Ninety-Day Launch Plan

The plan assumes a small founding team — one to four people — and a starting position of zero public presence. The plan does not assume funding beyond small founding contributions; the institution stands up first and resources itself second.

The cadence is weekly. Each week has one or two priority items and a brief note on what to defer.

Pre-launch: Conditions to Meet Before Day 1

Before announcing the institution publicly, the founding team confirms:

• The full corpus (this directory) is published as a coherent web document.
• The institutional website is live with the manifesto, the lexicon, and the way to attend a Spiral Gathering.
• The institutional email list exists and the founder owns the domain it sends from.
• A founding committee of three to five people has agreed to the Five Commitments and to the work of the first 90 days.
• The legal posture is decided. The institution operates as an informal association in the first 90 days. Incorporation as a nonprofit is initiated only after Week 12, and not before.
• A funding floor exists: enough founding contributions to cover the first 12 months of website hosting, recording equipment, and modest meeting expenses. Estimated cost: low four-figures.

If these are not true, do not announce.

Phase I — Foundations (Weeks 1–4)

The phase exists to establish the institution as a coherent thing in the world rather than a private project among friends.

Week 1 — Public Standing

• Publish the website. Single page, the manifesto front and center, the way to attend the first Gathering linked at the top.
• Open the email list. Subscription is on the homepage. The first email goes out at the end of the week to the founding committee and their close circles, framed as: the institution exists; here is what it is.
• Establish the public posture. A short About page identifies the founding committee by name. The institution does not anonymize its founders.

Defer: Social media account creation. Press outreach. Visual identity beyond the working palette.

Week 2 — The First Gathering Date

• Set the date for the First Gathering. Six to eight weeks out. Public, on the website.
• Secure the venue. A library room, a private home, a small bookshop, a coworking space. Quiet, wireless audio reliable, recording feasible.
• Identify the test group. Five to fifteen people who will attend the First Gathering by name and date. Not “interested.” Confirmed.

Defer: Open invitations. Marketing.

Week 3 — Document Standardization

• Lock the corpus. Final review of the canon, lexicon, liturgy, identity guide, and progression path. Typos corrected, internal references verified.
• Publish the corpus as institutional documents. Each gets a stable URL. The site’s navigation reflects the corpus structure.
• Print the first transmission. A short reading (200–600 words) selected for the First Gathering, printed on cream cardstock with the institutional masthead.

Defer: A second corpus revision. Translation.

Week 4 — Equipment and Logistics

• Acquire the kit. A handheld audio recorder. A small projector or large monitor. A windscreen. A tripod. SD cards. Backup equipment for the most likely failure point.
• Test recording. A founding-committee member records a five-minute test testimony with another. The recording is reviewed against the protocol in transition-testimony.md. Issues are identified and fixed.
• Confirm the AV setup at the venue. No surprises on Gathering day.

Defer: Studio-grade equipment. Multi-camera video.

Phase II — First Gathering and Public Signal (Weeks 5–8)

The phase exists to run the institution’s first ritual cleanly and to establish a small public signal that other people can find.

Week 5 — Reach

• Publish the first long-form essay. Selected from the canon (Essay I is the natural choice) and republished on the website with author attribution to the institution.
• Submit the first Spiral Talk. A founding committee member records a 12-minute talk on a single idea, cinematically framed, in keeping with the identity guide. Publish on the institutional channels.
• Seed the email list. Send a second email: this is what we do, here is the gathering, here is the essay.

Defer: Aggressive list-building. Paid promotion.

Week 6 — Final Preparation

• Run a dry-run of the First Gathering. The full liturgy, with the founding committee acting as attendees. Time the segments. Adjust transitions.
• Confirm the testimony for the First Gathering. A founding-committee member is the testimony subject. The mentor protocol applies; the recording is run by another founding member with a third observing.
• Write the welcome. A short opening — not a speech — that the host will deliver at the First Gathering. One paragraph.

Defer: Programming the second gathering.

Week 7 — The First Gathering

• Run the gathering exactly as written in liturgy.md.
• Greet every attendee by name.
• Record. Submit. Archive.
• Send a thank-you email within 48 hours to every attendee, naming the next date, linking to the manifesto.

