Public Process

The Problem: Opacity as Default

Creative technologists face a structural problem: finished work is visible, but the reasoning that produced it disappears. Portfolios showcase polished artifacts while erasing the decision chains, false starts, and architectural debates that constitute the actual practice.^[1] Sennett argues that craft knowledge resides not in the finished object but in the iterative dialogue between maker and material — a dialogue that traditional portfolios systematically suppress. The same asymmetry haunts open-source culture: code is public, but the reasoning behind the code remains private, locked in Slack threads and whiteboard photos that no reviewer will ever see.^[2] Kelty's ethnography of free software communities reveals that the "recursive public" — people who maintain the very infrastructure through which they communicate — depends on transparent process documentation as a condition of participation. ORGAN V (Logos) was created to solve this problem: a dedicated organ within the eight-organ system whose sole purpose is making the work of building visible, structured, and citable.

The Essay Collection

The collection comprises 21 published essays totaling approximately 88,000 words, deployed as a static Jekyll site on GitHub Pages. These are not blog posts in the conventional sense — each essay is a structured, long-form account of a specific phase, decision, or methodology within the eight-organ system.^[3] Schön's concept of "reflection-in-action" describes practitioners who think about what they are doing while doing it, and the essays follow this model: they were written during the sprints they describe, not after. The temporal proximity between action and documentation means the essays capture uncertainty, provisional reasoning, and the texture of real-time problem-solving that retrospective accounts inevitably smooth over.^[4] Polanyi's insight that "we can know more than we can tell" is precisely the challenge: these essays attempt to make tacit architectural knowledge explicit by documenting it at the moment it is still active, before it becomes embedded and invisible.

Audience Design

A single essay must address multiple audiences without becoming incoherent, and the collection was designed with explicit audience models from the start.^[5] Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia — the coexistence of multiple voices and social registers within a single utterance — informs the writing strategy: each essay carries technical specificity for practitioners, evidential weight for grant reviewers, communicative clarity for hiring managers, and theoretical grounding for academics. This is not an accident of style but a deliberate rhetorical architecture. The essays are structured so that different readers can extract different value from the same text: a grant reviewer reads the metrics and timeline evidence, a hiring manager reads the communication skill and system-design thinking, a practitioner reads the tooling decisions and honest post-mortems, and an academic reads the epistemological commitments and citational apparatus.^[6] Bazerman's genre theory demonstrates that written forms are not neutral containers but active shapers of knowledge — the essay format itself signals sustained intellectual engagement in ways that tweet threads and README files cannot.

---
layout: essay
title: "Gold Sprint: Validation and Launch Criteria"
date: 2026-02-10
category: sprint-narrative
word_count: 4329
audiences:
  - grant-reviewers
  - hiring-managers
  - practitioners
tags:
  - validation
  - launch-criteria
  - automation
  - governance
series: "Building the Eight-Organ System"
organ: V-Logos
abstract: >
  Real-time account of the Gold Sprint: 18 community
  health files deployed, 5 workflows upgraded, 24
  dependency relationships validated, and the transition
  from construction to operational governance.
---

Evidence, Not Marketing

The critical distinction that separates this collection from conventional project documentation is its commitment to evidence over persuasion. Every essay contains timestamped decisions, concrete metrics, and honest acknowledgments of failure — not because transparency is morally superior, but because verifiable claims are more useful to every audience than polished narratives.^[7] Latour's actor-network theory reveals that scientific facts gain their authority not from correspondence with reality but from the density of the network that supports them — citations, instruments, institutions, replications. The essays apply this principle to creative practice: each claim about the system (81 repositories, 339K words, 228 validation checks) is backed by traceable evidence in the registry, the CI logs, and the commit history. The methodology is exposed, not hidden.^[8] Kuhn's observation that paradigm shifts require making previously invisible assumptions visible applies here at the individual level: the essays make visible the assumptions, constraints, and tradeoffs that conventional portfolios treat as backstage work.

