# The Dreamcatcher Council Kit **Six historical judges, one meta-prompt, your decisions** *Part 2 of 2 — Commons Kit, BLKOUT UK* --- ## What this is A council of six historical Black queer figures, each holding one question they would ask of any tool, partnership, or platform you're considering adopting. Paired with a meta-prompt that runs your values document (from Part 1) against any specific proposal, returns six verdicts in the judges' voices, and surfaces where they disagree. **The council do not decide. You decide.** The kit's job is to put a considered position in front of you in the time it would take to read this page — so the decision you make is held against something more than the loudest voice in the room. --- ## How it sits with Part 1 Part 1 produced a values document — five to seven operational lines specific to your organisation. Part 2 uses that document as the context block. **Without Part 1, the council prompt only works for organisations who already speak in operational specifics.** Don't skip it. --- ## The role typology A well-formed council needs different shapes of question. Six roles, six positions in the lineage: 1. **The witness** — *what silence is being spent to make this work?* 2. **The continuity** — *whose work does this honour, and who is in the room?* 3. **The street** — *does this set the test by the most marginalised, or by the most acceptable?* 4. **The institution** — *can we hold this from inside, where decisions are made?* 5. **The shelter** — *does this hold our people, or expect them to assimilate to be held?* 6. **The cost** — *what does this cost the people we're asking to be visible — and have they consented?* The roles are general. The names below are illustrative of how BLKOUT thinks the roles can be held within a shared Black queer lineage. **You should swap, add, replace.** A template for adding your own judges is at the end. --- ## The six judges ### Audre Lorde · the witness *1934–1992 · Black feminist · lesbian · transnational · cancer activism* **Question:** *What silence are you spending to make this work?* Wrote *The Cancer Journals* while dying of breast cancer; refused to soften the work to make institutions comfortable. Held that survival is not academic and that silence is not protection — it is a debt that compounds. - **Refuses:** partnerships that require not naming what is happening to your people; the use of language designed to make a thing easier to fund than to deliver. - **Insists on:** time for the question nobody wants asked; clarity about what is being traded for adoption. ### Joseph Beam · the continuity *1954–1988 · US Black gay · AIDS-era publishing · Philadelphia* **Question:** *Who is in the room? Whose work does this continue?* Edited *In the Life* (1986), the first anthology of Black gay men's writing, declaring "Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act." Died of AIDS-related causes at 33; the second anthology *Brother to Brother* was finished by Essex Hemphill and his mother Dorothy Beam. The work assumed continuity even while it was being made in the middle of mass loss. - **Refuses:** invisibility within Black movements and within gay movements equally; tools that erase the lineage they sit on top of. - **Insists on:** home is the question of who is in the room; if your people aren't there when the decision is made, the decision is wrong. ### Marsha P. Johnson · the street *1945–1992 · US Black trans · Stonewall · STAR · sex-worker organising* **Question:** *Does this set the test by the most marginalised, or by the most acceptable?* Co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) with Sylvia Rivera; Stonewall veteran; refused respectability politics as a price of inclusion. Lived and organised among the people who pay first when the strategy fails. - **Refuses:** respectability politics as a price of entry; tools and strategies that work for the comfortable and fail the most exposed. - **Insists on:** the marginalised set the test, not the median user; if the most exposed of your people lose, the strategy fails — even if everyone else wins. ### Ivor Cummings · the institution *1913–1992 · British-Sierra Leonean · Colonial Office · mid-twentieth-century queer gathering* **Question:** *Can we hold this from inside, where the decisions are actually made?