If I write something in here it’s me writing to Ben as a friend. He doesn’t need to worry I’m coming at him with some work request, this is about us connecting as friends.

Work coordination. If it’s out-of-office hours, this can wait.

Boring but necessary house + kid stuff. I got scared that this would dominate all my communication with my partner. Like the “work” chat above it allows us to protect our relationship (somewhat) from the onslaught of logistics.

A memory augmenting channel. Dumping observations that are maybe insignificant, but could be vital as part of a bigger arc is an easy win. Our whole family health is in here, but to give you an idea, here’s a slice of one pattern we spotted that lead to an escalation in care:

We dump details about night wake-ups (invaluable for handing over care context), medicine administered, readings (height/ weight/ blood pressure/ temperature), questions for doctors, appointment times, notes from doctors visit.

Format – name + topic/ body area + info
Makes patterns easy to search. Timestamps are essential, but auto-added by chat.

A record of books / films / series that we’ve encountered and would like to queue up. Raw titles alone means you lose the context for why this caught your attention, so I’d recommend a format like:

title + genre + link? + why?

Origin – My friend Richard and his partner have a bowl of cards, and on the cards are written fun activities. When they’re bored they pull a card from the bowl, and they’re off on adventure. I copied that. When my partner or I come across a recommended location, fun kids activity, or upcoming event, they get dumped into this chat.

Evolution – It’s like a shared memory space… but for for possible futures. This chat has increased our capacity for bringing dreams into the world. We started at simple (Real Fruit Ice-cream), and have grown in scale (International trip with another family), and depth (Take a night-class to explore this shy aspect of myself).

I cannot recommend this pattern enough.

Origin – We have two young kids and wanted to remember some of the crack-up things they’ve said.

Evolution – One of the greatest gift kids offer is the chance to see the world afresh. Their observations are uncoloured by idioms, uncluttered by… ‘grown up’ context? Their questions side-step social norms and drive (unknowing or sensing?) into the heart of things. We’re invited to reflect on our assumptions, our knowledge, what we really values, and to summarise those thoughts in under 2mins in simple terms.

Origin – started as a joke chat. I added my partner and posted a couple cute selfies.

Evolution – reflecting on what having a “premium subscription” might mean, I noticed this channel was a perfect place to post post celebrations of beauty we see unfolding in our lives, appreciation of one another, and the occasional insights from therapy.

Origin – Inspired by this comedy video, this started as a high-context, high-trust channel for my partner and I to vent about those cringe or painful moments in life.

Evolution – Laughing together at a predicament is a quick way to affirm shared values and step away from any fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. If it’s not funny, then we can move into more careful support of each other. Whatever the path, stabilisation/ alignment/ destressing make it easier to engage curiosity, name the kernel of any conflict, explore upstream solutions, etc.

My partner and I run monthly relationship retrospectives. You can read about that pattern here, and evolutions of our process on the Multiamory podcast [1] [2] !

This is a simple shared memory archive. When we decide on an iteration of something we’d like to try out, we record it here. This helps us loop back to reflect on how experiments have gone. Later this will likely enable us to reflect on what we continue to struggle with, how far we’ve come, and what our relationship is.

A support group for a group of 18 parents who were friends and happend to have kids around the same time. This group has covered planning playdates, re-sharing cool event, shared summer holidays for the past 4 years, hand-me-downs, baby-sitting, emergency support, etc.

I deliberately added sharing of vulnerability to this group. I role-modelled not knowing, I asked for help. I was met with support, and observing safety and care, others followed suit. I think this deepened relationships, increased resilience, and turbo-charged our collective sense-making.

I met a nice guy at Dweb Camp, and said “we should keep in touch!”. He dropped me into a Signal chat with 23 people called “Social Labryinth” with zero context. Turns out this was a group of people that were mostly friends of his at the conference, along with a handful of seemingly aligned odd-bods.

I have never seen such sustained and rich discourse beyond a conference. I attribute this to the lovely host, their great taste in friends, and our alignment in interests (all at a radical tech conference). This group went on to birth another parallel group, an online conference, and many of the people I met are now trusted peers and collaborators.

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The origin of this group are somewhat shrouded in mystery. It seems like I made it as a joke in 2023 and then forgot about it, only to stumble across it a year later while searching my chat for clowns.

Over the past year this chat has evolved into a critical discourse on clowning, their role as bridges between possible realities, and has been slowly gathering real clowns who are now helping shape the conversation. Was I always a clown, or am I becoming one?

I met an Ecologist at a conference, and really wanted to learn more about the systems thinking lenses of Ecology, and how this person had been applying them to groups. We are both short on time, so started a chat group as a way to share learning through dialogue. Along the way we’ve been adding resources and people that match the theme.

We could have just kept this as a DM chat, but opening this to trusted friends we were able to share learning more widely while also building trust as we observe mutual friends interacting.

This is an off-shoot from a chain of collaborations between myself and nonlinear. We share a passion for building human-centred digital commons. A major challenge is there are so many open-source projects / tools that auditing and testing them as an individual is overwhelming.

The focus of this group is then “do you have a spare 30 mins to kick the tyres on a project?”. We post links to things that have crossed our radar “anyone seen this?”, and either someone has or maybe we co-ordinate a small scouting party to go test it out and report back. Cheerleading is also welcome. This is gentle volunteering.

Functionally we are surfacing aligned tools, extending our capacity to sense, progressing common-good, and making friends.