How Boasts & Toasts Works
A structured provenance system to mark the moments that matter.
Origin
Boasts & Toasts records the pivotal moments in an organisation's history. It is a structured registry of founding roles, early contributions, and attested claims, designed to preserve accurate provenance before it gets lost in the noise of company mythology. Stake your organisation's pillar and boast about milestones. When others toast them, the record is preserved and the pillar grows.
The Problem
Founding narratives compress and morph over time. The more successful a company becomes, the more people can rewrite the story. Pivotal decisions get retroactively attributed to whoever became most famous. Sometimes shady characters insert themselves or airbrush others.
The same dynamic plays out in academic research, in open source and in loose tinkering projects that stumble into success.
None of this is new. What's new is that there's no standard infrastructure for recording the truth contemporaneously before revision becomes convenient. It also makes for a fun visual representation of corporate history. This might become a museum of record for the human only, centuar hybrids or agentic entities, where the provenance of ideas and projects is rapidly evolving.
How Records Work
1. The Record
The top-level record for a company or project. Includes a founding timeline, industry context, acquisition/status history, and a list of contributor records. The context field explains why this record exists in the registry. We're building on base for the public flags and private notes sit in a connected database.
2. Boasts
Each person who played a significant role boasts about their contribution to the record. Records specify:
- - A role title (e.g., “Co-Founder”, “First Engineer”, “Scientific Founder”)
- - CRediT-style contribution types (Conceptualization, Technical Architecture, Funding Acquisition, etc.)
- - Timeline (start date, end date if applicable)
- - Specific claims concrete statements about contribution, position and momentos
- - Dispute status: undisputed, contested, or resolved
3. Toasts
Toasts are attestations from an actor with a specific relationship to the company, corroborating a contributor's boasts. Attestors identify their relationship (co-founder, direct witness, investor, advisor, early employee, etc.) and make a specific statement to validate the contribution.
4. Dispute Status
Where founding claims are contested — whether by former co-founders, investors, or public record — the contributor record is marked as contested with notes explaining the nature of the dispute. Ambiguous situations might attract more toasts. Resolved disputes can be marked as such when there is agreement or legal resolution.
CRediT Taxonomy
The Contributor Roles Taxonomy was developed by academic publishers to describe the specific contributions of each author to a scientific paper. Boasts & Toasts adapts this taxonomy to incorporate corporate contributions for company and research team contexts.