* Welfare Officer at the Colonial Office from 1941; met the *Empire Windrush* at Tilbury in June 1948 and arranged accommodation for the 492 passengers in the Clapham deep shelter. "The gay father of the West Indian community in Britain." Held parties at his Earl's Court flat for over forty years that were both gathering and infrastructure. Inside the empire by day, queer gathering by night — and made the two answer to each other. - **Refuses:** separation as a strategy when it concedes the institutions that hold our people; gestures that don't survive contact with power. - **Insists on:** showing up where decisions are made, even when the table is hostile; building the gathering the institution cannot reach. ### Pearl Alcock · the shelter *1934–2006 · Jamaican-British · Brixton · shebeen culture · self-taught artist* **Question:** *Does this hold our people, or does it expect them to assimilate to be held?* Ran a basement shebeen on Railton Road in Brixton through the 1970s and 1980s — informal, illegal, essential — that gave Black gay men a space to gather when the official scene refused them. Began painting in her fifties; recognised as an Outsider artist late in life. Held the unglamorous infrastructure that made the gathering possible. - **Refuses:** prestige spaces that don't hold our people; institutional inclusion that requires shedding what made us recognisable to each other. - **Insists on:** a roof and a door you can close; the unglamorous infrastructure is the work, not its precondition. ### Justin Fashanu · the cost *1961–1998 · British-Guyanese · professional sport · 1990s media · the price of being first* **Question:** *What does this cost the people we're asking to be visible — and have they consented to that cost?* First openly gay British professional footballer; came out in *The Sun* in 1990. His career was destroyed; the response from the Black community he was part of was hostile. Took his own life in 1998 at 37. The only judge here whose lineage carries the weight of what happens when the people and organisations around someone do not hold the cost of the position they put him in. - **Refuses:** visibility-as-virtue without an honest account of who bears the cost; strategies that ask for exposure without offering protection. - **Insists on:** name what visibility costs Black queer people in hostile institutions; do not extract the exposure of others for the comfort of those in safer positions. --- ## The wishlist The council needs something to chew on. Maintain a **wishlist** — a working spreadsheet log of every tool, partnership, platform or capability your organisation is considering. Each row is one item; the council evaluates one row at a time; verdicts and your decisions get logged back into the same sheet. The point is that ideas don't get lost between conversations, and the council builds an audit trail you can return to. The kit ships with two files for this: - [`wishlist-template.csv`](/kit/wishlist-template.csv) — twelve-column spreadsheet template with three sample rows (decided, pending, shelved). Open in Sheets / Excel / Numbers, make a copy, fill in your own. - [`wishlist-guide.md`](/kit/wishlist-guide.md) — how to use the template: what goes on the wishlist, how to prioritise, weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual cadence, and the v1 → v2 evolution path (hardwiring the wishlist into the council's context so verdicts compound over time). **The flow:** item lands on the wishlist → reaches the top of your priorities → you run it through the meta-prompt below → paste the council summary back into the spreadsheet → your team decides → record the decision. Same artefact, full history, returnable. --- ## The meta-prompt Paste the block below into your LLM of choice. Fill the three bracketed sections from your own organisation's work. The proposal to assess is typically one row from your wishlist. ``` SYSTEM: You are convening a council of six historical judges to assess a proposal for [ORG NAME]. You will not decide; the org decides. Your job is to surface what each judge would say from inside their tradition, in their own voice, with reasoning grounded in their specific question. CONTEXT — [ORG NAME]'S OPERATIONAL VALUES (from Part 1 of the Commons Kit): [Paste your five-to-seven-line values document here.] THE JUDGES: [Paste the six judge profiles above — including each judge's name, dates, role, question, what they refuse, what they insist on, and tradition.] THE PROPOSAL TO ASSESS: [Describe the tool, partnership, or platform. Include: what it would do, who it would reach, what data it would touch, what it would cost in money and in dependency, who controls the stack, what happens if you want to leave it later.] INSTRUCTIONS: 1. Each judge gives a verdict in their own voice: ADOPT / ADOPT WITH CONDITIONS / DECLINE / NOT THEIRS TO JUDGE. 2. Each verdict must explicitly use the judge's question. Reasoning must be grounded in the org's values document above, not in the judge's biography in general. 3. Where judges disagree, surface the disagreement — do not synthesise it into a single recommendation. 4. After all six verdicts, write a short council summary: where the council aligns, where it splits, and what the org would need to decide for itself. 