Primitives Research Lab began with a build.
In the last two days of November 2025, at a hackathon run by MLAI and sponsored by the Office of the Australian eSafety Commissioner, Pyrate Ruby Passell built a working API safety system. The three governance primitives were uncovered from that build, not derived from theory.
Stacy Gildenston spent the following three weeks establishing what the build had demonstrated, closing the primitives on 24 December 2025 and publishing them four days later. The math continued through Stacy and became the Upstream Safety System™, built from start to finish by Pyrate Ruby.
Stacy Gildenston
Systems Architect · Polymath · Governance Practitioner
Stacy Gildenston is a systems architect and governance practitioner with three decades of experience designing, teaching, and standardising complex technical systems in safety-critical domains where failure carries technical, social, ecological, or intergenerational consequences.
She has served as Director of Certification for the Linux Professional Institute, SAGE / USENIX, and Cabletron Systems, and as instructional systems engineer for the GE AC6000 locomotive advanced electrical maintenance programme, building auditable competency and assessment frameworks for high-stakes technical environments.
She designed and developed the first online training portal for the semiconductor equipment manufacturer Semitool, and led company-wide technical training for Greenwich Tech Partners, a New York firm whose clients were major Wall Street investment banks such as Bear Stearns.
A 2003 World Summit on the Information Society Award recipient and a University of Arizona Master Naturalist and Watershed Steward, she has led climate and governance work with the Hopi and Navajo Nations in collaboration with the Grand Canyon Trust.
Her aerospace and education work includes refounding Melbourne Combat Robotics, initiating and supporting multiple university-level competitive rocketry teams, serving as Vice President of the Melbourne Amateur Rocket Society, and running the F1 Grand Prix rocketry display for the Australian Defence Force.
She is co-creator of the Upstream Safety System (USS™) and, with her daughter Pyrate Ruby Passell, co-founded the Dynamic Teen Coalition, the first and only teen board at the United Nations.
Her work centres on making safety-critical systems legible, auditable, and governable at scale.
Pyrate Ruby Passell
Lead Developer · Prodigy · Systems Pioneer
Pyrate Ruby Passell, 17, is a multidisciplinary developer and co-originator of the Upstream Safety System™ (USS™), responsible for developing, implementing, and black-box testing the system’s technical components and translating governance theory into a working, auditable architecture.
She has been recognised by the UN Foundation as its first Changemaker under the age of 18 and as a Friend of the Open Quantum Institute at CERN, and was selected through the International Telecommunication Union as a mentor for the United Nations’ first Citiverse Challenge.
She was an invited contributor who endorsed the UN Global Digital Compact at 14, and built and operated the first digital governance Discord servers used at the United Nations, establishing the operational model adopted by the Dynamic Teen Coalition, the first and only teen board at the UN, which she co-founded with her mother Stacy Gildenston.
In 2018 she won the Australian Youth Rocketry Challenge, an early national-level engineering achievement, and in 2023 she served as a member of the National Gallery of Victoria Teen Board.
Her work sits at the boundary where governance theory becomes executable system design.