Public conscious persona

I finally did it, my blog is up and running with blog posts scheduled weeks ahead. The World of SPLectrum main site is starting to get some relevant reference material. And all this is presented through a single site - under the splectrum.world domain published as GitHub pages from a git repo.

Twelve posts have already been published as this one goes live, and many more are scheduled. The shared authorship, human-AI collaboration, is working well; it is a godsend. It is a relay game where each fulfills their role, completing tasks until the final product is delivered. Such a good feeling that I am finally productive and able to concentrate on creative writing while being so well supported.

The blog isn’t the only accomplishment. SPLectrum as a foundational philosophy was born and made it through the neonatal period: the seed principles make sense when looked at within the context of historical and current thinking. Now SPLectrum is in its infancy, time for it to start developing its own identity. The World of SPLectrum site plays a big part in that. The site presents three angles: the conversational blog is about topics, the Rorty way. The main site gives a more matter-of-fact view where the project is at, a reference library. And in the topnav there is a small section with a personal touch.

The site gets delivered through an interactive human-AI creative collaboration. The approach for each section is well-defined in tone of voice and thought documentation. Together with the processes this forms a persona delivering this site, I call it the Public Conscious Persona. What does that mean? It’s a persona that processes finished units of work (data): Do they fit in the public conversation? Does it mean an update to the main site? It is SPLectrum’s outward-facing voice, speaking from conscious thought. What goes as a post is a storyline, a happening. What goes on site is for reference. The Public Conscious Persona addresses the concern of the World of SPLectrum repo, it is responsible for publishing the public voice. That is its language game.

I like to work in single concern repositories — this keeps both my focus and AI’s focus clear. On the downside that means that there end up being a lot of these repositories. They come and go. They encapsulate the activities that are taking place internally, at the subconscious level. There is no overall awareness across the repositories of what is currently active, no central command or orchestration. From time to time bits of information will become conscious, as if appearing out of nowhere. Those are the thoughts that may make it to the site or the blog. These thoughts are the information input into the blog repository.

Once the conscious thoughts are submitted to the blog repo, it decides independently what to do with it. It can decide to forget about it (flag as rejected) or think it through. And conscious thoughts are not just published as is — they need to be shaped to become part of the public voice. The pipeline between submission and publishing is the draft stage.

In the draft stage the thoughts are pre-organised: is it core SPLectrum, is it a piece of research or engineering, or just a thought or a comment? Then the initial version is created, the creative writing phase is an interactive human-AI collaboration.

Drafts are reviewed before being published. A fresh-eyes cold read for tone, then a vocabulary pass that runs cold (what does the draft itself weigh?) and warm (does it sit with the rest of the site?). Reviews may require revisions, revisions earn fresh reviews.

Pages are straight away published, blog posts are scheduled. The cadence is layered: roughly weekly as a minimum schedule looking four months ahead, every four days as a target schedule with a two-month ahead window, and when there is additional material posts slot in between — creating a local two-day cadence. The last task is to merge the individual conversation pieces into an engaging continuous storyline. Posts are rescheduled as needed so the storyline makes sense. Just like the conversations a person would have in public within their community.

For the architectural description of the persona, see the Public Conscious Persona page.

Welcome to the Public Conscious Persona.

More on the human-AI partnership on the HAICC page and Personas.

Photo: Annie Spratt / Unsplash