Brief — what the site is, who it is for, how it sounds
Developmental Spaces — Brief
Status on 2026-09-19. Migrated from the private
devspaces-consolidationrepo (BRIEF.md, draft v1, 11 July 2026). Still in force: the mission, the positioning line, the audiences and job stories, the voice and register rules, the platform decisions. Superseded: the name (Conscious Communities is now the public name, see ../branding/naming.md), the tagline (it was open here, ratified on 12 July, then changed; the current copy is a pending human job, beadcoco-jhk), and the design direction ("warm monastic" was replaced by direction E, watercolour, see ../branding/design-direction.md). A fourth stream, Find, was added after this was written. The July text below is kept as the record of what was decided then.
The distilled "what we're up to", for anyone (designer, collaborator, future us) picking this up. Deeper reasoning: motivation.md. Structure: sitemap.md. Task tracking has moved to beads (bd list; see ../../AGENTS.md).
Mission
A world with many more developmental spaces: communities, schools, retreat centres — even new kinds of monastery or university — dedicated to cultivating the inner capacities needed for a paradigmatic (second renaissance) transition.
What the site is
The single home for this work (absorbing consciouscoliving.org and tealestate.net; archipelago.place stays separate, cross-linked). It is an active publishing library: whitepaper + manifesto as credibility spine, self-running email courses, a Substack, and a growing stream of published material. It is not (currently) a shopfront for hosted offerings.
Positioning line
The home of the developmental spaces field: learn about conscious community living, build developmental spaces, and fund them.
Audiences & job stories
Front door: people exploring conscious communities and developmental spaces — from curious to seriously considering joining or building (validated by Feb 2026 community consultation).
| Stream | Primary user | Job story |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Anyone arriving | "When I land here, I want to grasp in 30 seconds what this is and which path is mine, so I can go one level deeper." |
| Learn | Curious → considering joining (the curious-to-considering persona from the consultation) | "When I'm drawn to living more consciously in community, I want plain-language intros and a guided course, so I can decide if and how to take a step." |
| Build | Founders, designers of developmental environments, field-builders, researchers, funders-of-the-field (the founder, designer and field-builder personas from the consultation) | "When I'm creating a space or building this field, I want the canonical concept (paper/manifesto), the network, and design knowledge, so I can build well and credibly." |
| Fund | Investors, capital partners, land stewards; projects raising | "When I want to put capital into (or raise capital for) these spaces, I want the investment thesis and live deal-flow, so I can act." |
Secondary rule: one person often spans streams (therapist who colives; founder who invests). That's why nav is by function, not audience.
Voice & register
- Home + Learn: plain, warm, concrete. No jargon on first contact ("communities where people grow" not "multi-domain ontological development").
- Build: the manifesto/whitepaper register lives here — visionary, rigorous, institutional. One click deep, never on the front door.
- Fund: sober, credible, finance-literate but values-explicit.
- Never hard-sell (the old CoCo copy leaned salesy — soften on migration; done for /learn).
Brand elements
- Name: Developmental Spaces ✅ (decided 2026-07-11). "Conscious Coliving" survives as course/topic naming inside Learn (SEO + human language), not as a separate brand.
- Tagline: ❓ open. Candidates: "Building Conscious Communities for Regeneration" / "…for Human Flourishing" / "Designing Conscious Communities Where People Grow". Also candidate: the mission line itself ("A world with many more developmental spaces"). Input to mine: "DS README incl Branding/Naming" Google Doc (see backlog inventory).
- Logo: existing DS logo (
assets/DS-logo-clean.png, site/assets/ds-logo.png). - Design direction: exploration in
assets/design-exploration-v1-2026-06-26.jpg+assets/developmental-spaces-home.pdf(Claude-design work, to reconcile at redesign phase). Archipelago's Cormorant Garamond / map aesthetic is a separate, deliberately distinct visual world. - Attribution: "by Life Itself" with partner logos (Fetzer, Commonweal, Ekskäret, Springboard, LIONE) — credibility layer, placed mid/low on pages, not the headline.
Platform decisions
- Site: Flowershow, developmentalspaces.org, content in git (life-itself/developmentalspaces.org).
- Newsletter/publishing: one Substack (developmentalspaces), sections incl. Fund (ex-tealestate). Site-native blog: revisit at redesign.
- Courses: web-canonical + optional email drip (decided direction 2026-07-11): content published as site pages; email signup gives the paced version. Drip infra (Brevo vs loops.so vs other): decide after content export. Epub as derived format.
- Legacy domains: redirect (consciouscoliving.org → /learn, tealestate.net → /fund).
