> EVEN WILDLY IMPROBABLE IDEAS NEED A PLAN
So we've written the Manifesto - what do we do next?
> THE VERY FIRST HITCHHIKER CONGRESS: 18 MONTHS TO CREATE A CONSTITUTION
We're convening a constitutional congress to create the governance structure and legal framework that will enable genuine member ownership for the next 42 years (at least!)
Seven Fellows (£42,000 each) will lead seven core workstreams: 1. Governance, Emergence & Constitutional Evolution - "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Not Being a Vogon" 2. Membership, Rights & Responsibilities - "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Knowing Where Your Towel Is" 3. Economic Model & Value Distribution - "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Pan-Galactic Value Exchange" 4. Data Sovereignty & The Integrated Self - "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Your Genuine People Personality" 5. AI Policy, Ethics & Human Primacy - "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Marvin" 6. Content Standards & Community Culture - "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Magarathea" 7. The Heart of Gold - Making It Real - Implementation & Reality Testing
Each Fellow will convene Field Researchers to explore their theme through workshops, podcasts, walking conversations - whatever serves the work. A Towel Team will coordinate the whole thing and logistics and manage the "laundry budget" - the practical resources that make collaboration happen. The Vision Fish (I'll be one of them!) governance team providing strategic oversight and trying to make sure we all keep on track.
# TIMING Months 1-3: Convene Fellows and scope the constitutional themes Month 4: First Vision Fish review - refine and integrate Months 5-9: Deep work creating constitutional documents and videos and some things that no doubt emerge Month 10: Second Vision Fish review Months 11-13: Creative testing through storytelling, theatre, games, and practice - culminating in the First In Real Life Annual Hitchhiker Congress (one anchor event + up to 42 satellite events globally) Months 14-18: Finalize Constitution, establish legal structure, transfer the rights into the New Structure and prepare for launch
# THE OPPORTUNITY Become a Founding Patron Fish! To fund a Fellow (£42,000): Support the constitutional work on one of the seven themes. Your Fellow will lead Field Researchers in creating the elements that go into the constitution. To fund the Towel Team (£42,000 per person): Enable the coordination that makes everything else possible. Without logistics, travel, and "laundry budget," brilliant ideas we probably won't get very far. To fund infrastructure, creative testing, or specific phases: Help us build the systems that enable reality testing or support the Congress events.
# Support the Vision Fish A personal thought… When I first met Douglas in his house in Islington back in the mid 1990's I can remember so clearly being in that lovely light sitting room on the second floor and talking about Bach and mathematical patterns in music (about which my knowledge was sketchy at best!) But also about Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which we both loved. Spool forward all these years and I was talking with a friend about our plans recently and without knowing the story about my meeting with Douglas, and as we had been talking about wildly improbable ideas he pointed me to the very first lines of the Glass Bead Game, which I have modernised a little as it is not a book famous for its female characters.
> " Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men and women treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born."
That's what we're doing. Treating this wildly improbable thing - a truly member-owned global platform - as if it exists, thereby bringing it into being. If any of this makes any sense, maybe we could have a follow up.
THE HITCHHIKER CONGRESS: PROJECT OVERVIEW Creating the Constitution for Hitchhikersguide.earth: A Digital Mutual Society
PROJECT GOAL We will create the Constitution and legal company structure for the world's first global mutually-owned digital platform based on the legendary The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the site that Douglas Adams himself founded h2g2.com.
The new platform Hitchhikers.earth will give members the power and agency to create and share value in ways they determine as they build an economy of guidance based on exploring Life the Universe and Everything.
