GHDR Monthly Notes:

Friday, April 4, 2025.

The Review

Well, the takeaway from last time was expanding the context of the original hypothesis of needing meaningful conversation and shared purpose! That was a good starting point.

Events conspired to give me a mission statement, which after some thought was refined into:

• genuine friendships can form
• and is architected for sustainable personal and economic growth

A second realization was that part of my frustration was due to a lack of fun, and fun has very specific connotations for sri-kin related to psychological safety

To create the place (even a small one), I said that as a group...

• We find ways to sustain ourselves, and grow together.
• We help establish a strong culture of cooperation and discovery.
• We help co-develop a functional specification for psychological safety and belonging.
• Economic measures of success depend on the number of productive collaborations and friendship-based projects.

I guess I could just redistill it further into a self-referencial singularity:

Lemme check if I had set any action items last time...

• I was preoccupied with work and upcoming taiwan trip, quite stressed about it
• I found that my hypothesis poster was not fun to look at and I didn't want to. Related to not wanting to reread my own writing. I think I might reflect on that in my notes.

I didn't have specific projects related to it; the implied work was to continue to try finding opportunities for meaningful conversations / shared purposes. I knew it was going to be a stressful month.

Also on my mind: I've been worried about sinking into procrastination...the endless media scrolling instead of sleeping is related to this. I see it as a kind of "recharge reward", but I'd like to change that association. I think I do it because there is so little positive stimulation in my daily life that this is the only source of it for days to weeks at a time :frowning: T'is no way for a Sri-kin to live!

Another thing on my mind: the way that fear of people's reactions are suppressing my motivation. My trust in people is low, so rebuilding personal strength that's backed by heartfelt conviction so I can build fun and sustainable Sri-kin places is the move. But it's hard to move when I'm feeling such feelings of concern and alarm constantly every time I am in a new situation.

The last thing on my mind is the need to make tangible goods to serve as the psychological handholds that draw people into the Sri-kin Colony Universe (gasp, the SCU!) but the above two mind-concerns feel like they're holding me back, as well as the aforementioned needs

The Prioritization and Order

There's a logical order that I think I'm missing on the mission statement and related stuff. Let me list 'em out first in no particular order

• I want to make a sharing, caring place where
• genuine friendships can form
• that is architected for sustainable personal and economic growth
• where psychological safety and collaboration uses fun as a key metric
• where meaningful conversation is the preferred type of interaction
• where shared purpose is discoverable and acted-upon through sharing our work, opinions, and ideas
• My needs aren't being met, so I have been sliding into procrastination seeking even the smallest sliver of positive feelings
• Despite feeling that my needs and beliefs are sound and good for people, I have little expectation that people will "get", which further depresses public proclamations of opportunity-attracting statements.
• And yet, I feel that it's my responsibility to lead this movement in some way, even if it's on the scale of just 1-2 people who "get it"
• To make anything happen, I need to create the psychological handholds as tangible goods that people can react to with both mind and heart and want to share with others and myself. This is the big blocking task.

That last sentence could be another missing part. I have the mission statement, I have the personal hypothesis behind it, I know what the place should be designed to support for an expanded audience. But I've been missing the operational mission.

There's an emerging theme that's connecting several ideas into something more compact...

The mission statement is to create a place that is fun for sri-kin that meets my various criteria; this is the meadow or the colony steeped in friendship. This is the vision.

The strategic mission is to architect also for sustainable personal+financial growth for members, which by extension makes the entire place more durable and resilient as a social construct.

The functional directive is to "create psychological handholds" using my "concrete deliverables" definition: tangible in eye or hand, packaged for sharing, adaptation, and/or reproduction. This is operational and applies to everything above.

Functional measures are to provide metric and practices that we've defined as reinforcing belonging and psychological safety through conscientious public celebration. This is cultural and provides the heartfelt mechanisms that foster a fun place for belonging, as described in the mission.

An interesting idea that's coming out of analysis is that there are two classes of Sri-kin, an "architect" class and a "participant" class. I asked ClaudeAI to speculate based on my writing input:

1. Architect-class sri-kin - Those who share Sri's interest in designing systems for connection, understanding the mechanisms of psychological safety, and creating tangible frameworks. They would engage with the "how" of community building alongside the "what" and "why."
2. Participant-class sri-kin - Those who resonate with the vision of a "sharing, caring place" and enjoy the resulting environment without necessarily engaging with its structural underpinnings. They value the outcomes without needing to understand the systems that create them.

I mentioned the related concept of designing for simplicity being extremely difficult to create as the basis for this thought, and Claude mentioned something called progressive disclosure which is apparently from UI design in the 1980s, revealing more complexity as the user is able to signal their interest in a way that contributes to general understanding.

It's not quite analagous; maybe it's akin to a ladder of participation employed by membership organizations.

"In social science, this transition from general membership to specific responsibility based on emergent interests is often described through several interconnected concepts:"

Just listing the terms and paraphrasing where it's new to me...

