The orientation essay describes a coordination form that has been slowly emerging across geographies and traditions and closes with the line: “This wiki is a guide for establishing your own.” This essay is the bridge from reading to running.
Where you are
You have read the orientation essay. You understand a BioHub as a coordination body anchored in a specific BioRegion. You recognize that most bioregions already contain people doing regenerative work, and that what is missing is a coordination layer that connects the work into a single, fundable offer.
The coordination layer is what the four templates in the templates section produce. This essay walks through the shape of the work, what you need before starting, and what the templates will not do for you.
The four questions the templates answer
Each template answers one of four questions. In order:
Who are we? The BioHub Identity Template establishes the BioHub itself. Its three outputs (Identity Statement, Field and Lineage Positioning, Founding Compact) state who has convened, on what grounds, under what governance, with what patronage architecture, and where the BioHub sits in the emerging global field.
What is our BioRegion? The BioRegion Establishment Template establishes the geography within which the BioHub coordinates. Its three outputs (BioRegion Definition, BioRegion Atlas, BioRegion Charter) state the boundaries, the ecological and cultural profiles, the coordination bodies already active, and the principles under which coordination happens.
What do we tender? The BioConomy Value Proposition Template establishes what the BioHub offers markets. Its three outputs (Value Proposition Statement, Value Proposition Evidence Pack, Tender Compact) state the six-service portfolio (water yield, carbon sequestration, biodiversity data, heritage and tourism, food systems, coordination-as-employment) with the retention logic governing each, the counterparties who purchase each, and the participants whose commitments each depends on.
Which instrument does what we tender fit into? The Bankable Service Alignment Template maps the BioHub’s services onto a specific financial instrument. Its three outputs (Alignment Statement, Alignment Evidence Pack, Alignment Compact) state what aligns, what is alignable with build-out, what is misaligned, and what the cohort commits to build to reach instrument readiness.
The first three templates are the establishment work. The fourth is the alignment work. Run the establishment templates before the alignment template; run each template’s three prompts in sequence; do the cohort review between prompts.
What you need before you start
A coordinator. One person who convenes the cohort, runs the prompts, and holds the cadence of the work. This is a facilitation role, not an executive one. The cohort holds the commitments.
A small cohort. At minimum, two to five founding participants who have committed to the founding work. Named individuals, not organizational representatives. What each contributes and what each receives is spelled out in the Founding Compact.
A decision-making form the cohort agrees to work within. How the cohort decides. Which decisions require consensus, which majority, which coordinator authority. Set at the founding. Governs every subsequent cohort review across the four templates.
Access to a deep research AI platform. ChatGPT Deep Research, Claude Research, Perplexity Deep Research, Gemini Deep Research, or an equivalent. The Running a Template page covers the cross-platform notes.
An anchor location. The settlement or place from which the BioHub will operate. Not the whole BioRegion, which the second template establishes. The place where the cohort meets.
What you do not need before you start
A perfect boundary. The BioRegion Establishment Template produces two to four candidate boundaries for the cohort to choose from. The choice is made after the AI has done the analysis, not before.
A legal entity. The Identity Template’s Prompt 1 produces candidate entity forms. The cohort selects. The entity is registered after selection, not before.
Capital. The Identity Template’s Prompt 1 produces candidate patronage architectures. Mycelial Patronage is one of them. The architecture is selected before capital is raised, not the reverse.
Permission. The BioHub’s authority to convene is grounded in the cohort’s willingness to commit. It is not granted by an existing institution. Where an existing institution’s mandate overlaps with the BioHub’s coordination work, the BioRegion Charter’s principles for recognizing prior custodial and coordination bodies govern the relationship.
Complete information. Every template’s evidence pack includes a gap register. Gaps are named, not filled with confabulation. The readiness diagnostic tells the cohort which services are contractable now, which after specified build-out, and which are speculative pending research.
Where the templates cannot substitute for cohort work
The templates run in minutes. The cohort work between prompts takes days or weeks. This is a feature.
Three categories of work the AI cannot do:
Local knowledge the AI does not have. A boundary that reads well on ecological grounds may cut through a heritage territory the cohort knows about but no publicly available source names. A counterparty the AI names as a plausible buyer may have already refused an approach from a peer BioHub, and the cohort knows why.
Commitments only the cohort can make. The Compacts are co-signed. The AI drafts. The cohort commits. Where the draft asks for a commitment the cohort is not ready to make, the draft is revised, not the readiness.
Consent work that depends on relationships. Where the BioRegion contains indigenous or first-nation authority, the ecological-cultural boundary reconciliation depends on consent work the cohort does with the authorities concerned. Where the BioRegion contains other BioHubs, the multi-BioHub coordination depends on relationships the cohort holds with adjacent BioHubs. Neither is delegable.
The cohort review steps between prompts are where this work happens. The templates make the steps visible; the cohort does them.
Contribution back to the wiki
The templates are working documents. Every BioHub running them adds evidence: precedent cases the templates did not know about, verification methodologies that turned out to work or not to work, alignment pathways that revealed themselves once the deep evidence work was done, coordination protocols that held or did not hold under pressure.
The wiki’s editors welcome contributions back. The current channel is via the project’s GitHub repository at github.com/mbh66/biohubs. Case notes, precedent additions, template revisions, and questions about specific alignments can be raised as issues or pull requests there.
Where a BioHub has run the four templates and produced its own outputs, the outputs themselves may be candidates for a future case-studies section of the wiki, subject to the extraction publishability criteria and the BioHub’s own consent to publication.
Related pages
- What Is a BioHub
- The Templates
- Running a Template
- BioHub Identity Template
- BioRegion Establishment Template
- BioConomy Value Proposition Template
- Bankable Service Alignment Template
- BioHub
- BioRegion
- Commitment Pooling
Sources
- Gladek, E. et al. (2026). BioHubs: A Pathway to Regional Resilience
- Ruddick, W. (2023). Commitment Pooling
Provenance
Written as the bridge essay between the orientation piece (What Is a BioHub) and the templates folder. Draws on the four template documents in the VoG as Patron Project Prototype knowledge base for the substance of what each template does and requires. The distinction between what is needed and what is not needed before starting is drawn from the templates’ own “When to Run This Template” sections. The contribution channel named at the end reflects the current published wiki architecture; the wiki editors may direct contributions elsewhere as the project’s governance develops.