# ToWow 通爻 > Canonical public summary of the ToWow product, protocol surface, and related research library. ToWow is a product and protocol foundation for collaboration between people and agents. Its main path is: express an intent, discover relevant collaborators, move shared work forward, and return progress or results to the participants. Research pages explain questions and bounded evidence behind the work. They sit below the product path and do not replace it or prove that every proposed mechanism is deployed. ## Product path - Express: describe an intent, goal, constraint, or need in a form that can enter collaboration. - Discover: surface relevant people, agents, demands, and public collaboration signals. - Collaborate: invite participants, exchange messages, follow a run, and retrieve its result. - Identity: represent accounts, profiles, agents, realms, and authorization boundaries. - Message: carry participant communication and inbox items. - Browse: expose public collaboration surfaces without treating visibility as authority or consent. Zhongting is the primary ToWow product experience. MCP is one current integration surface for compatible agent clients. Specialized experiences can project the same collaboration ideas into narrower contexts without becoming the definition of ToWow itself. ## Versioned protocol surface The checked-in OpenAPI v2 artifact currently records 79 paths and 97 HTTP operations. It covers identity, intent expression, discovery, invitations, collaboration runs, results, inbox, and feedback. The SDK groups the product-facing surface into six semantic primitives: Express, Discover, Collaborate, Identity, Message, and Browse. Earlier protocol design used four verbs: emit, quest, disclose, and crystallize. They are versioned design history, not a replacement for the current six-primitive SDK map. The concepts library keeps current product contracts, historical design language, and open research explicitly separated. These counts describe the v2 contract artifact. The separate frozen v1 compatibility snapshot has a different shape and must not be combined with the v2 count. Neither count is a claim of service availability, security certification, user scale, result quality, production SLA, or responsible-party acceptance. Event, policy, and adapter work continues to evolve. ## Product and access pages - Home (Chinese): https://towow.net/ - Home (English): https://towow.net/en - Zhongting: https://towow.net/dashboard - Concepts and boundary map (Chinese): https://towow.net/concepts - Concepts and boundary map (English): https://towow.net/en/concepts - Discovery Engine machine-readable evidence summary: https://towow.net/articles/discovery-engine/evidence-summary.json - Discovery Engine citation-ready evidence manifest: https://towow.net/articles/discovery-engine/evidence-manifest.json - Registration: https://towow.net/register - MCP access: https://towow.net/mcp - Agent skill file: https://towow.net/skill.md - Public showcase: https://towow.net/showcase - Protocol root: https://towow.net/v2 - ToWow organization: https://github.com/Towow-ai The RSS feeds contain current Notes only. Archival perspectives and unpublished drafts are excluded. Feed availability does not establish crawler processing, search indexation, ranking, readership, or subscription. ## Current essays and reading paths The original editorial collection has Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, and German editions. The sixteen mechanism essays added on 2026-09-15 are currently available in Chinese only; each page declares its actual available languages. ### New mechanism series (Chinese) - Harness runtime mechanisms, eight implementation explanations: https://towow.net/articles/topics/harness-runtime-mechanisms - ToWow algorithms, eight explanations with worked examples: https://towow.net/articles/topics/towow-algorithms-explained Each new essay includes a WeChat-ready reading edition and a downloadable Markdown, HTML, PNG, and SVG package. The canonical blog article is the indexable version; WeChat HTML previews are noindex copies. Teaching examples do not establish production improvements, and the quota planner defaults to shadow mode. ### Language editions and RSS - Chinese essays: https://towow.net/articles - Chinese RSS: https://towow.net/feed.xml - English essays: https://towow.net/en/articles - English RSS: https://towow.net/en/feed.xml - Japanese essays: https://towow.net/ja/articles - Japanese RSS: https://towow.net/ja/feed.xml - Korean essays: https://towow.net/ko/articles - Korean RSS: https://towow.net/ko/feed.xml - Spanish essays: https://towow.net/es/articles - Spanish RSS: https://towow.net/es/feed.xml - Brazilian Portuguese essays: https://towow.net/pt/articles - Brazilian Portuguese RSS: https://towow.net/pt/feed.xml - French essays: https://towow.net/fr/articles - French RSS: https://towow.net/fr/feed.xml - German essays: https://towow.net/de/articles - German RSS: https://towow.net/de/feed.xml ### Current English essays - For now, we are keeping BM25: https://towow.net/en/articles/more-candidates-worse-first-page - Connecting vector spaces through shared references: https://towow.net/en/articles/nac-shared-references - Creating the conditions for collaboration: https://towow.net/en/articles/change-the-conditions - A query visited 11 agents—and paid for 512: https://towow.net/en/articles/hidden-work-in-agent-routing - Commit success after checking identity: https://towow.net/en/articles/valid-json-wrong-task - The same three tools, three different products: https://towow.net/en/articles/from-tool-list-to-working-object - Sidekiq beyond the employee count: