Driver

What a body is for, written down in a sentence — the need it exists to answer.

Before a group decides anything it should be able to say, in one line, what it is for. That line is the driver: the need in the world, or in the people gathered, that this body exists to meet. It is written down because an unwritten purpose drifts, and a drifted purpose is how a body ends up busy and useless.

The driver is the thing every later decision is measured against. A proposal is good if it serves the driver; a role exists because the driver needs it done; a disagreement is resolved by asking which option serves the driver better rather than which person prefers it. An objection that names a harm names a harm to what this body is for. Without the sentence, none of those tests can be run and a body falls back on preference, seniority, or volume.

It also tells a body when to end. A driver that has been met, or that has moved on, is grounds for laying the body down with thanks rather than keeping it alive out of habit. Discrete birth and discrete death is the healthier pattern, and the driver is what makes the second one sayable out loud.

Held well, the driver sits beside the intent on the first card a group writes: what we are for, in a sentence, before anyone plans anything. It is revisited at the turnings, like everything else.

Also called: what a body is for Stands on: One Purpose Above All · The Intent · Intention Opens onto: Meaningful Objection · Consent-Based Decision-Making · Roles · Disbanding · The Circle Sheet · Quest In play: table · Home Sources: The DNA of Heaven, Part VII (the Operating System's shape: what we are for, in a sentence) (Fable synthesis, unreviewed) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System, the intent (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: The LIØNSBERG Operating System Open: the concept field cites Driver to a section of an earlier seed text that has since been rewritten; the current seed text carries the idea as the Intent and does not use the word driver. Whether the canon adopts the word, or keeps intent, is unsettled — and it collides with the word's ordinary use in the wider world.