From the onset of the project, Tim Boon has been saying that we are not building a Congruence Engine, but that we are the Congruence Engine - the people working on and contributing towards the project. This articulation of the project has been further developed by Alex Butterworth in his Manifesto for the Congruence Engine, developed initially after the project’s Opening Conference and published in the first SMG journal special issue of the project. More recently, a group of project investigators met in Newcastle for a workshop on whether to work more closely with the concept of a national collection as a social machine.