EPI — A Peer-Led Practice of Presencing

Team Agenda — Open Decisions

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Team Agenda — Open Decisions

What this is

A walkable list of the decisions actually waiting on the four of us. Each item names the question, where the wiki stands today, and what would resolve it. Designed to be opened in a meeting and worked top to bottom — each item ends in something concrete you can decide, defer, or split out.

The seed questions came from the original EPI Integrity Layer v3 open-questions section; the list has been updated as items have been resolved and as new questions have surfaced through the v5 strategy draft and the Inner Map ingest.

Conventions on this page

  • Already resolved items are kept for lineage with a brief note — the team did the work, recording the verdict so it doesn’t get re-litigated. Skim these.
  • Open items are the ones to walk through. Each ends with a concrete next step.
  • Action items are owned tasks — not group decisions.

Already resolved (kept for lineage)

✓ Naming — “Integrity Layer” vs. “Traditions” vs. “Principles”

Resolved 2026-05-25 → Guiding Principles.

The container was renamed wiki-wide; statements are now referenced as “Principle 4,” not “Integrity 4.” See wiki/log.md entry [2026-05-25] rename | Integrity Layer → Guiding Principles for the full operation. Vocabulary discipline lives in glossary.md.

✓ Facilitator Development Pathway — in tension with peer-led principles

Resolved → chose peer-led, no professional class.

This was resolved before the v3 review even started — see facilitator-pathway-vs-no-professional-class. The Facilitator Development Pathway material from earlier EPI documents is held as superseded legacy; the operational form is host-led, not facilitator-trained (principle-11). v5 strategy planning vocabulary re-introduced steward / facilitator / pod / training — flagged on the fork page; not treated as superseding the resolution. One open item remains about that vocabulary drift — see v5 planning vocabulary below.

Open — from the original v3 questions

Statement count — trim from 22 toward 12–16

v3 contains 22 statements. AA holds at 12 Traditions. The right number for EPI is probably 12–16. Real trimming will need to happen in team review. Some statements are clearly load-bearing and will survive (1, 2, 5, 9, 11, 19); others may fold or get cut.

Current state: 22 numbered statements (23 distinct entries because of the duplicate-14 split — see index for the numbering anomaly note). The load-bearing six named by v3 are: principle-1, principle-2, principle-5, principle-9, principle-11, principle-19.

What would resolve it:

  • Walk through the 22 statements together and decide for each: keep as-is / fold into another / cut.
  • Decide the target number (12, 14, 16?).
  • If statements are renumbered, that triggers a wiki-wide rename operation (see log for what that involved last time). Don’t do the rename until the team’s verdict on each statement is final.

”Presencing” in Principle 2

The word “presencing” in Integrity 2. The team should explicitly confirm or reject this word choice, since it propagates into The Practice and Carry the Message documents.

Current state: principle-2 statement does not currently contain the word “presencing” — the open question flags it as the team-pending word for this statement. The word is used elsewhere in the wiki (purpose, welcome, the twelve-steps commentary) as the canonical word for what EPI practices.

What would resolve it:

  • Confirm “presencing” is the right word and revise the principle-2 statement text to use it explicitly.
  • Or pick a different word; if so, every page that uses “presencing” needs updating in parallel.

Friction statements — Principle 7 (no bolt-ons) and Principle 16 (separation from paid work)

Statements [v3 6 / now principle-7] (no bolt-ons) and [v3 15 / now principle-16] (separation from paid work) are most likely to create friction with current or future practitioners. Worth explicit team discernment.

Current state: Both flagged as friction in index and overview. v5 strategy draft independently confirms both (Practitioners are free to engage paid trainings … Those offerings are not EPI … This boundary protects the integrity of the free, peer-led practice).

What would resolve it:

  • Decide whether these are load-bearing despite friction (keep as-is, accept that some practitioners will push back) or need softening (rewrite with the same intent but less friction).
  • Note: v5’s “Money” section makes a strong case for keeping both intact in the spirit of AA’s Seventh Tradition.

Principle 13 (open meeting) and 20/21 (Guide–Traveler) — careful review

Both new in v3 and emerged from live testing. Should be especially carefully reviewed because they represent moves the team hadn’t yet aligned on before they were drafted.

Current state:

What would resolve it:

  • Read each statement fresh in a team session; confirm or revise.
  • For Guide–Traveler specifically, the next question (below) is about whether to adopt the form deliberately or let it emerge.

Guide–Traveler — ratify-in-advance vs. let-emerge

The Guide–Traveler relationship is new to EPI — not yet a current practice in the existing Men’s Group. Introducing it deliberately rather than letting it emerge organically is a real choice. The Guiding Principles makes the form available; whether and how it gets adopted is a separate question for the team.

Current state: principle-20 and principle-21 make the form available in the Guiding Principles. The Men’s Group has not adopted it as a practice. v5 strategy describes accompaniment as one of the four pillars but doesn’t say it’s currently being practiced.

