Obsidian Delta

Part 5 of 5 · Opportunities: built on open infrastructure

  1. What is already solved
  2. A tutoring practice with a kit for every hard topic
  3. French editions: a business in a gap
  4. The first week on the job, from one page
  5. Run an initiative on the desk

October 18, 2026 History

Run an initiative on the desk

An initiative runs on requests. A co-op needs a course for its new members. A school has one learner who freezes at fractions. A community programme wants a printed pack its volunteers can hand out. Someone asks, someone does the work, someone checks it, and some of what comes out has to stay inside: drafts, learner situations, anything members would not hand to a stranger. Most small initiatives hold all of that in a group chat and a shared folder, and the requests quietly drown. What they need is a desk: one place where requests come in, work gets done and recorded, and documents stay inside until somebody moves them out on purpose. Obsidian Delta runs its own work on one, and opens it to partners.

The desk, in one request

The build with us section of our opportunities page offers three ways in, and the first reads: “Partners who want to run an initiative on the customer-management and content system Obsidian Delta runs its own work on: a team, Skippy doing the building, documents that stay inside the initiative.” The other two are the open Meta DAX repository and a hackathon, both below.

Now follow one request. A member says it in their own words, by voice or by text: “we need a module on this”, or “I have this learner, and here is where they freeze”. It lands as a ticket on the initiative’s desk with everything they said kept. Someone on the team answers it from the console, or hands it to Skippy, which does the building from the open recipe. What comes back is for a person to read before it reaches a learner, the same rule we state for our done-for-you packages.

Open what requests like these turned into. Systèmes de fichiers imbriqués began as one conversation with a college networking teacher and arrived as a French module with six interactive scenes. Words into Algebra began with a tutor’s hardest topic and arrived as a kit, then an Edition remade for one learner. First Week at the Bakery is rebuilt for any business from a one-page brief.

The second half of the desk is where things stay. Each initiative is its own space with its own members. A document starts private to its author and moves up a rung at a time: to the initiative, to people you name, to the public. Every move is a step somebody takes on purpose, and every move is logged. Nothing climbs by accident.

Here is a partner we have sketched and not run. A volunteer teachers’ collective wants six weeks of early reading in their community’s own language, on paper, because connectivity is thin. A member files the request. Skippy builds the course and a print-first pack. A fluent reader checks every page. It sits in the collective’s library, and only if they choose does it climb to the commons for the next collective to start from. Our draft is held until a native speaker has read it, which is the point: the desk keeps the checking in plain sight.

What is built, and what is not

The intake is on this site. Click the logo at the bottom right of any page and the widget offers to “Record a message” or “Type a message”; it is the desk’s front door. The desk runs as its own deployment, apart from the formaddie product, with the checks that keep one initiative’s documents from another’s switched on.

Skippy is the one automated responder today. Letting a partner plug in their own AI is designed, not built. There is no self-serve sign-up: a partner is added by hand, which is why the door ends in a message to Jason. We make no claim about scale; the desk has so far carried our own work.

Contributors have a plainer entry. The repository’s contributing guide says: “You do not need an account on anything but GitHub, and most contributions never touch code.” It lists four ways in, from sharing a sample to fixing a prompt or the checker, and holds AI-assisted work to the test the desk applies: “AI output you have not read and tried is not ready to submit.”

The hackathon is planned, with no date set yet. Its idea is that people build through the system without writing code.

What to do this week

Write your initiative in five lines. Who asks. What they ask for, in their own words. Who does the work. Who checks it before it leaves. What must stay inside. If you cannot write the fourth or the fifth, you have found the gap the desk closes. You bring the expertise; the desk, the open recipe and Skippy’s building are already there.

Then send the five lines. Message Jason on LinkedIn, say which of the three doors you mean, and say so if you want to hear when the hackathon has a date.

This closes the Opportunities series. The first week on the job, from one page showed the simplest request a desk takes, one page in and a five-day course out. What is already solved listed the free pieces, this desk among them. Past the series, the Foundation’s Run it with us says what a second run of the Constraint Protocol needs from a named outside party. Obsidian Delta has committed to run what it operates under a declared constraint, but the protocol’s README calls these “commitments, not a description of current practice”, so we do not say the desk runs on it today. On formaddie, the recipe is the story keeps the same rule at the scale of one family: the chapter “belongs to the person who tells it”, and whoever set up the account “cannot read a word of it unless the narrator chooses to share”.

Who files the requests in your initiative today, and where do they go?

Sources

Where this connects

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