GHDR Report 0303: Launching Slowly and Mindfully

⊕captionReady to Launch! This screenshot was taken from the game 'No Mans Sky', and is one of my favorite ships in which to tool around the galaxy

This year's singular GHDR goal is to work on The Colony, which I imagine as a place where those who thrive around a shared creative energy with other like-minded folks would want to set up shop and work together. I'd like this place to have a culture of sharing knowledge and experience in such a way that we collectively build a destination for creative collaboration and commerce. There's quite a lot of things that I have to do to get this off the ground, and I admittedly am also finding the task daunting. To make it less so, I've scaled down the idea from a large Colony to the more intimate Sri's Outpost concept.

Additionally, there are a bunch of other things on my mind: (1) the PDF maker for automating my form design (2) health care (3) preparing for future international trips that may strike at any time (4) cleaning up the house for guests (5) taxes...you get the idea. I'll need to make time for those too in addition to paying work. Figuring out how to balance this year's GHDR Goal with everything else is causing me considerable stress, so I think this month I'll have to think about how to make this manageable somehow.

So, let's talk about it!

What Didn't Get Done

First, though, let me admit that I didn't get any of last month's tactical tasks done. These were:

• "Publishing a biweekly newsletter" - this would create another way for people to find me, and by extension perhaps form a beginning connection.
• "Show a packaged item every two weeks for newsletter classifieds" - this would be the proof that I am doing things, not just talking about them.

I ended up focusing on paying work for the past few weeks, which was very draining due to the difficulty of the task and working solely by myself on it with little communication. However, I finally got it done right at the end of February, so I feel I can breathe.

I need to remind myself that

While I understand the above rationally, it is still difficult because I am so impatient to finish things, and I feel that I am not able to stay engaged for as long as I like. That said, beating myself up over it isn't helpful either so I try to remember that I'm doing my best and something is better than nothing.

Incremental Advances

Though my main focus lately was work, I did start the ball various Colony-related activities:

1. In the DS|CAFE I've been amplifying other people's creative acts and being more verbose about the reasoning behind what I write in our chats. This is an explicit act of culture setting that is related to my colony creation goal.

2. I've also started to direct more ideas into the DS|CAFE group projects and shared interests forums, which are relatively new so we're figuring out what they mean. I see these forums as early prototypes for the Expedition HQ. These projects are:

   • 60 Second or Less Creative Festival (requires Discord access)
   • Users Search Engine (requires Discord access) The general idea is to create low-commitment yet compelling ways for people to combine their interests and share eexamples of what they like doing. This is important for helping people get to know each other as well as showing that this is a cultural activity that we support in our community.

3. I've started conversations with close friends and acquaintances about forming Webrings that we use to badge our websites.

While these are something, what's missing is the push to make these concrete experiences that others can experience and easily share outside the Discord community. I can probably define a few easy metrics to start:

• For "Culture Setting", I'd look for an increase in the number of supporting statements from people other than myself. I think I've noticed an uptick in these from several people, which makes me happy. And this happiness can be a powerful motivator in making other things happen...yay, energy!
• For "Group Projects", we haven't yet seen anyone start and contribute to a thread. We've remained in the discussion phase. Figuring out how to maintain the "low commitment yet high interest in contributing" balance is next. This calls for some form of project leadership, so it may be that this is a primary focus rather than my paying work.
• For "Webrings", this is both a technical issue and a creative issue. A first step would be to just implement this webring starter kit and see how it works, and then share it with others to riff on.

I think this would be a good start. Now I just have to write this down somewhere so I don't forget that this is what I'm supposed to be doing...my personal DSCAFE Studio (Discord access required) is probably the place I should put it...I'll do that right now! Since I'm running Discord all the time, this is the easiest place to find stuff no matter where I am. I'll rewrite these reminders as big text to help when skimming this article in the future...

With that, I think I can declare some new March Directives to keep at top-of-mind. I've rewritten them slightly from last month's version to make them more limited in scope suitable for The Outpost.

Building Stuff for The Outpost or The Colony

In addition to communications outreach, there's the challenge of what makes visiting The Colony/The Outpost worthwhile in the first place. I've listed concrete deliverables that I think would fit the spirit of what I want to see offered by The Colony.

But what about The Outpost? This is scaled just to me. Right now, those goods are probably:

• The various printed products like The ETP Notebook
• The customizeable PDFs for The Compact Calendar, The Word Counting Calendar, and The ETP Almanac, generated by custom software.

I think it would be good to allocate time to push on the latter, as I had made fairly good progress on my software. So I'm make pushing on this another directive for March:

There are quite a lot of these variations to make, which is probably why I've been dragging my feet on finishing them for such a low-profit product. It's possible that having the ability to generate variations very easily will open up new opportunities, so I should allocate a few days on this to at least make progess.

Writing More Supporting Materials for The Colony

There is quite a long list of documents that I need to write, particularly for these starter topics:

• A Manifesto that explains why The Colony is appealing, and what it aims to achieve.
• A Scope of Mission that lays out a pragmatic action plan that has clear and measurable objectives.
• A Statement of Cultural Values that helps people understand the expectations of people participating in the project, so they can agree/disagree with it and select themselves as willing participants in this experiment.

While this has been on my mind, I am not going to prioritize these for now. It would be better if I can talk to somehow and be inspired to brainstorm these out loud. Remember, Sri: ONE THING AT A TIME!

Summary of March Directives

So here are the directives for the month of March once again:

1. Provide a pattern for being supportive in DS|CAFE, amplifying the "network effect" of sharing progress.

2. Create an entry point for one of the "low-commitment high-interest" group projects that will draw one or two participants.

3. Implement a webring on dsriseah.com.

I think that's enough for March. While I thought I would be able to be creative every day for this year's GHDR, I'm honestly burned out with work and life and I have to keep my expectations "low and slow" lest I crash. That said, I'd also like to allocate a day or three to:

4. Spend time on PDF Maker software to finish the ETP Almanac Variations

That's it for now! Thanks for reading, and have a great March!

INDEX of GHDR 2024 POSTS