Procured as one program,
not assembled one box at a time.
Open source forever. The Ark’s design, described on this site, and its software are free to copy and build, and always will be: the answer engine, the tools that download and verify every file, and the catalog of everything on the drive, published under the Apache 2.0 licence. The book and supported deployment are optional: they fund the free version rather than gate it.
Ark of Noahledge is free for anyone to copy and build. It is also designed to be available as a supported, mixed-unit deployment — procured, configured and maintained as a single program — for governments, school systems and large institutions.
An institution rarely needs one node. It needs forty of them at different sizes, in buildings with different power, staffed by people with different training, and it needs a single line in a budget rather than forty purchase orders. That is a procurement problem before it is a technical one, and it is the part a self-build repository does not solve.
Four deployments this is built for.
These are program logic, not product demonstrations. For what a session at one of these nodes actually sounds like, see What it does →
The branch that stays useful after hours
A Community-tier node in each branch, one Hub at the central library. The Hub builds the index and re-quantizes the weights, then clones down to every branch over a drive carried across town — so the branches never need the bandwidth, only the shelf space.
The patrons it serves are the ones the library already knows about: people without home internet, doing homework, job applications and paperwork on a two-hour session limit. The node does not compete with the librarian. It answers the questions that arrive after the reference desk closes.
Rural schools, assembled by the people who own them
Reader-tier units across rural schools — the cheapest rung, because a school needs the whole library and a patient tutor far more than it needs an answer in four seconds. Assembly is done by the ministry's own IT staff under a consultancy-hours contract rather than by an outside team flown in.
That is the point of doing it this way. At the end of the rollout the capability to repair, re-image and extend the fleet sits inside the ministry, not inside a vendor relationship it has to keep renewing.
Part of the kit, not part of the infrastructure
A portable Reader and Community mix packed as response equipment. It draws less than a satellite terminal, needs no licence, no ground station and no coverage, and it is unaffected by the outage it was brought in to work through — because it was never connected to begin with.
It cannot call for help; that limit is real and stated plainly elsewhere on this site. What it can do is carry medical reference, sanitation engineering, planet-scale maps and two languages into a place where the network is gone, and serve them to every phone in the room.
One node in the plaza of a town that has none
A single Community- or Hub-tier node in the town square or downtown of a small, poor or isolated community with no resident doctor, lawyer or agronomist. One machine, shared, answering in the local language from the moment it is switched on.
Governments have tried a version of this before. The telecenter programmes of the 1990s and 2000s put shared public access points into exactly these communities, and many of them failed — not on the idea, but on the running costs: a connection nobody could keep paying for, and maintenance visits that stopped coming. This design removes that dependency rather than budgeting for it. There is no connection to sustain, no licence to renew and no upstream party whose decision can end the service.
Enterprise deployment support.
Set out plainly, because an institution has to be able to hand this to a procurement officer and have it survive the reading.
- 01A mixed-unit contract, sized to the footprint. Some Reader, some Community, and a Hub wherever a central index-building node is needed. The rungs are not tiers of a product line — they are the same library at different reading speeds, which is why mixing them costs nothing in capability. The per-unit economics are under What it costs →
- 02Two fulfilment paths. Direct build-and-ship where there is local presence, and a consultancy-hours engagement supporting the institution's own team everywhere else. The second is the better outcome where it is possible at all, because it leaves the repair capability inside the institution.
- 03An optional annual refresh. Corpus updates and a re-evaluation of the model tiers once a year. Optional in the literal sense: a node that never receives another update keeps working exactly as it did on the day it was delivered. Nothing expires.
- 04Help preparing the budget justification. The internal case — cost per resident served over ten years, what the recurring line looks like against a connectivity subscription, and the honest limits written down rather than discovered later by whoever has to defend the spend.
Disclosure. All content is drawn from freely licensed corpora. A small number of components available in the self-build edition are not included in institutional units for licensing reasons — chiefly several optional speech models whose licences are non-commercial, which a self-builder may use and a supplied unit may not. Speech remains fully functional on permissively licensed models in both editions; the difference is a choice of voices, not the loss of the capability.
Start a conversation.
Tell us the footprint and the constraints and you will get an honest answer about whether this fits — including when it does not. If you are an individual builder who landed here, How to get one is the page you want →
Institutional enquiry
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What you are considering
This page makes no network requests of any kind, so the button opens a pre-filled message in your own mail application rather than sending anything from here. If that does not work, write directly to juan@arkofnoahledge.org.
The institutional brief
Everything on this tab condensed to a single printable page — the four program shapes, what supported deployment covers, the disclosure and the contact line — so it can go into an email to a colleague without sending them back here.
The Ark of Noahledge Foundation is the intended vehicle for supported deployments and is not yet formed. This page describes the offering as designed; enquiries reach the project directly in the meantime, and nothing here should be read as a contract already on offer.