The Contributor's path

Every school here is a public-domain or CC-BY-SA grammar anyone can correct, translate, or extend. Climb in by the gentlest route that suits you.

Read · the contributor's guide

Contribute to existing schools — or create your own

Fix an item, add a school or a reading layout, write a course, or improve the site itself — by whatever route suits you, from a one-click edit in the app to full code. The deep guide walks every path.

Four ways to contribute — pick one

Creation-first · the gentlest route at the top

PathWhat you doStart
1In the app
recursive.eco · no code
 An item open in the browser with an 'Open in recursive.eco' action — propose a change without leaving the page.
Click through any item and propose a change — even without AI. The copy icon forks it to the Create page to edit inline; or just ask the Grammar Assistant to make the edit for you.
 Create or edit now →
2On GitHub
web · a browser
Edit the school's JSON in GitHub's web editor and open a pull request — no other tools needed.
 Open the repo →
3In Claude.ai
chat · MCP recommended
Draft bigger edits in a chat, then open the PR. We recommend connecting the recursive.eco MCP so Claude can act on your library directly.
 Read the steps →
4Fork & code
Claude Code Desktop + MCP
Clone the repo and edit like any coder — best with Claude Code Desktop + the MCP, working the whole library at once.
 Read the steps →

From path 2 on, the same moves let you edit any part of this site — and they're the very skills you'd use to grow a library of your own. (We're building easier on-ramps for that; more soon.)

What you'd be tending

The open library, in its actual viewers

Browse · every item
The item library
Every school, item by item — the Definition, evidence tier and Research notes you'd correct or translate.
Pivot · every angle
The Emergence Explorer
Drag fields to regroup every item — the patterns a well-tended grammar makes possible.
Build · cast · send
The Casting Studio
Build a reading layout, cast it, and send the reading to recursive.eco for an AI interpretation.
Read · a course
The courses
Every course is Markdown — and now a grammar too. Write a new one, or fix a single line.

The Wish List

What's on the workbench right now, and what we'd like done before launch — a living list, and a menu of things a contributor could pick up.

On the workbench Before launch Done

On the workbench

What we're actively building

Flagship · the first schools

Populating schools/ with the first real grammars

This site is a fresh branch of the recursive.eco chassis — the mechanism (viewers, chrome, sync) is ported and working, but no school of emotion has been written yet. Plutchik, NVC, DBT, attachment theory and the constructionist substrate all need their own schools/<slug>/grammar.json, each with an honest evidence_tier and a shared emotion_key so schools can cross-link.

How it's made

  1. Research each school's own literature, with confidence markers, before writing a line.
  2. Write the grammar in that school's own voice — never our editorial gloss on it.
  3. Run scripts/check_all.py, then scripts/build_meta_grammar.py to fold it into the constellation.
The wish behind it

Once a handful of schools exist, the galleries, the genealogy view, and the courses can all point at real content instead of the tarot chassis's placeholder art and copy.

Start a school → Read the contributor's guide →
On the workbench

Migrating the courses

The courses menu and gallery still carry the tarot chassis's course catalog (course/_courses.json). It needs a real "Start here" set for this project — likely something close to the creed on the About page — before it's honest to link to from the header.

On the workbench

A visual language for the schools

The hero, the three doors, and the gallery still show placeholder tarot-card art — this project's own plates, one per school, haven't been made yet.

Before launch

What we want done first

Before launch

Genealogy view, redesigned for schools

The Genealogy Graph's lineage taxonomy (trump order, the 1781 "occult turn") is inherited straight from tarot and doesn't describe how schools of emotion relate to one another. It needs its own tiering — likely the branches already sketched in schools/_collection.json (constructionist substrate, basic-emotion, needs-based, attachment & couples, skills-based, parts & depth, historical & scientific).

Before launch

Publish the first channel row

Import each school once it's written, set it public on recursive.eco, and add it to the recursive-repatterning channel — a school without a public row renders an empty page for logged-out visitors.

Before launch

Provenance you can trust

Confirm every citation stays inside its source tradition, every evidence tier is honest, and copyrighted sources (Rosenberg, Johnson, Brown, Linehan) are paraphrased, never quoted — the floor the whole library stands on.

Done

Branding pass — tarot chassis to Recursive Repatterning

Accent colour swapped to teal/emerald, the header, footer, home page and about/manifesto rewritten in the project's own voice, and the dead tarot-only pages (games, historian, logo studies, print viewer) pruned from navigation.

This list lives in the open repo like everything else — see something missing? Open an issue or a pull request ↗.