a seminar room, 8โ14 masters students, 8โ10 weekly sessions | the mage machine + carried network/naming layer (works in any room, needs no IT integration) |
| a faculty co-host; the grading of record | facilitation, the harness, the ceremony, the bound-book pipeline |
| ethics-board conversation (the consent ledger is designed to make this easy) | consent registers in three forms: plain-language, legal stub, machine-readable |
Assessment posture
The course's gate answers "does the understanding survive translation?" โ
blind, replayable, third-party auditable. Marks remain the institution's own
act, informed by artefacts the harness makes unusually legible: validated
triptychs, fold history, each student's register contributions.
Lineage & federation
The course is the local expression of the hitchhikers.earth federation
("Proof of Understanding" is its gate too); consented outputs can federate
to the community's wiki as seeds. The method's canon, engine, and audit
tooling are public: github.com/mitchuski/agentprivacy-harness.
Contact: Mitchell Travers ยท mitchell@soulbis.com
Assets
Source: workshop/UNIVERSITY_ONEPAGER.md
upstream: github.com/mitchuski/hh_workshop ยท the repo is the source of truth; this page is a projection that records its origin ยท author: Mitchell Travers ยท (โ๏ธโฅโฟปโฅ๐ง)๐
โ The HH Workshop ยท Welcome Visitors