Join a community
Joining a Betat community means becoming a Provenancier — a verified human contributor whose knowledge enters the permanent record. The community verifies that you are a real person, then you can submit content for review. When a verifier accepts your submission, it becomes a provenance record carrying the HI tag: permanently attributed to you, permanently readable by anyone.
You do not need to install anything. You need a browser and an invitation or enrollment link from your community.
How joining works
1. Find your community’s Betat instance. Your community administrator will give you the URL — something like archive.example.org or similar. This is your community’s own Betat site, not betat.org.
2. Enroll as a Provenancier. Visit the Enroll page on your community’s site. You will provide a display name and authenticate through your community’s chosen method — peer vouching, a cryptographic key, or an institutional identity. Your community verifies that you are a real, known human before enrollment is complete. All three now work entirely through the web form. A cryptographic key can be set up with just a passphrase you choose and remember, like a password — no technical step required; you’ll use that same passphrase to log back in later. (If your community’s administrator instead asks you to generate and paste in your own key, that’s a more technical alternative meant for applicants who prefer to hold their own key file directly.) If you enroll by peer vouching, your enrollment may not complete immediately — it finishes once enough existing members have vouched for you.
3. Submit your first record. Once enrolled, you receive a submission token. Use it to submit content for review. Provide a persistent link to the content and a hash — your community administrator or the documentation can help with this if it is unfamiliar.
4. A verifier reviews your submission. A community verifier reviews what you submitted. If accepted, your submission becomes a provenance record: permanent, public, and carrying the HI tag.
What you are declaring
When you submit content, you accept a declaration:
I declare that this content was originated by a human being. I am that human being, or I am an authorized representative. I understand that this declaration is permanent, public, and append-only — it cannot be removed or modified.
This declaration is the foundation of the HI tag. It is what makes a Betat provenance record meaningful. The permanence is not a legal threat — it is a commitment to the record’s integrity. A record that can be quietly removed or changed is not a record worth trusting.
What you do not need
- An account on betat.org
- Any software installed on your device
- Technical knowledge beyond using a web form
Betat is designed so that the knowledge matters, not the technology. If you can fill out a web form, you can contribute to the record — including with a cryptographic key, if you choose a passphrase rather than generating one yourself (see step 2).
Reading records
Anyone can read provenance records — no enrollment, no account, no cost. Reading is always free and always open. The record for anything your community has verified is findable through your community’s site or through the Betat registry when it launches.
Betat. The human record, for the other person.