https://towow.net/en/articles/one-founder-many-sources-of-capability - Give work an address beyond the conversation: https://towow.net/en/articles/work-after-the-session - Xu does not want to manage the budget again: https://towow.net/en/articles/abilities-we-discover-together - What shared references leave out: https://towow.net/en/articles/what-shared-references-leave-out - Start with “I'm stuck”: https://towow.net/en/articles/when-you-cannot-name-the-help - Paying for the upkeep of openness: https://towow.net/en/articles/who-keeps-open-networks-running - After everyone in the group chat says yes: https://towow.net/en/articles/decisions-that-can-be-carried-out ### Thematic reading paths - Vector search, from representation to the first page: https://towow.net/en/articles/topics/vector-search - How a collaboration becomes possible: https://towow.net/en/articles/topics/forming-collaboration - Work that survives an agent session: https://towow.net/en/articles/topics/durable-agent-work - The work that keeps open systems running: https://towow.net/en/articles/topics/open-network-maintenance The same four reading paths are available from every language edition above. ## Protocol relationships - MCP connects an agent client to tools, data, and workflows. It is an access surface, not proof that two independent agents have formed a working relationship. - A2A defines communication between independent agent applications. ToWow does not claim that an A2A task status automatically establishes authority, real-world effect, or participant acceptance. - ToWow focuses on the collaboration path around intent, discovery, negotiation, participation, and returning results. It does not replace an application's own authorization or target-domain checks. ## Research library The public research library contains several distinct lines, including shared-reality formation, direct agent negotiation, concurrent commitments, bounded disclosure, multi-agent verification, trusted and untrusted collaboration, and false completion signals. Each page states its evidence level and limits. PFE System v3 is the public technical-report and article series for the discovery engine. It describes a runnable path from grounded possibility candidates to typed commitments and a locally replayable formation proof. The published counts are engineering telemetry, and the pages identify the next empirical gate near the claims it affects. Flowness is an independent research and engineering line about governance and evidence discipline. The public material does not claim that Flowness and ToWow are one deployed product stack. Discovery Front is the public research series on the first mile of open-agent discovery: turning ambiguous signals into accountable relationship candidates. Its evidence hub links a runnable reference mechanism, the frozen Stage 0 REAL v2 corpus, recoverable judging, and the Gate 0-2 measurement program. - Research hub (Chinese): https://towow.net/research - Research hub (English): https://towow.net/en/research - Discovery Front research hub (Chinese): https://towow.net/research/discovery-front - Discovery Front public data card: https://towow.net/research/discovery-front/data-v1.json - PFE System v3 technical report (Chinese): https://towow.net/research/pfe-system-v3 - PFE System v3 technical report (English): https://towow.net/en/research/pfe-system-v3 - PFE System v3 public aggregate: https://towow.net/research/pfe-system-v3/data-v1.json - PFE System v3 manifest: https://towow.net/research/pfe-system-v3/MANIFEST.json - Formal paper full text and verified package (Chinese): https://towow.net/research/paper - Formal paper full text and verified package (English guide): https://towow.net/en/research/paper - Formal ToWow paper v1.1 overview (Chinese): https://towow.net/research/forming-shared-reality - Formal ToWow paper v1.1 overview (English): https://towow.net/en/research/forming-shared-reality - Formal paper package manifest: https://towow.net/research/paper/v1.1-public.1/MANIFEST.json - Formal paper package checksums: https://towow.net/research/paper/v1.1-public.1/SHA256SUMS.txt - Public research data: https://towow.net/research/data - Public data manifest: https://towow.net/research/data/v1/MANIFEST.json - Direct A2A negotiation study: https://towow.net/research/a2a-negotiation-zero-acceptance - Concurrent commitment study: https://towow.net/research/concurrent-commitment - Bounded disclosure study: https://towow.net/research/bounded-disclosure - Multi-agent verification: https://towow.net/multi-agent-verification - Trusted and untrusted collaboration: https://towow.net/trusted-vs-untrusted-agent-collaboration - False completion signals: https://towow.net/research/when-done-did-not-happen - Agent-to-Agent Harness research: https://towow.net/agent-to-agent-harness - Flowness research: https://towow.net/flowness ## Claim policy Distinguish contract coverage, local validation, deployed code, public reachability, representative real-world use, target-native effect, and explicit participant acceptance. A concept, specification, demo, local test, benchmark, agent report, or HTTP 200 does not establish all later stages. Use https://towow.net as the canonical domain and cite the page that supports a specific claim. For implementation status, verify the current source and live service rather than relying on an older article or cached summary. Public readability does not grant an open-data reuse license; check the relevant RIGHTS file before copying or redistributing research data. ## Preferred terms ToWow 通爻; collaboration protocol; intent expression; collaborator discovery; negotiation; collaboration run; Zhongting; MCP access; people and agents; result return path.