Not Panicking Ltd will transfer its h2g2 rights into this new structure, establishing m
ember-owned governance for the next 42 years (at least!). This work will take 12 months and bring together Fellows, Field Researchers, and the broader community to build something genuinely new in digital space, something new for this part of the Galaxy! HOW WE'RE ORGANIZED Five Fellows will each lead one of five constitutional workstreams, receiving £42,000 over the course of the project: FIVE CONSTITUTIONAL WORKSTREAMS AND LEARNING ALONG THE WAY 1. Governance, Decision-Making & Membership "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Not Being a Vogon and Knowing Where Your Towel Is" Who gets to make what decisions where? Who can join, what rights and responsibilities do they have, and what does member ownership actually mean? How do we handle emergence and allow the Constitution to evolve? How do we measure and review whether we're living up to our principles and ensure members can hold the platform accountable? 2. Economic Model & Value Distribution "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Pan-Galactic Value Exchange" How do we generate resources without extraction, distribute value fairly, and ensure surplus flows to members and mission rather than external shareholders? How do we constitutionally prevent the platform from being sold or members' data from being monetized without permission? 3. Data Sovereignty & AI Policy "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Marvin and Your Genuine People Personalities" How do members maintain agency over their data selves and the fast emerging relationship between biological and digital existence? What role can AI play in enhancing human creativity while ensuring transparency and human primacy? 4. The Earth Edition - Creating the Experience "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Creating the Very Best Life, the Universe and Everything Experience We Can!" What does guidance actually look and feel like, and what makes content Guide-worthy? How do we create engaging content across all forms - writing, podcasts, videos, interfaces, graphic novels - while maintaining quality, moderating well, and preserving Douglas Adams' spirit? How do we maintain that spirit of h2g2.com? - work, rest and play. 5. Time Travel - Legacy, Preservation & Curation "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Time Travel" How do we honour and preserve the 25-year h2g2 legacy and community contributions? How do we curate what's valuable, migrate historical content, and maintain continuity while enabling the next phase. And the one after that. 6. The Heart of Gold - Making It Real Implementation, Reality Testing & Cybersecurity The constant thread of iteration, experimentation, and reality testing running through all five constitutional workstreams. This includes building the technical infrastructure, ensuring cybersecurity and operational resilience, and continuously checking that constitutional ideas work in practice. Each Fellow will convene Field Researchers for their workstream - in groups of sixes and sevens, up to 42 total across all themes. The Fellows determine how many Field Researchers they need. These Field Researchers participate as founding contributors, recognized for their role in creating the constitutional foundation, but they're not paid - they're here because they believe in what we're building. The work happens through whatever modes serve it best: workshops, meetings, podcasts, walking and talking. This isn't about rigid structures; it's about finding the right ways for people to think and create together. Overseeing everything are the * Vision Fish - a small governance team that provides strategic direction and ensures coherence across the workstreams.
Supporting the whole endeavor is the * Towel Team, two people who coordinate logistics and manage what we're calling the "laundry budget" - the practical resources needed to make gatherings, travel, and collaboration actually happen.
THE JOURNEY: SIX PHASES OVER ONE YEAR The work unfolds across six distinct phases, each building on what came before. In the first two months, we convene and scope. The Five Fellows are selected and onboarded. Each Fellow then gathers their Field Researchers and begins the work of defining what their constitutional theme actually requires. They research best practices, explore precedents, and define the scope and key questions for their area. This isn't about coming with answers - it's about understanding the territory. Each Fellow produces a scoping document that maps what they can see from here and, critically, begins to surface what's missing from our initial thinking. Month three brings the first Vision Fish review, an intensive two-day workshop where Fellows present their scoping work. The Vision Fish provide strategic feedback, and we work together to see how the themes connect and where gaps or overlaps exist. This is where we ask: Is this the right scope? What are we missing? How do these pieces fit together? The Fellows leave with refined direction and a clearer sense of how their work integrates with the whole. Months four through six are for deep work. Fellows return to their Field Researchers for intensive artefact creation. They draft the actual constitutional elements for their themes, working through research, consultation, and iteration. These artefacts can take any form that serves the purpose - text, video, interactive media, whatever will help people understand