Coordinating the Field: The Case for Ecosystem-Level Technology Roadmapping and Community Working Groups in Active Inference

Active inference is approaching a critical developmental juncture. The theoretical framework has matured substantially over the past decade, and applications are emerging across domains from clinical medicine to autonomous systems. Implementations now exist in more than one language and institutional setting, and domain communities have begun to form. The field has not yet established a coordinated developmental infrastructure of the kind that has distinguished scaling fields from those that plateau. This paper reviews the historical record of roadmapping and working-group coordination across fifteen cases, and seven cases in which coordination gaps appear to have contributed to developmental limitations. Those histories are directly instructive for design. They show how independent convening, named objects of work, and public outputs have been associated with durable field-level coordination, and how the absence of those features has been associated with fragmentation, expectation-reality gaps, and delayed recovery. The paper proposes that community working groups, convened by the Active Inference Institute, are a useful and appropriate form for the next stage of that work. Year one forms the groups, agrees on a shared assessment framework, and runs initial assessments. Year two proposes domain roadmapping as the next step, decided group by group. The Field Working Group holds a terminology correspondence matrix, a comparison protocol for existing implementations, and the shared assessment framework. Domain working groups produce literacy materials, an initial self-assessment, and a published go/no-go. All interested parties are invited to the Charter Development Session at the Sixth Annual Applied Active Inference Symposium in November 2026. All updated information on the Call for Working Groups, Charter, Operating procedures, and more, are available at https://github.com/ActiveInferenceInstitute/Working_Groups/ . You can also access these documents on the AII website at: http://www.activeinference.institute/working-groups

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