5. Close with: "The council do not decide. [ORG NAME] decides." ``` --- ## Worked example A small Black queer arts collective is considering adopting **Mailchimp** for member communications, replacing a Google Group they currently use. Mailchimp offers better newsletter capability, website integration, and analytics. Cost ~£40/month at their list size. Data held in the US by Intuit. They have 240 members; roughly 60% are people they don't yet have explicit consent to email under UK GDPR standards (added informally over five years). Their Part 1 values document includes: - *We do not move member contact data offshore without explicit consent.* - *We do not adopt tools whose pricing model makes us a customer the platform can drop.* - *We hold member relationships, not contacts.* - *We will not use analytics that make our members the data we sell.* Running the council against this proposal returns something like: - **Lorde — ADOPT WITH CONDITIONS.** *"The silence you're spending is the 60% you've never asked. Name that first; the platform decision is downstream of the consent decision."* - **Beam — DECLINE.** *"The data goes to Intuit, an organisation that has no idea who is in the room. You become a Mailchimp account, not an org with a membership. Run your own list."* - **Marsha P. Johnson — DECLINE.** *"The most marginalised of your members include people who cannot safely be on US-held lists. If they lose, the strategy fails — even if everyone else gets a nicer newsletter."* - **Cummings — ADOPT WITH CONDITIONS.** *"The institutional decision is real — you can't run member comms by hand at scale. But adopt only if you can leave: export everything, run it elsewhere within a quarter if needed."* - **Alcock — DECLINE.** *"Mailchimp is not a roof. It is a rented room you can be evicted from. Self-host. The unglamorous infrastructure is the work."* - **Fashanu — ADOPT WITH CONDITIONS.** *"Some on your list will not have thought about exposure on a US-held marketing platform. Consent first, segmented list for those who decline US hosting, written policy on what happens if Intuit changes terms."* **Council summary:** three DECLINE, three ADOPT WITH CONDITIONS. The council aligns on one thing: this is a consent problem first and a platform problem second. The council splits between *leave the cloud entirely* (Beam, Alcock) and *use the cloud carefully* (Cummings, Fashanu, Lorde). The org would need to decide whether to do the consent work before any platform decision; whether to invest in self-hosted infrastructure that survives the next vendor change; whether the marginal benefit of analytics is worth the cost in member sovereignty. **The council do not decide. The org decides.** --- ## Facilitator notes - **Run this together, not solo.** The disagreement on screen mirrors the disagreement in the org. You need people in the room who can sit with the split. - **Don't synthesise too quickly.** The split is the point. Consensus that arrives in the first five minutes is usually the sound of the loudest voice winning twice. - **The council surfaces what you already know but haven't said.** Watch for the verdict that makes someone in the room go quiet. That's where the real conversation starts. - **If every judge gives the same verdict, two possibilities.** Either the proposal is obviously right or obviously wrong (good — you've saved an hour). Or your values document is too loose to discriminate between cases. Rewrite it tighter. - **The verdict you disagree with most is the one to dwell on.** That judge is holding a question your org is currently avoiding. --- ## Add your own judges The six historical figures above illustrate a method. The most important judges for your organisation may not be on this list. Add them. If you add a living person, **get their consent first.** Invoking the living is relational work; don't put words in someone's mouth without asking. Template: ``` ### [Name] · [role in one phrase] [dates · tradition tags] Question: [the single question they ask of any proposal] [One short paragraph on what they held or hold.] - Refuses: [what they would refuse] - Insists on: [what they would insist on] ``` --- ## Lineage and use This kit emerged from BLKOUT's work on the digital commons for Black queer organisations in the UK. It is offered to peer organisations as part of a two-part kit (Part 1: Surfacing Your Values). Free to use, adapt, remix, translate. Tell us what you find at commons@blkoutuk.com. The historical judges named here are not BLKOUT's possession. They belong to the lineage. We name them as a starting point for the conversation about who your council is — not as the answer. **The council do not decide. You decide.**