and engage with the constitutional principles. This is also when the explicit mandate to discover "what's missing" comes into its own. Fellows are actively looking for what we didn't anticipate, what our initial framing overlooked, what reality reveals that theory missed. Month seven is the second Vision Fish review, another intensive workshop where Fellows present their constitutional artefacts. Now we're asking: Does this actually work as governance? Can real people understand and use this? How do these pieces fit together into a coherent whole? The Vision Fish reviews for clarity, implementability, and integration. We identify contradictions that need resolving and provide guidance for revision. Months eight through ten are for creative testing - and this is where things get really interesting. We take the constitutional artefacts out of the abstract and test them through storytelling, theatre, role-play, and games. We run scenario simulations: "What would happen if...?" We engage the broader h2g2 community in play-testing. We use the actual infrastructure that the Heart of Gold workstream has been building to pilot these governance structures in practice. This creative testing period culminates in the First Annual Hitchhiker Congress - one anchor event bringing together the Vision Fish, Fellows, and Field Researchers, surrounded by up to 42 satellite events happening across different locations, formats, and communities. The anchor event becomes the central gathering where constitutional learning is shared and integrated, while the satellite events test the constitution in diverse contexts - perhaps theatre performances in one city, governance simulations in another, podcast discussions, walking conversations, community forums. Each satellite event feeds insights back to the anchor Congress, creating a rich tapestry of testing across geographies and approaches. This phase is about feeling how the constitution works, not just thinking about it. What emerges? What did we miss? Where does governance break down under stress? Do people actually want to participate under this structure? The Congress and its satellite events produce field reports, identify gaps and failure modes, and generate emergent wisdom that only comes from actually trying to live under these principles. The final phase, months eleven through twelve, is where everything comes together. The Vision Fish and Fellows integrate all the learning from creative testing and the First Annual Hitchhiker Congress. We create the final Constitution, incorporating the insights that only emerged through practice. We design the specific legal company structure that will enable member ownership. We define the transition plan from Not Panicking Ltd to the new governance structure. We establish the plans for building membership in the next phase. We prepare for public launch. Everything is documented, not just the final Constitution, but the process itself, so others can learn from what we discovered.
THE PRINCIPLES THAT GUIDE US Throughout this journey, certain principles guide our work. Emergence is built into every stage - we explicitly task each Fellow with discovering what's missing from our scoping, acknowledging that we cannot see the full territory from where we stand now. Reality testing ensures that governance works in practice, not just theory. We will be having fun along the way, seeing what works, what doesn't, what needs tweaking, getting stuff out there! We take a Common Law approach, focusing on minimum viable principles rather than exhaustive rules, emphasizing who decides rather than trying to pre-decide everything. Subsidiarity runs through all our thinking. Decisions should be made at the most appropriate level, with the Constitution setting framework rather than dictating detailed operations. And at every stage, we apply the Tripod of Work: tasking (clear outputs required), trusting (real authority given to those doing the work), and tending (multiple review cycles to ensure nothing is lost and everything connects). WHAT WE'LL DELIVER At the end of this process, we will have created a Constitution that establishes governance structures, membership rights, economic models, data sovereignty principles, AI policy, and content standards. We will have designed the legal structure that enables genuine member ownership. We will have working infrastructure from the Heart of Gold workstream. We will have a clear transition plan for transferring IP and governance from Not Panicking Ltd to the new member-owned structure. We will have documented the entire process so others can learn from it. And we will have a founding community - Fellows, Field Researchers, and engaged members - ready to build the next phase. The First Annual Hitchhiker Congress will become a landmark event, establishing a tradition of gathering, testing, and evolving that continues beyond this founding phase. WHY THIS MATTERS We're not just creating a constitution for one platform. We're proving that member-owned digital governance can actually work. We're demonstrating that there's an alternative to extractive corporate platforms, and we're documenting how to build it so others can follow. If we succeed, this becomes a template that others can use. If we fail, we'll document publicly what doesn't work - which is still valuable. Either way, we're honoring Douglas Adams' 25-year legacy while creating something genuinely new for our current digital moment. We're taking the wildly improbable and making it real.