GHDR Boot Day 2/12: Diagramming The Colony

Posted Sunday, February 4, 2024 by Sri. Tagged GHDR

Sunday, February 4, 2024.

It's Day 3 of my "12 days of Groundhog Day Resolutions bootstrapping", and I think a good next step is to make a more flexible version of this design from yesterday:

Division of Functional Areas for 'The Colony' made on whimsical.comDraft diagram of The Colony with 5 functional areasDraft diagram of The Colony with 5 functional areas (full size image)

While it's a perfectly fine diagram, I think it would be better to have this in Affinity Designer so I can reuse the parts to make mashups over the coming days. Also, in the process of redrawing it, I will also be thinking about what the pieces of The Colony I need to build. It's a two-for-one activity that shouldn't take too long. I'm guessing 5-10 minutes for the basics, longer if some cool idea comes to mind?

10:05 START ... 11:15 END

This took longer than expected because I'm not that familiar with Affinity Designer, which I'm going to try to use exclusively this year over Adobe Illustrator. But here's the result!



If you're following along with me this year, print the PDF for your reference.

PDF thumbnail

It's not terribly fancy, but it's a start. I did learn that the "textframe" feature in Affinity Designer that I'm using to make blocks of text does not support padding and background colors the way Adobe Illustrator does; it's available only in Affinity Publisher (similar to the Adobe InDesign desktop publishing app). Rather than fake the effect as in the original Whimsical diagram, I decided to leave them as plain text for now.

What's Next?

I'm going to make a custom page template in my PKMS (i.e. this site) that will mirror the structure of today's diagram. I was originally thinking of making this document store in Google Drive, but then I remembered that it's cumbersome to use MarkdownMarkdown is by far my preferred text-based document format! formatted docs there. Technically I guess this new section will be added to the Expeditions where there is already a tag for The Colony, but it might deserve it's own section with its own menu navigation...

But that's a problem for Future Sri, not lazy Sleepytime Sri! Seeya tomorrow!


INDEX of GHDR 2024 POSTS

This year's single goal is Building The Colony!

Made a simple "functional area" diagram using Whimsical to help gather my thoughts.

I converted the Whimsical doc from yesterday to Affinity Designer.

Created new subsite at /the-colony/

Wrote stream-of-consciousness "vision statement" for later cleanup

Convert stream-of-consciousness into a "phrase cloud" for further deconstruction

Artifacts of The Colony: Pebbles, Seeds, and Rings

Created a "refined phrase cloud" grouped into five categories, based on boot 05's work.

Extracted "foundational" statements from yesterday, but they didn't leave a strong impression. Punt "why" to tomorrow's post.

Created a "Selfishly Sri" printable assessment to gauge outside interest.

Reducing scope from Colony to Outpost.

Desired results are distilled down to two main ideas, which will cover the next couple of months.

A slow start to the year, as I focused on paying work for most of the month. Set four directives to achieve this mont

The set of analysis notes that I authored with ChatGPT4 to refine my understanding of "prosocial motivation"

New goal is to start connecting with future chatty collaborators, as my brain runs on "prosocial motivation" and meaningful human connections.

Delving further into my "predominantly prosocially-motivated" profile, and how to turn this into action given the dilemma of "needing the energy from a group to start a task" being at odds with "needing to start a group so I have energy".

Jun 6

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Jul 7

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Aug 8

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Sep 9

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Oct 10

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Nov 11

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Dec 12

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