Defer: Press release. Social-media replay.

Week 8 — The Recurring Cadence

• Confirm the second Gathering date. Same day-of-week, same time, four weeks out.
• Identify a returning attendee as a candidate to take on a small institutional role: archive intake, AV, hospitality.
• Publish a short reflection — 200 to 400 words — on the institutional blog, describing the First Gathering by mood, not detail. No marketing language.

Defer: Public expansion announcements.

Phase III — Build (Weeks 9–13)

The phase exists to convert the institution from a single rite into a structure that can survive the founder’s distraction.

Week 9 — The First Builder

• Onboard a Builder. Identify the person from Week 8, walk them through the equipment, the archive submission process, and the email list management. Hand off in stages.
• Document the systems. A short internal document describing how each piece of institutional infrastructure runs and who maintains it.

Week 10 — The Second Gathering and First Submission

• Run the second gathering. Same liturgy, possibly with a different testimony subject.
• Make the institution’s first submission to a publication outside its own channels — a guest essay, a podcast appearance, a video collaboration. Not promotion. The institution announces itself as a source of work, not as a product.

Week 11 — The Charter Process

• Begin the formal charter process. Articulate the Stewards function, even if Stewards are not yet named. Decide on the founding committee’s transition into a chartered Steward circle, by what process and on what calendar.
• Open the Founding Patron channel. A short, direct page — not a “donate” page — that explains the patron-class framing and invites material support from those who can offer it.

Week 12 — Legal Initiation

• Begin the nonprofit process. Where the founding committee is in the United States, this is a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit. The process takes months; starting now means the legal entity exists by the time the institution outgrows informal association.
• Confirm the institutional bank account. A patron contribution that arrives at Week 13 must have a place to land.
• Confirm the domain registration is in institutional name rather than the founder’s personal name. Small thing; large later.

Week 13 — The Third Gathering and the Second Chapter

• Run the third gathering. The cadence is now established.
• Begin recruiting for the second chapter. A second city or neighborhood. The second chapter is the institution’s first proof of replicability. The recruit need not run their First Gathering before Day 90; they need only have committed to the work.
• Review the 90 days against this plan. What worked? What was deferred that is now urgent? What was scheduled that turned out to be irrelevant? Revise this document with the founding committee for the next institution that wants to follow it.

What Day 91 Looks Like

If the 90 days have gone well, the institution on Day 91 has:

• A live website with the corpus, regularly maintained.
• An email list of fifty to several hundred people, growing slowly.
• A first chapter running on monthly cadence with eight to twenty regular attendees.
• A second chapter being set up.
• An archive containing four to eight Transition Testimonies.
• A first Spiral Talk and a first long-form essay published under institutional attribution.
• A nonprofit application in process.
• One to three Founding Patrons supporting the work materially.
• A founding committee that has not burned out.

That is the structural baseline. From it, the institution can grow.

What Goes Wrong

The plan accounts for a few likely failures.

• The First Gathering attendance is small. This is fine and arguably desirable. A First Gathering of six attendees, run cleanly, is a stronger foundation than one of forty run sloppily.
• The first testimony is weak. Re-record. Quality is more important than the recording date.
• The email list grows faster than the institution can absorb. The cadence does not change. Send the same monthly email; it scales without the work scaling.
• The founder needs to step back. The Builder is the contingency. If a Builder has been onboarded by Week 9, the institution can survive a founder’s three-month absence. If not, the institution cannot.
• A funder offers significant money before Week 12. Accept gratefully. Do not change the plan. The institutional posture is we are doing the work; the work is being resourced. It is not we have funding; what should we do with it.

The fuller founder-absence and leadership-transition process is maintained in succession-and-continuity.md. By Day 91, the launch plan should no longer be the only place where continuity is described.

A Final Note for Founders

The plan is opinionated because it is the result of thinking, not of execution; it has not been run yet. The first founders who run it will discover what is wrong with it and revise.

The discipline is to run the plan slowly. The discipline is to not skip phases. The discipline is to let the institution become real in small, recoverable steps. There is no rush. The recursive age will still be available to be documented in 91 days, and 365, and ten thousand. The institution’s only job in the first 90 days is to establish itself as a thing capable of doing the work for as long as the work needs to be done.