# 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.

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## The concepts

| ID | Concept | Dinis's own words (quoted) | Canonical file | Date | Words (file) | Maturity | Class |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| **W1** | Explorer / Villager / Town Planner — Wardley's PST renamed and made into three literal agent teams | "Simon Wardley identifies three team archetypes mapped to the evolution axis… Explorers / Villagers / Town Planners" and later, explicitly: *"(Explorer, Villager, and Town Planner map to Wardley's Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners.)"* | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/02/14/v0.3.2__briefs__wardley-maps-in-sgraph-project.md` | 14 Feb 2026 | 1,578 | mature | **[O]** — the naming, and the application to AI agents, is his |
| **W2** | The "theft" / handover | "The key dynamic is what Wardley calls the **'theft'** — the villagers take (pinch) what the explorers have built and turn it into a product." | same as W1 | 14 Feb 2026 | 1,578 | mature | [S] |
| **W3** | The SG/Send evolution map (13 components positioned) | "The components in the top group (encryption, upload/download, S3 backend, tokens) are ready for the Villager team to productise. The components in the bottom group are still being explored." | same as W1 | 14 Feb 2026 | 1,578 | mature | [S] applied |
| **W4** | Cartographer as the role that makes mapping operational | "The Cartographer is the role that makes the Wardley Maps framework operational rather than theoretical. Without the Cartographer actively maintaining and updating the evolution map, the Explorer/Villager distinction becomes opinion rather than evidence." | same as W1 | 14 Feb 2026 | 1,578 | mature | **[O]** |
| **W5** | A map is a graph with positional metadata | "**a Wardley Map is not a separate artifact from the graph. It is a graph with positional metadata.**… The graph is primary; the map is a projection… Map queries are graph queries with positional filters" | `team/roles/cartographer/REFERENCE__from-issues-fs.md` | 7 Feb 2026 | 4,537 | mature | **[O]** — the strongest architectural idea in the corpus |
| **W6** | Configurable / alternative evolution axes (openness, automation, documentation, test coverage, graph connectivity) | "by treating the evolution axis as a configurable dimension rather than a fixed one, and by storing axis metadata in the graph alongside everything else" | `team/roles/cartographer/REFERENCE__from-issues-fs.md` | 7 Feb 2026 | 4,537 | developing | **[E]** |
| **W6b** | Same idea restated as visibility / risk overlays | "in Wardley maps the evolution does not always need to be genesis, custom-built, product, commodity. You can have other axes: visibility from not-visible to fully-visible, or risk from not-understood to fully-accepted." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/19/strategy-phase-and-shipping/v0.33.28__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-maps-productizing-commoditizing-permissions-explorer-phase.md` | 19 Jun 2026 | 2,236 | developing | [E] |
| **W7** | **The custom-axis verdict, and the evolution-vs-maturity line** | "the evolution scale doesn't necessarily need to be Genesis, custom-built, product and commodity; you can go from air gap to file to API to event-driven."… "The practical rule: **relabel the axis when the thing genuinely evolves; use a maturity model when the thing merely improves.**" | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/07/28/mvp-and-field-demo/v0.33.53__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-map-of-the-airgapped-register-custom-evolution-axes-broken-middle-shape.md` | 28 Jul 2026 | 2,956 | mature | **[O]** — the sharpest methodological contribution in the corpus, with sources cited |
| **W8** | **De-commoditisation / the attrition shield** | "**a thing can be commoditised at one phase of evolution while still being meaningfully custom-built at the next phase**… I am going to call this pattern **de-commoditisation**"; "The Wardley Map shows the commodity. The shield is what the map does not show. Both matter." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/05/17/v0.27.55__article__de-commoditising-the-commodity (1).md` | 17 May 2026 | 2,947 | mature | **[O]** — explicitly framed as a gap in doctrine |
| **W9** | Commoditise-to-enable (ILC applied) | "once you commoditise something, you enable other businesses to be built on top"; "when something is commoditised, a higher order of activities appears, and that is where the market opportunities are" | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/05/24/sg-send-thread/v0.27.60__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-maps-setup-and-mermaid-capability.md` | 24 May 2026 | 2,711 | mature | [S] |
| **W10** | **The commodity illusion** | "what is interesting when you map like this is that you see a lot of things that feel like a commodity or a product to the user are actually very weak and very immature behind the scenes." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/23/wardley-maps/v0.33.33__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-maps-brief-user-needs-first-before-after-agent-as-user-maturity.md` | 23 Jun 2026 | 1,834 | mature | **[E]** — a named reading of maps, not standard vocabulary |
| **W11** | **The agent as a user** | "the agent is also a user… Execution is mature; safe authorization via an LLM is custom-built and immature; the LLM is commodity, but the uninjected, on-task safe decision is not" | same as W10; drawn in `…/v0.33.33__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-maps-first-pass-eight-maps-user-needs-before-after.md` | 23 Jun 2026 | 1,834 / 2,398 | developing | **[O]** |
