Plain definitions first. Deeper roots where they help.
This is the working vocabulary for the product, the small-group practice, and the longer experiment around it.
The Dictionary is optional deep reading. Nobody should need it to understand the homepage or use DunbarrioSolo—and no definition here outranks what people learn together in practice.
01
The few definitions that make the rest of the vocabulary easier to place.
A human-scale framework for small groups that repeatedly share responsibility, make decisions, resolve friction, remember what happened, and improve how they function together.
It begins with the dependence that is already present in households, care circles, small businesses, local teams, and other recurring groups, then asks how that dependence can work more deliberately without turning into control.
A design constraint favoring groups small enough that people, responsibilities, and governance can remain recognizable and legible.
The working range of 3–9 people for a direct circle and the roughly 150-person ceiling in the broader model are practical constraints, not magical natural laws or promises that every group below those numbers will work.
02
Ways to notice a relational world before deciding what, if anything, should become shared.
A structured way to address relational friction when ordinary interaction is not enough.
The current app provides Repair as a mutual, two-account flow after the connection between those people has been accepted. It does not turn conflict into public content, a score, an engagement mechanic, or an automated verdict.
03
The vocabulary of doing recurring work, keeping useful history, and improving the next attempt.
The personal running record of Embraces and smaller acts of connection recorded in DunbarrioSolo.
Circle routine completion and version history are kept on graduated-circle shared-work surfaces. Governance decisions are kept with circle governance; they are not combined into one group Ledger.
A reusable description of a procedure or way of working that can be adopted, tested, and refined rather than recreated from scratch.
A Blueprint describes a practice. It is not the same as demonstrated capability, and first-class Blueprints are not tracked in the current app.
A proposed future refinement layer where repeated practice could inform reviewable changes to reusable Routines, Tasks, and Blueprints.
The Workshop is being explored as a way to keep improvement explicit rather than silently rewriting live shared work. It is not a complete shipped workflow.
An explicit, reviewable suggestion to change a reusable procedure because practice revealed something worth improving.
This is a design concept rather than a currently tracked normal-user workflow. It is not a silent edit, an automatic penalty, or a judgment of the person making the request.
Groups should get better at doing things together every time they do them.
The longer-term goal is for repeated practice to create reviewable learning that can improve a procedure and help it survive role rotation and individual memory. The complete loop is not currently shipped.
A group’s retained ability to know how to do something across time, role changes, and individual turnover.
It is not merely stored documentation. It is the combination of usable procedure, situated experience, and the group’s capacity to carry the practice forward.
Collective procedural memory is a longer-term design goal rather than a complete current product workflow.
04
How a circle makes structural decisions and holds responsibility without assuming a permanent manager.
A rotating outward-facing responsibility concerned with exchange, adjacent circles, and what the circle can offer or seek beyond itself.
Link surfaces appear after a circle graduates. The role can remain dormant until the circle is listed and has described what it offers or seeks.
A Link is not a gatekeeper.
The explicit process by which a circle handles structural decisions rather than burying them inside routine administration.
The current Governance surface becomes available after mutual connections are established.
Governance keeps changes to shared structure visible to the group and leaves interpretation with people rather than an automatic score or sanction.
When a direct circle grows beyond a workable human-scale size, it can split into smaller viable circles while preserving continuity where appropriate.
Mitosis is a structural response to growth, not a rule about personal departure. Implementation details around split history, Ledger inheritance, and weak or dissolving halves may continue to evolve.
People remain free to leave. Leaving a circle is not mitosis.
05
A developing attempt to make voluntary support dependable without allowing support to purchase control.
A financially capable participant who may contribute disproportionately to shared infrastructure while remaining a member subject to the same bounded governance.
A Steward stands inside the community rather than owning it from outside. Financial contribution does not create a separate source of permanent authority.
A developing model in which a financially capable participant helps make support dependable while standing inside the bounded community rather than purchasing control over it.
Different people may contribute different kinds and amounts of surplus while membership remains membership. Stewardship is a model and direction, not an implemented financial product.
06
LONGER-TERM DIRECTIONLonger-term directions for connecting small units without moving every decision into one giant center.
A circle’s evolving description of what it can offer, what it is trying to learn, and where useful exchange with other circles may exist.
Graduated circles already expose Knowledge Tree placements and adjacency machinery. The Link helps keep this representation current so eligible nearby circles can identify relevant exchange without collapsing into one centralized group.
The long-term ambition is for claims of capability to become increasingly grounded in demonstrated practice rather than self-description alone.
Connection among bounded circles or Dunbarrios that permits exchange without centralizing every decision.
Graduated, listed circles already expose federation machinery. A populated, resilient federated ecosystem remains a longer-term direction.
Useful practices, knowledge, and assistance may travel while authority remains bounded close to the people affected.
07
IDEAS / ARCHIVEEarlier metaphors, coined language, and adjacent work that helped form the project. These entries offer context and character; they do not describe current product behavior.
Naming is not only labeling; a new word can make a pattern easier to notice, question, and practice together.
Dunbarrios has always used language as a working surface. Its terms should remain open to revision when the practice becomes clearer than the name.
An early philosophical attempt to understand consciousness and care as emerging through genuine entanglement between beings.
A metaphor for change that arrives through folds in existing life rather than one totalizing rupture.
An earlier meditation on attention, witnessing, and the vanishing scale of the present moment.
A reflection on the literal permeability between bodies and the shared atmosphere that makes separation less complete than it feels.
A wordplay and meditation on presence: the same letters, differently divided.
An earlier philosophical reference to eternity, presence, care, mystery, life, and death in the work of Terence McKenna.
A metaphor for the repeated interpersonal work of agreeing what happened without requiring either person to disappear into the other’s account.
An earlier political slogan about the structural danger of concentrated authority and accumulation.
An earlier contrast between structures that distribute participation and structures that concentrate it at an apex.
An adjacent, separate project that answers the idea of radical separation through an embodied expression of voice and place.
WETIKOHowl is not a Dunbarrios product feature.
A working surface, not a monument.
These terms can be edited, split, merged, or retired as the practice becomes clearer. The point is not to defend the vocabulary. The point is to make the work more understandable.