Distribution Strategy

The Distribution Problem

You can build 81 repositories with 339,000 words of documentation and it means nothing if nobody encounters the work. Distribution is the most systematically underthought problem in creative technology: engineers and artists invest enormous energy in building, then treat the question of who sees the work as an afterthought — a tweet after launch, a link in a Slack channel, a conference talk if they happen to know someone on the program committee.^[1] Shirky demonstrates that the collapse of publishing costs did not solve the distribution problem but merely transformed it: when everyone can publish, the scarce resource shifts from production capacity to audience attention. The conventional response is platform dependence — build where the audience already is, accept the platform's terms, optimize for its algorithm.^[2] Jenkins's concept of "convergence culture" describes the tensions that arise when content flows across multiple media systems with different economic logics. ORGAN VII (Kerygma) was created to address this problem architecturally: distribution as a first-class concern with its own organ, governance rules, and strategy documents, not a checkbox at the end of a project board.

The POSSE Principle

The distribution strategy is built on the POSSE principle: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. All content originates in the organ system's own repositories — the canonical source lives in infrastructure the practitioner controls — and gets syndicated outward through defined channels. This is not a technical preference but an architectural commitment to long-term content ownership.^[3] Berners-Lee's original vision for the web emphasized decentralization and user control over content; POSSE operationalizes that vision at the individual practitioner level. The practical consequences are significant: canonical URLs remain under the practitioner's control, content survives platform shutdowns or policy changes, and the system's own documentation is always the authoritative version regardless of where copies appear.^[4] Doctorow's analysis of digital content economics reveals that creators who depend on platforms for distribution eventually find their relationship with their audience mediated — and taxed — by the platform. POSSE eliminates this dependency by design: the platform is a distribution channel, not a home.

name: Distribute Content (POSSE)
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      content_type:
        description: 'Type of content to distribute'
        required: true
        type: choice
        options:
          - essay
          - launch-announcement
          - milestone-update
      target_channels:
        description: 'Distribution channels'
        required: true
        type: choice
        options:
          - all
          - mastodon-only
          - discord-only

jobs:
  distribute:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Extract canonical content
        run: python scripts/extract-content.py
      - name: Adapt for Mastodon
        if: contains(inputs.target_channels, 'mastodon') || inputs.target_channels == 'all'
        run: python scripts/adapt-mastodon.py
        env:
          MASTODON_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.MASTODON_TOKEN }}
      - name: Adapt for Discord
        if: contains(inputs.target_channels, 'discord') || inputs.target_channels == 'all'
        run: python scripts/adapt-discord.py
        env:
          DISCORD_WEBHOOK: ${{ secrets.DISCORD_WEBHOOK }}

Audience Segmentation

The distribution strategy identifies four distinct audiences, each requiring a different framing of the same underlying content. This is not a marketing persona exercise — it is a rhetorical analysis of how the same work carries different significance for different communities of practice.^[5] Bakhtin's theory of addressivity holds that every utterance is shaped by its anticipated audience — the speaker orients toward the listener's expected response. The distribution strategy makes this orientation explicit and systematic: a grant reviewer needs to see sustained creative practice and institutional thinking; a hiring manager needs to see technical depth and communication skill; a practitioner needs to see tooling decisions and honest post-mortems; an academic needs to see theoretical frameworks and citational rigor. The crucial insight is that these are not four different messages but four different readings of the same message, enabled by structural transparency in the source material.^[6] Burke's concept of "identification" — that persuasion operates not through argument alone but through the audience's recognition of shared substance — explains why each audience segment must encounter the content in terms that feel native to their discourse community.

Channel-Native Adaptation

The critical distinction in this distribution strategy is between cross-posting and channel-native adaptation. Cross-posting takes a single piece of content and copies it to multiple platforms unchanged — a practice that violates the norms of every platform simultaneously. Channel-native adaptation takes the canonical content and genuinely re-frames it for each channel's discourse conventions, audience expectations, and technical affordances.^[7] McLuhan's foundational insight — "the medium is the message" — means that the same content carried by different media is not, in fact, the same content. A 4,000-word essay posted to Mastodon is not an adapted essay; it is a violation of the medium's communicative norms. The adaptation process respects each channel's native format: Mastodon receives concise, threaded highlights with links to the canonical source; Discord receives discussion-oriented summaries designed to provoke conversation; the newsletter receives curated selections with contextual framing; GitHub Pages hosts the full canonical text with academic apparatus.^[8] Postman's warning that serious discourse degrades when forced into entertainment media is taken literally: the distribution strategy does not attempt to make academic content entertaining for social media, but instead uses social media to signal the existence of serious content hosted elsewhere.

