Newcomer Tour

A five-page tour through the source OGM Wiki for someone who has just shown up.

1. What is OGM?

Read Open Global Mind in the source: Organizations/Open Global Mind.md. It's the worked example of OGM's own sovereign template — mission, vision, leadership, channels, and current fundraising posture, all on one page.

"Open Global Mind brings together theorists, practitioners, and other interested parties to explore and create ways for individuals, organizations, and societies to organize around resolving wicked messes in the service of a future where humanity and other forms of life can thrive for millions of years to come."

(Charter language drafted by Ken Homer.)

2. How OGM is structured

Read The Five Layers (this wiki's synthesis) or OGM Structure/The Five Layers.md. Infrastructure / Governance / Knowledge / Services / Contagion. This framework is used operationally everywhere in the wiki — sprint plans, MOU appendices, vision documents.

3. How OGM talks about itself

Read OGMing. OGM is used as a verb. The vocabulary is distinctive — fractal scale, sovereigns, membranes, quests, guilds. Knowing this saves you from translating OGM-talk into more generic phrasing.

4. How to navigate the wiki itself

Read How We Wiki (synthesis) or Admin and Help/How We Wiki/Our Way of Writing Here.md. Especially the Incipient Links concept — links to pages that don't yet exist are first-class. This explains why the wiki has many stubs and orphan-link targets.

5. Where to start contributing

Three options, depending on what you're drawn to:

A project: see Projects Hub for the active project landscape (Marley, NeoBooks, Quick First Book, SenseDoing, Weaving the World, The Generative Commons).
A theme that's underdeveloped: see Orphan Gems — pages the wiki keeps pointing at but no one has filled in. Each is a high-leverage write-up opportunity. Top recommendation: Jerry Michalski (33 inbound, 965-char body).
A conversation: come to a meeting. See Meetings & Calls Hub for what recurs and OGM Culture/Office Hours for the schedule.

6. Where to talk

From OGM Culture/OGM Onboarding 101.md:

What this tour leaves out

Stewardship and the MOU — important historical context, but not where most newcomers should start. See Stewardship Hub when you want it.
Jerry's Brain and the Nuggets — the single largest sub-corpus. See Jerry's Nuggets Pointer.
The Generative Commons — read once you've gotten oriented; it's a substantial document with its own register.

Cultural Foundations — the next reading path, deeper into how-we-do-this
Governance Story — for the historical/MOU thread