Life Itself Strategy Materials

Life Itself Strategy Materials

Life Itself Strategy Materials

A wiki/knowledgebase for all Life Itself's strategy related materials.

Structure

  • initiatives/ — one file per initiative. An initiative is an enduring effort that can contain projects. Use stable semantic slugs as filenames (e.g. second-renaissance.md).
  • projects/ — one file per project. A project is a bounded effort nested under an initiative. Use YYYY- prefixed filenames (e.g. 2024-presenting-our-strategy-v3.md).
  • visualizations/ — interactive D3 visualizations of the portfolio. Open any HTML file directly in a browser.
  • scripts/ — build tooling. build-index.js generates visualizations/index.js from markdown frontmatter.

Data Model

The hierarchy is initiative → project. Parent relationships are expressed in frontmatter using wiki-link slugs.

Frontmatter schema

  • Required: title, description, created, status
  • Optional: parent, tags, url, github, tracker

status values:

  • active — being actively worked on (whether live or not)
  • maintenance — live and running but no active development work
  • paused — temporarily stopped with intention to return
  • idea — being considered, not yet started
  • archived — retired or deprecated, no longer pursued

parent uses wiki-link style: parent: [[life-itself]]

Example:

---
title: Second Renaissance
description: Cultural-civilisational renewal project including narrative, events, and movement-building.
created: 2026-01-28
status: active
parent: [[life-itself]]
tags:
  - lifeitself
  - second-renaissance
---

Cross-cutting categorization

Themes and organizational groupings (media, spaces, courses) are metadata, not hierarchy. Use tags rather than creating grouping initiatives. This keeps the initiative list as a list of things actually being pursued, not filing cabinet labels.

Overview of existing materials

Inventory of existing strategy materials

See materials sidebar or subfolder.

Portfolio Visualizations

Interactive views of Life Itself initiatives and projects. Open any HTML file directly in a browser — no server needed.

Data is rebuilt automatically on commit (via a pre-commit hook) whenever initiatives/ or projects/ files change.

Building the data index

The visualizations are powered by visualizations/index.js, generated from markdown frontmatter by the build script.

# One-time setup
cd scripts && npm install

# Rebuild manually (also runs automatically on commit)
node scripts/build-index.js

The pre-commit hook triggers this automatically when any initiatives/*.md or projects/*.md file is staged.

A history of projects to work on strategy

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