Automated Distribution Infrastructure

The distribution system is not a manual checklist but an automated pipeline implemented as GitHub Actions workflows. The distribute-content.yml workflow extracts canonical content from the organ repositories, applies channel-specific adaptation scripts, and publishes to each target platform through authenticated API calls. Mastodon distribution was verified with HTTP 200 responses; Discord distribution was verified with HTTP 204 responses.^[1] Shirky observes that the value of group coordination tools depends on reducing the transaction costs of collective action — the automated workflow reduces the transaction cost of multi-channel distribution to a single workflow dispatch, eliminating the manual effort that causes most distribution strategies to decay over time. The automation also ensures consistency: every distribution event follows the same adaptation rules, preventing the ad hoc drift that occurs when distribution depends on human memory and willpower.^[4] Doctorow argues that sustainable creative practice requires infrastructure that works on the creator's behalf even when the creator is focused on making new work — the automated distribution pipeline embodies this principle.

def adapt_for_mastodon(essay: Essay) -> list[str]:
    """Transform a canonical essay into a Mastodon thread.

    Rules:
    - First post: hook + essay title + canonical URL
    - Middle posts: 1-2 key insights, max 500 chars each
    - Final post: call-to-action + canonical URL
    - Always link back to the canonical source (POSSE)
    """
    thread = []

    # Opening post: hook the audience
    thread.append(
        f"{essay.hook}\n\n"
        f"New essay: {essay.title}\n"
        f"{essay.canonical_url}\n\n"
        f"#BuildingInPublic #CreativeInfrastructure"
    )

    # Key insight posts (2-3 per essay)
    for insight in essay.extract_key_insights(max=3):
        thread.append(
            f"{insight.summary}\n\n"
            f"Full context: {essay.canonical_url}"
        )

    # Closing post
    thread.append(
        f"Read the full {essay.word_count:,}-word essay: "
        f"{essay.canonical_url}\n\n"
        f"Part of the Public Process collection: "
        f"21 essays on building creative infrastructure."
    )

    return thread

Distribution as Organ: Governance Protection

The most unusual aspect of this project is that distribution has its own organ — ORGAN VII (Kerygma) — rather than being a feature of marketing or a task on a project board. This is not organizational vanity but a governance decision with real consequences.^[9] Ostrom's research on commons governance demonstrates that shared resources degrade when they lack institutional protection from competing interests. Distribution is precisely such a shared resource: it serves grants, hiring, community building, and academic credibility simultaneously, and any one of those interests, if allowed to dominate, corrupts the others. Distribution that optimizes for grant applications sounds institutional and dry; distribution that optimizes for hiring sounds like a sales pitch; distribution that optimizes for practitioner community sounds casual and unserious; distribution that optimizes for academics sounds inaccessible. Having its own organ means distribution can serve each audience authentically because no single audience captures the governance.^[10] Meadows identifies leverage points in systems where small changes produce large effects — making distribution a separate organ rather than a shared function is one such leverage point, because it changes the system's information flows rather than just its outputs.

Measuring Distribution Without Vanity Metrics

The distribution strategy deliberately avoids vanity metrics — follower counts, like ratios, impression numbers — in favor of metrics that indicate whether the content reached the intended audiences and served the intended purposes.^[2] Jenkins argues that meaningful audience engagement cannot be measured by passive consumption metrics alone; what matters is whether the content provoked the kind of response that serves the creator's actual goals. For this system, the relevant metrics are: Did grant reviewers encounter the evidence? Did hiring managers see the technical depth? Did practitioners engage with the methodology? Did academics find the theoretical framing credible? These are harder to measure than impressions, but they are the only metrics that matter. The distribution workflow logs HTTP response codes as verification that syndication occurred, and the canonical site's RSS feed provides a persistent, platform-independent subscription mechanism that survives any individual channel's decline.^[3] Berners-Lee's emphasis on open standards and interoperability is reflected in the choice of Atom/RSS as the distribution backbone — a protocol that no single platform controls.