| **W12** | **The air gap as manual labour; the ends-evolved-middle-manual shape** | "**you cannot map a gap, because a gap has no evolution**"; "this will be a very interesting shape where you can have the top working quite efficiently, and then the middle bit those lines all the way to the left because they're manual… the ends are solved. the middle is people." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/07/28/mvp-and-field-demo/v0.33.53__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-map-of-the-airgapped-register-custom-evolution-axes-broken-middle-shape.md` | 28 Jul 2026 | 2,956 | mature | **[O]** |
| **W13** | Wardley-maps-as-Mermaid-code, and the `[visibility, evolution]` coordinate rule | "**Mermaid uses the OnlineWardleyMaps format `[visibility, evolution]`, which is the opposite of typical (x, y) notation.**… Getting this backwards puts every component in the wrong place, so it is the thing to check first." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/05/24/sg-send-thread/v0.27.60__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-maps-setup-and-mermaid-capability.md` | 24 May 2026 | 2,711 | mature | **[E]** — tooling knowledge, verified by rendering |
| **W13b** | The node-naming parse-error caveat (empirical) | "**component and anchor names that contain a hyphen, an ampersand, or a slash cause a parse error when those names are referenced in links or `evolve` statements.**… The robust fix is to keep component and anchor names to letters and spaces" | same as W13 | 24 May 2026 | 2,711 | mature | **[O]** — original empirical finding |
| **W14** | **The lifecycle of a skill: Explorer → Product → Town Planner → absorbed** | "the lifecycle of a skill is to start as massive LLM, held together with string and gum, very expensive, lots of tokens, all the way to a product, all the way to code, and it almost becomes a commodity, eventually disappearing, because maybe it is absorbed by something else." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/04/v0.32.3__strategy-brief__sg-send-skill-lifecycle-explorer-to-town-planner-english-to-code.md` | 4 Jun 2026 | 2,799 | mature | **[O]** |
| **W15** | **High token spend is an engineering problem** | "**Anybody who spends a lot of money on tokens has an engineering problem. They are using explorer-type code and solutions in a commodity environment.**" | same as W14 | 4 Jun 2026 | 2,799 | mature | **[O]** — the most quotable line in the corpus |
| **W15b** | English → code as the maturity mechanism; LLM-powered test harness | "the natural progression of a skill is to start in English and end up in code. As you refine the skill, you reduce the scope, you reduce the variability."; "the testing can be more in explorer mode, because the testing can have the subjectivity and power of an LLM" | same as W14 | 4 Jun 2026 | 2,799 | mature | **[O]** |
| **W16** | **Explorer-phase discipline: defer Town-Planner artifacts** | "there is no point doing things that are typical Villager and Town Planner company maturity when you are still dealing with Explorer ambiguity. Do not spend time creating things that are pure hypothesis you just cannot know" | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/19/strategy-phase-and-shipping/v0.33.28__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-maps-productizing-commoditizing-permissions-explorer-phase.md` | 19 Jun 2026 | 2,236 | mature | **[E]** — PST applied to *the company itself*, not to teams |
| **W17** | **Safe is not secure** | "there is a difference between safe and secure. Secure is just the security metrics. Safe is whether it is aligned with the risk appetite, within the threshold of risk the business or the person is willing to accept." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/23/wardley-maps/v0.33.33__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-maps-brief-user-needs-first-before-after-agent-as-user-maturity.md` | 23 Jun 2026 | 1,834 | mature | **[O]** |
| **W18** | **The vibe-coded MVP is the best brief; the three-team shipping workflow** | "the vibe coded MVP **is** the specification. It is more precise, more concrete, and more usable than any document the business stakeholder could have written." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/05/11/v0.27.32__article__explorer-villager-town-planner-vibe-coding-workflow.md` | 12 May 2026 (YAML `date:`) | 2,413 | mature | **[O]** — and note it *inverts* the seniority: "This work is best suited to junior and mid-level engineers" (Villager) / "the most experienced engineers on the team" (Town Planner) |
| **W19** | A working tool is already a commodity; switching drags the user back to Genesis | "once a tool works, it has become a commodity for its user, and asking them to switch asks them back to Genesis, which is why change is so hard." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/07/v0.32.7__strategy-brief__sg-send-tool-replacement-strategy-compatible-commoditize-de-risk.md` | 7 Jun 2026 | 2,535 | developing | **[E]** |
| **W20** | Vaults embody the Wardley flow | "the vaults are so powerful because they let us experiment wildly in a very controlled way, then bring them into the main codebase as the villagers take over, and then productise, including the town-planner team that makes it super solid." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/19/strategy-phase-and-shipping/v0.33.28__strategy-brief__sg-send-need-to-ship-iterate-learn-ci-pipeline-wardley-flow-cost-constraint.md` | 19 Jun 2026 | 1,557 | developing | **[E]** |
