Open and closed

What can be seen, and what cannot

Of 51 catalogued sources, 31 are openly readable and 20 sit behind something — 10 paid, 4 registration, 3 partly-paid, 2 restricted and 1 draft.

Nearly everything here came from the open ones: 688 of the 847 tools are reachable through at least one openly readable source. That is not evidence that the field is mostly open. It is the opposite — it is a selection effect. A directory built by reading can only contain what it was allowed to read.

So the honest statement about those 20 sources is not that they hold a little. It is that we cannot say what they hold at all. They are a blank, not a small number, and no amount of careful cataloguing on this side of the wall will change that.

What is missing everywhere

The corpus is overwhelmingly middle-depth: 435 of 847 tools are depth 2, personal reflection at a self-chosen level. Depth 3 accounts for 124. Depth 4 — work at a person's growing edge — is 15 records, drawn from 3 sources: Authentic Relating Games Manual, SEE Change Initiative (Empowered Entrepreneur/Employee Training) and The Work That Reconnects (Joanna Macy & Molly Brown).

15 exercises out of 847. Either this field mostly does depth-2 work, or its deepest work is not written down where anyone can find it. Both are probably true, and neither is explained by paywalls: the gated sources here contain almost no depth-4 material either.

Why gates go up

There are two reasons, and they are usually spoken as one. Separating them is the whole point of this page.

The weak reason: protecting the method

A facilitator's livelihood feels like it lives in their material, so publishing the material feels like giving it away. But this directory's own model says otherwise, in a field it records for every single tool. Holding — what it takes to hold the room — is a property of the facilitator, not of the exercise.

Anyone can read the Truth Mandala's instructions in ten minutes. Almost nobody can hold that room. The exercise was never the scarce thing, which means gating it protects the one part that was always copyable and withholds nothing that made anyone worth hiring.

The strong reason: responsibility

The other reason is real. A depth-4 ritual, handed with full instructions to someone with holding-1 competence and no relationship to the group, is precisely the failure this model exists to name. Openness cannot be unconditional, and the safety axes are the argument for restraint.

But responsibility does not require a gate — and the proof is the deepest material in this whole catalogue. Macy publishes the Work That Reconnects under a licence that reads “open source — a gift freely given”. The Truth Mandala is open online, and it carries its responsibility in the text: opens grief, fear, anger and despair; not for groups with no exit option; closing and integration are structurally part of the ritual, never truncate them; facilitate only after experiencing it as a participant. The Despair Ritual adds: never improvise this form from a page.

That is what carrying responsibility looks like without a paywall. The care is in the framing, and the framing travels with the work.

Where this directory stands

It links home rather than republishing. Every record says what a tool is, who made it, what it opens, what it demands and where the instructions actually live — and then sends you to the people who made it. That is not a compromise between open and closed. It means being open about what exists and what it costs to run without becoming the place that hands a depth-4 ritual to a stranger.

The obvious next move would be to hold the deepest material behind an account — not as a business, but to honour that transformation carries responsibility. Macy's licence is the argument against it, and it is a better argument than any gate. She asks for something instead of withholding something: acknowledge the source — the Work That Reconnects, Macy as root teacher, the named adapters — and do not facilitate what you have not sat inside.

That is responsibility carried by what is asked of the reader rather than by what is kept from them. It scales further than a login ever could, because it travels with the work into every place the work is copied to — and unlike a wall, it cannot be climbed by anyone willing to pay.

So the line here is drawn in the framing, not the access. Every record states what an exercise opens, what it takes to hold, what the group must already have, and what its own tradition asks of whoever runs it. If that turns out to be insufficient, the honest response is better framing before it is a closed door.

The measurements above are counted from the dataset when this page is built.