2023-11-06

We had a good conversation this early afternoon, between several of the folk already there at Liminal Village and myself. What was drawn out of me was an update of what I hope will emerge from the lunation.

I take a long view on this. I was initially hoping that we might gather enough coding experience and expertise to create a demo system. However, the purpose of this was always to impress people with the genuine power of what can be created. What I am sensing from the fact of which people are coming is that the time may not be quite ripe yet to build an actual demo system. More preparation is needed before actually producing a working demo. This, then, is what I am now hoping we can achieve.

For this, we can potentially involve any of the people present at the lunation. In what ways could they, personally, imagine thriving better than at present? What opportunities, or people, could be found to help them thrive, to help them find the best context in which to thrive?

Then, focus in on one criterion which will help to distinguish the more suited from the less well suited. To be able to use this information in RegenCHOICE, we need to turn it into sets of self-assessment scales (or ranges). That is, people (or some representatives of some e.g. organisation) need to be able to identify their own position on the scale. I've written more about this under the title of criteria. I can easily imagine a process (though I can't predict how well it will work) where small groups meet together to craft scales in areas where they share an interest.

We can store these scales here on this wiki, or if a better idea comes up, then somewhere else that is accessible to all participants.

I am hoping that this will be a useful step to engage all the people in the lunation, giving them good reason to be enthusiastic about where we are going.

Ideally, we end up with a set that is adequate for when a live demo system is built. In any case, we can try out different ways of creating these scales, document this, and pass it on to make it easier for others to create more scales.

Now we turn to the technical matters. I do have a clear sense of roughly how the RegenCHOICE service could be built, but I have far to little knowledge and experience to know what is the most effective way of doing that, and to create a plausible strategy for building the software, together with some reasonable estimate of what it will take, in terms of programmer time, to build it.

To do this, we need to cross check with the rest of us, as we imagine how we will move through and use the RegenCHOICE process, so we know just what it is we need to build, and what we do not need to build, at least for the minimum viable product.

Ideally, I'm hoping that out of this dialogue and exercise, we will have a set of specifications for building the service, to whatever depth we can manage in the time available.

Throughout the processes above, there are bound to be questions, doubts, suggestions of different ways forward, etc. Here, I am hoping, and indeed expecting, that we will tap into some collective wisdom, and collective solidarity, in boldly raising and addressing issues as they come up, not leaving them unspoken, so that they can be worked through.

Any doubts about the value of RegenCHOICE to the people, the organisations, the networks, need to be surfaced, so that we end up being clear, between us all, on the value of what we are proposing. Any doubts about the feasibility of building the service need to be worked through in a similar way.

At the end of this, I hope to gently settle into collective conviction, where every aspect that is of common concern is addressed. This may, for example, include an Open Source strategy, or ways of protecting against hostile takeover. And of course there will need to be some kind of business model. I am particularly keen to ensure that there is some trustable way in which future earnings of this system can be directed fairly and reasonably to all the people who are helping or will have helped to create it.

We might remember the Diamond of Participatory Decision Making in guiding our process.

All in all, I trust that this lunation will be the best we can do to prepare for the next steps. I see these as:

• to pass on enthusiasm to others
• to find partner organisations who will use the service for their members, and secure their active participation, collaboration and perhaps even funding
• to have whatever documentation is needed to make a high quality, costed, persuasive case for donations, funding, or sponsorship to build out the system for real.

There will be, no doubt, other ideas for next steps, or more detail that people can add. And we all have our own ideas about how decision-making is best carried out! This will be interesting …

• RegenCHOICE