Epistemic Garden

Epistemic Garden is an R&D lab focused on community-driven collective intelligence, founded and led by Francisco Carvalho (known online as xiq / @exgenesis). The lab's central mission is to build tools that help online communities understand their information landscape and protect against coordinated manipulation, adopting what they call a 'germ theory for ideas' -- the idea that tools mapping idea diffusion can help communities maintain memetic sovereignty and epistemological robustness. The lab's flagship project is the Community Archive, a crowdsourced open database and API containing over 17 million tweets from hundreds of high-quality accounts. Built on this foundation, the team has developed several live tools including Keyword Trends (community-specific discourse tracking), Birdseye (visualizing individual work by topic over time), and a browser extension for real-time data collection. In-progress projects include the Nooscope (mapping idea origins and diffusion across networks), Meme Reports (weekly idea-spread synthesis), and Discourse Maps (discussion navigation and argument identification). Francisco Carvalho has a background in AI safety and online sensemaking tools. In 2021, he built ThreadHelper, a browser extension that turns Twitter into a collaborative thinking tool (an Emergent Ventures grantee). In 2023, he joined hive.one to work on Twitter data analysis and community detection. The Community Archive was launched in 2024, and Epistemic Garden was established as the umbrella R&D lab. The core team includes Carvalho as lead ML/software engineer, goat (@iaimforgoat) handling software engineering and data maintenance, and Alexandre Variengien as researcher. Variengien has a background in AI safety, having previously worked at the European Commission's AI safety unit (EU AI Office) and co-founded the Centre pour la Securite de l'IA (CeSIA). The team has informal advisors from Midjourney, Nomic AI, METR, and Microsolidarity. In October 2025, Epistemic Garden co-hosted the AI for Collective Sensemaking Unconference with Calcifer Computing in Brooklyn, New York, attracting approximately 60 participants with 15 talks and workshops. The lab operates openly, publishing lab notes on Substack and maintaining an active Discord community. The lab is supported by Vitalik Buterin, the Survival and Flourishing Fund (which recommended $100,000 in the 2025 S-Process round), and Peter Wang (co-founder of Anaconda). The Community Archive also accepts support through Open Collective.