• Role Socialization - how new members learn norms, skills for roles
• Legitimate Peripheral Participation - theory that newcomers start at the edge and move inward as familarity grows
• Organization Assimulation
• Guided Pathways
• Wayfinding - navigating institional complexity to gain the knkowedge to make informed choices
• Trajectory of Participation - path that members follow from peripheral to core, helped by guides and mentores
• Scaffolded Engagement Structures - systems that support member partipation with challenges/responsibilities that match evolving interests/capabilities

package idea: sri's sense of fun as it relates to architects and participant classes.

• For ARCHITECT SRI-KIN - Sri likes deconstructing complex systems and creating intellectual frameworks, then seeing them applied to help someone do something magical they want to d
• For PARTICIPANT SRI-KIN - Sri also like facilating experiences and sharing her discoveries, exploring ideas with others, and seeing what people enjoy and make. if sri is able to share something she knows, that makes her happy too! the fun is seeing what happens and how people express themselves through making and trying things

package idea: sri's mission statement

• Sri wants to create a place that is fun for Sri-kin
• Psychological safety and collaboration is augmented by identifying fun things for Sri-kin to serve the architectural needs of the SCU.
• It is a sharing, caring place where genuine friendships can form, architected for sustainable personal+economic growth for participants

package idea: sri's functional directives

• Create concrete artifacts that are tangible that people want to adapt and share.
• Sharing anything useful, including the ideas behind the colony and the meadow, is nice, but is of interest only to Sri-kin Architects.
• Likewise, the functional measures that define the Sri-kin culture of belonging and growth are understandable by Sri-kin Architects who are social designers. The utility to Sri-kin Participants, though, is also obviously benficial because it tells them what is appreciated in Sri-kin Society that helps them achieve the kind of connection they think is of value to the group as a whole.
• More powerful psychological handhold are immediately useful to Sri-kin Participants: productivity tools, software projects, collaborative projects, where people are invited to try them out and join.

main idea for post: the distinction between architecting and participating helps clarify what to work on, and I need to devote time to making it. As I have said before, working on projects only when there are other interested parties is my main focus; to get that rolling I need to offer and lead as an architect, but present the tasks themselves in terms that are interesting to participants. Before, I tried to provide both and felt unseen or misunderstood. A better way to frame this is to think in terms of participant benefit, and create a participant-level condensed version of mission, directives, and measures that they can really grasp.

That said, there's the need for creating something first so people have something to hold on to (the psychological handhold in concrete form, evolving to anchor the core activities and practices that meet our mission.

The Writing

So let me try to rephrase this more simply:

• The mission is to create a fun culture that's designed to help participants become friends while learning stuff that supports personal and economic growth!
• The design and governance of this culture is an architectural task that sri is personally excited to tackle! Creating the framework, tools, and processes that make the culture work for everyone who buys into its tenets is the organizational dream! The benefits produced by group action should benefit the group, and what is learned by individuals is free to be applied for their own needs.
• The first phase is simply to identify some shared projects and create the starting structure that will help develop our social framework. Creating things together that delight other people is fun! It is intellectually and creatively rewarding too.

So, from my perspective, this means identifying a few major projects that I think fit until the Sri-kin Architectural Framework:

• Productivity Tools
• Community Management Tools
• Publishing Projects with Friends
• Sharing URSYS code modules that do various things
• Publishing blog posts that share knowledge in a way that adheres explicitly to Sri-kin ways

These have benefit to people, and they also benefit me as the creator and spreader. These are handholds for participants to assess and decide to help with. These are also handholds for prospective clients to see the quality of my work and hire me to do something related to it.

Having the energy to do the things is major resistance I think I should lead with that.

I’ve also lost focus discipline in a subtle way I think. The sense of missing and increasing definition is one way of coping with it, but mild depression has me constantly seeking more engaging inputs. There‘s also a feeling of being entitled to reward without mindful discipline. I feel constantly denied

That said, I have some new structures. And rubber ducking with claude reveals a pattern of whimsy that I rarely show.

Sri analyzing through ClaudeAI

Sri is excited by the idea, but sees the major hurdle as having enough emotional connective energy to stay the course. Ultimately, she has to toil alone and she knows this is her weakness/sadness space.

Claude Response:

I further speculated to ClaudeAI with my misgivings about the stuckness of doing stuff in the face of feeling judged combined with an anecdote about Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan:

I speculate that Sri may use systems thinking as a way to shield herself from judgment. She has mentioned how much she likes the movie "Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan" both for its themes of genuine male friendship (different than her own friendships and therefore interesting) and for Kirk’s cheating of death, outflanking, outthinking. She admires it, but also recognizes that at some point you have to face it. She feels that she is in that place now, creatively speaking. There’s no way to out-smart the need to do the isolated work.

ClaudeAI generated surprisingly affirming commentary. I've bolded the major insights in this excerpt:

The film's themes resonate deeply with her current creative challenge. Just as Kirk eventually had to face mortality (both Spock's and potentially his own), Sri now recognizes she must face the unavoidable reality that creating meaningful connection systems requires a period of isolated work that can't be cleverly circumvented.

This mirrors Khan's famous line about facing Kirk: "He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him." The isolated creative work similarly "tasks" Sri - it challenges her at her most vulnerable point.

[...]

The irony is that by acknowledging this limitation, she's actually demonstrating the authentic vulnerability that forms the foundation of the very connections she hopes to foster.

!!!!!!