01 — Concepts Index

Every distinct Wardley-related idea in the corpus, with its canonical source, its date, and — the column that matters most — whether it is standard doctrine [S], an extension [E], or an original contribution [O].

That classification is the site's editorial spine. Standard doctrine should be linked, not restated — Simon Wardley's book says it better and says it first, and restating CC BY-SA material creates a licence problem (see 07__). Extensions and original contributions are what this site is for.

Counts: 33 entries — 14 [O], 13 [E], 6 [S].

Paths are relative to the SGraph-AI__App__Send repo root. Word counts are the containing file's, measured with wc -w, not the concept's.

The concepts

Teaching order — six altitudes

The corpus is dense at the top and thin at the bottom. A reader arriving cold has nowhere to start, and the primer is only 846 words. Build the ladder in this order; each rung should be a page.

Altitude 1 — What a map is. Anchor, position, evolution, the four stages. This is [S] and belongs to Wardley. Link out to the book and to Wardley Mapping 101; do not rewrite it. One paragraph, then a rendered example.

Altitude 2 — How to read a map. W29 (user needs first), W28 (paired before/after maps — "The distance between the two is the case for the service"), W10 (the commodity illusion). This is where the site earns its keep for a newcomer: three named reading techniques, each with a rendered map.

Altitude 3 — How to write one that survives review. W13 (the [visibility, evolution] coordinate contract), W13b (the parse rules), W23 (a map is a claim, not a picture), W31 (honest mapping — "Is there a map that shows us badly? Worth drawing, as the test of whether these are analysis or marketing"). Pair with 05__.

Altitude 4 — Where doctrine bends. W7 (custom axes and the evolution-vs-maturity rule), W6/W6b (alternative axes), W8 (de-commoditisation), W12 (you cannot map a gap). Four opinionated pages. This is the site's centre of gravity.

Altitude 5 — Maps as organisation. W1 (Explorer/Villager/Town Planner), W2 (the theft), W14 (the skill lifecycle), W16 (explorer-phase discipline), W18 (the vibe-coded MVP as the brief, with its seniority inversion), W24 (somebody has to be the villagers), W25 (the same skill differs by character). See 02__.

Altitude 6 — Maps as data. W5 (maps are graphs with position), W21 (doctrine as a standing responsibility), W22 (gameplay), W26 (cost and control flows), W27 (every division its own map). This is the most architecturally ambitious layer and the least implemented — label it as design, not as shipped.

Two vocabulary problems to fix before writing anything

1. Spelling drift. The corpus uses commoditise / commoditize / commoditising and productise / productize interchangeably, sometimes in the same document. Pick one — -ise, to match the rest of the estate — and add a glossary line noting the -ize spellings are the same word.

2. Name drift. Explorer and Pioneer are used for the same thing; so are Villager and Settler. The rename is stated outright exactly once in the entire corpus, parenthetically, in a brief about something else: "(Explorer, Villager, and Town Planner map to Wardley's Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners.)" The word Settler appears once, ever. The site must state the mapping in its own vocabulary, on its own page, with the citation to blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html — which the corpus carries in only one place.

This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

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