how

What is how and what is it for?

how is a Holochain app for helping a community settle on shared technical and social standards, so that proposals can be discussed and refined in one group's own space instead of across scattered conversations. It exists to give the Holochain ecosystem a way to converge on standards such as changes to Holochain and its HDK, and classes of DNA that meet particular needs.

how is described by its maintainers as "a tool for how the Holochain community comes to alignment about technical and social matters". The README sets out the need it answers: an ecosystem of Holochain apps needs a way to converge on standards — changes and additions to Holochain and its HDK, classes of DNA that meet a particular need, and the community's own social processes. It compares the approach to the IETF's request-for-comment process and to Ethereum's ERC process, and calls the app an embodiment of a Holochain Emerging Standards protocol.

For someone taking part, the point is a place of its own for that alignment work. Standards discussion normally runs across chat threads, calls and documents, which makes the state of an agreement hard to follow and easy to lose. how is built to give the work a home as a Holochain app run by the group doing the aligning, rather than scattered across the community's other conversations.

One documented use is the community's own process: the README lists "technical community social processes like this one" among the matters the app is meant to settle. The repository is where to learn more, and its README carries the build and packaging steps. Its releases listing ends at the last published version, which names the Holochain and Moss versions it was built for, and records nothing newer; that places how among the ecosystem's historical projects, and the sources read for this page support no claim about present usability or current compatibility. Version, runtime and activity facts appear with their dates in the live panel.

From 3 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.