| **W21** | Doctrine assessment as a standing role responsibility | "The Cartographer's doctrine responsibility is to periodically evaluate the… ecosystem against these principles and produce a score or health assessment… The doctrine assessment is fractal" | `team/roles/cartographer/REFERENCE__from-issues-fs.md` | 7 Feb 2026 | 4,537 | sketch (never executed) | **[E]** |
| **W22** | Gameplay identification (ILC, open, ecosystem, tower-and-moat, Red Queen, sensing engines) | "Most Wardley Mapping practitioners stop at the map. The Cartographer must go further: doctrine assessment gives strategic health checks; gameplay analysis identifies available moves. These are where maps become actionable." | `team/roles/cartographer/REFERENCE__from-issues-fs.md` | 7 Feb 2026 | 4,537 | developing | **[E]** |
| **W23** | **A map is a falsifiable claim, not a picture** | "A Wardley map is a **claim**, not a picture: it asserts where each component sits on the evolution axis and is therefore arguable." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/08/14/sgit-site-and-hub/v0.33.58__strategy-brief__sgit-topic-sections-catalogue-read-keys-yes-write-keys-never-frozen-vaults.md` | 14 Aug 2026 | 3,338 | developing | **[O]** |
| **W24** | **Somebody has to be the villagers — NFRs as the sellable unit** | "the sweet spot is to find the economic value where it's cheaper for these companies to pay a third party to maintain what I call the non-functional requirements"; "**Demand for a specific skill is rising sharply while the mechanism that produces that skill is being dismantled**" | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/07/31/markets-and-field-demo/v0.33.54__strategy-brief__sg-send-somebody-has-to-be-the-villagers-maintaining-non-functional-requirements-scarce-asset.md` | 31 Jul 2026 | 3,059 | mature | **[O]** |
| **W25** | The same skill differs by Wardley character | "a skill, the same skill for a town planner, is very different for an explorer, for a villager. It is all about context-specific, but now we can do this, and we can scale." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/04/v0.32.3__strategy-brief__sg-send-skills-as-graph-capturing-how-business-works.md` | 4 Jun 2026 | 3,244 | developing | **[O]** |
| **W25b** | Wardley "why now" for skills | "skills are a good example of the Wardley map's evolution scale, where a number of things evolve, new orders appear, implementations appear above. Skills could only be possible with the level of LLMs we have right now" | same as W25 | 4 Jun 2026 | 3,244 | developing | [E] |
| **W26** | Map the control flows and the cost flows together | "cost and control flows, and cost flows. The graph is almost like the map of this, the Wardley map of this." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/05/24/sg-sentinel-batch2/v0.27.60__arch-brief__sg-sentinel-cost-attribution-accountant-agent.md` | 24 May 2026 | 2,641 | sketch | **[E]** |
| **W27** | Every division has its own map and its own maturity | "companies are made of multiple companies, multiple divisions, each with a different focus, different evolutionary scales, different Wardley maps, different maturities. We need to take that into account." | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/18/agentic-permissions/v0.33.40__strategy-brief__graphs-of-graphs-ontology-of-ontologies-permissions-mapping-reality-not-complexity.md` | 18 Jun 2026 | 1,568 | sketch | **[E]** |
| **W28** | **Paired before/after maps as the unit of argument** | "Each map is drawn twice. The reality map shows how immature the path is today… The with-our-service map shows the same value chain once our service supplies the missing data… **The distance between the two is the case for the service.**" | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/23/wardley-maps/v0.33.33__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-maps-brief-user-needs-first-before-after-agent-as-user-maturity.md` | 23 Jun 2026 | 1,834 | mature | **[E]** |
| **W29** | User-needs-first doctrine (his statement of it) | "the thing about Wardley maps that is always important is to start with the user needs, so we start with what they actually want" | same as W28 | 23 Jun 2026 | 1,834 | mature | [S] |
| **W30** | Push the value chain down / commoditise the experience | "it takes the parts that would otherwise be custom-built and bespoke… and commoditises them into reusable primitives, so the only thing left to be custom is the top line, the experience" | `team/humans/dinis_cruz/briefs/06/03/v0.31.12__strategy-brief__sg-send-vault-as-platform-of-primitives.md` | 3 Jun 2026 | 2,343 | developing | **[E]** |
| **W31** | Honest mapping / do not overclaim | "**even in the tracked (free) mode, the data is still encrypted; we still do not have access to the full data, so the privacy properties still hold.** The maps should not overclaim." and "Is there a map that shows us badly? Worth drawing, as the test of whether these are analysis or marketing" | `…/v0.27.60__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-maps-setup-and-mermaid-capability.md` and `…/v0.33.53__strategy-brief__sg-send-wardley-map-of-the-airgapped-register…md` | 24 May / 28 Jul 2026 | 2,711 / 2,956 | mature | **[O]** |


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## 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.

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## 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.

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