Reflective Practice as Structural Commitment

The reflective essays in the collection are not afterthoughts appended to the sprint narratives — they are a structural requirement enforced by the organ's governance rules. Every major sprint must produce both a narrative account and a separate reflective essay that examines what went wrong, what was surprising, and what the practitioner would change with the benefit of hindsight.^[3] Schön distinguishes between "reflection-in-action" (thinking while doing) and "reflection-on-action" (thinking after doing) — the sprint narratives capture the former, and the reflective essays capture the latter, creating a layered documentation practice that addresses different temporal perspectives on the same events. This dual-mode documentation is unusual in both academic and industry contexts, where reflection tends to be either absent entirely or confined to post-project retrospectives that have lost access to the granular decision context.^[4] The goal is to counteract what Polanyi identifies as the inevitable loss of tacit knowledge once a practice becomes routine — by writing the reflective essay while the surprise is still fresh, the collection preserves knowledge that would otherwise become invisible.

The Jekyll Architecture

The publication infrastructure is deliberately minimal: a static Jekyll site deployed to GitHub Pages, with no JavaScript framework, no CMS, and no database. This is not a limitation but an architectural choice aligned with the POSSE principle — own your canonical content on infrastructure you control, syndicate outward through defined channels.^[9] Eghbal documents how the maintenance burden of open-source projects grows with their dependency footprint, and the Jekyll choice minimizes that footprint: Markdown files in a Git repository, rendered to static HTML, served from GitHub's CDN. The Atom RSS feed enables machine-readable syndication. The site's simplicity is itself an argument — that sustained writing practice matters more than publishing infrastructure, and that the institutional weight of the content should come from the quality and density of the essays, not from the sophistication of the delivery mechanism.^[10] Raymond's distinction between cathedral-style (centralized, planned) and bazaar-style (distributed, emergent) development applies to the publication model: the essays are cathedral-quality writing delivered through bazaar-simple infrastructure.

title: Public Process
description: >
  Building creative infrastructure in public —
  21 essays on the eight-organ system.
url: https://organvm-v-logos.github.io
baseurl: /public-process
markdown: kramdown
plugins:
  - jekyll-feed
  - jekyll-seo-tag
collections:
  essays:
    output: true
    permalink: /essays/:title/
defaults:
  - scope:
      path: ""
      type: essays
    values:
      layout: essay
feed:
  path: atom.xml
  posts_limit: 21

Building-in-Public as Reusable Methodology

The most significant claim this project makes is that building-in-public can be a rigorous, structured methodology rather than a casual social media practice. The dominant model of "building in public" is the tweet thread: fragmentary, performative, optimized for engagement rather than evidence.^[9] Eghbal observes that open-source maintainers face a tension between community engagement and deep work — the tweet-thread model of building in public exacerbates this tension by demanding constant performance. The ORGAN-V model offers an alternative: structured, long-form documentation written on a deliberate cadence, published to infrastructure you own, and designed to serve multiple audiences simultaneously. This is reusable. Any practitioner or organization could adopt the same model — dedicated documentation practice, explicit audience models, YAML-structured metadata, static-site publication, POSSE distribution — without adopting the eight-organ system itself.^[10] The methodology is separable from the content, and that separability is what makes it a genuine contribution rather than a personal idiosyncrasy.

Outcomes and Metrics

The collection represents a sustained documentation practice producing approximately 88,000 words across 21 essays in under two weeks of active writing. Each essay averages 4,200 words and addresses all four audience types through structural transparency rather than separate versions.^[1] Sennett's craftsman does not produce one object for display and another for use — the craft is in the single object that serves both purposes. The essays function identically: a grant reviewer extracting timeline evidence and a practitioner extracting methodology guidance are reading the same text, not different versions of it. The collection documents 81 repositories across 8 organs, with concrete metrics (339K total system words, 228 validation checks, 31 dependency edges) that are traceable to the registry and CI infrastructure described in the essays themselves.^[7] The self-referential quality — essays that document the system that produces the essays — is not a defect but the point: the transparency is recursive, and the recursion is the evidence that the practice is genuine.