What would resolve it:

  • Decide which: (a) introduce deliberately — name the practice, set expectations, invite the men to take it on; (b) let emerge — remove the Principles, wait for the form to arise from practice; (c) introduce as available — keep the Principles, don’t push adoption, see what happens.
  • This is one of the cleanest decisions on the list — three options, one verdict needed.

Principle 24 (institutional independence) — foundational or preference?

[v3 statement 22 / now principle-24] is unusual among peer-led traditions and distinctively EPI. Worth checking whether this is genuinely a foundational commitment or a current preference.

Current state: principle-24 declares the library and practice designed to outlast EPI as an institution. Distinctive. The Inner Map ingest surfaced a related question (Colwell Practice attribution — see below) which touches on how institutional independence plays out in practice.

What would resolve it:

  • Decide: foundational (keep) or current preference (could be cut in the trim). If foundational, it survives the statement-count trim regardless of number.

Hypothesis vs. constitution

This document is a hypothesis, not yet a constitution. AA’s Traditions were written seven years after the fellowship began — derived from observed failure modes. Ours is being written partly in advance and partly in response to live testing. We should expect v3 to need revision once more groups operate under it.

Current state: All 22 statements held as under-review; ratification is the team’s deliberate next move. No statement is “binding gospel” until the team ratifies it.

What would resolve it:

  • Not a single decision — a posture. Acknowledge as a frame for the ratification process: ratify what’s load-bearing; hold the rest loosely; revisit after more groups operate.
  • Concretely: decide which statements to ratify now vs. which to leave under-review pending more live testing. Some (the load- bearing six) are likely ready; others may need to wait.

Open — new since v5 strategy draft (2026-05-25)

Six Facets ↔ Guiding Principles relationship

The most consequential structural question raised by v5.

Current state: v5 frames the Six Facets as a “constitutional reference structure” — but the Guiding Principles already hold the constitutional role. The wiki currently files the Facets inside wiki/guiding-principles/ as a sibling page type to principle. This is a placeholder until the team chooses.

Three plausible relationships:

  • (a) Complementary views of one layer — Facets and Principles are two ways of looking at the same constitution. Facets name what’s being developed; Principles name what must remain true. (Current filing.)
  • (b) Facets as the deeper constitution — Principles are operational expressions of the Facets, not co-equal.
  • (c) Facets as a taxonomy — Facets organize the Tool library, not the constitution.

What would resolve it: Pick one. The choice affects how new pages get filed and how the homepage navigation is structured.

90-second daily meditation — ratify the specification

Current state: daily-meditation held as proposed — not canonical. The 90-second bar and the three starter forms (body scan, mantra, noticing-and-releasing) come from v5 and have not been team-ratified. v5 Open Question #10 asks: “Are these the right three?”

What would resolve it:

  • Confirm: 90 seconds as the bar (or pick a different one).
  • Confirm: body scan / mantra / noticing-and-releasing as the starter forms (or pick a different set).
  • Decide who writes the canonical short description of each form.

Accompaniment role naming

Current state: accompaniment-role-naming holds five candidates side-by-side: Guide / Traveler (current), Walking Partner, Practice Partner, Companion, Accompanier. All candidate; none canonical.

What would resolve it: Pick one. Record why it won. The other four become alternative (set aside, honorable).

Library naming — “Coming Home” or another?

Current state: library-naming holds 17 candidates from v5. Working title is Coming Home.

What would resolve it: Pick one (or coin a new one). The body of work itself is needs-export regardless; this is just about the name.

v5 planning vocabulary drift

Current state: v5 Phase 3-4 prose uses steward, facilitator, pod, training, Facilitator Field Guide — vocabulary the resolved facilitator-pathway-vs-no-professional-class fork moved away from. Flagged on the fork page as language drift, not as overturning the resolution.

What would resolve it:

  • Decide whether the v5 phase plans need a vocabulary rewrite before they’re used elsewhere (Coolify Coming Home draft, recruiting copy, etc.).
  • Or explicitly defend the vocabulary in those planning contexts (e.g. “we call them stewards in operations, hosts in meetings”).

The Colwell Practice — institutional relationship

Current state: The canonical Inner Map diagram is published by The Colwell Practice (Julia Colwell, PhD). Flagged on inner-map — wiki cannot determine whether EPI = The Colwell Practice, sister organizations, a peer-led spinoff, or something else.

What would resolve it:

  • Name the actual institutional relationship.
  • Decide attribution wording for canonical Tool pages sourced from Colwell material. The peer-led commitment means EPI doesn’t depend on any single author, but acknowledging where the tool came from is consistent with the honor-the-lineage tone elsewhere in the wiki (AA acknowledgment on twelve-steps).

Reactive Brain caveat — confirm the wording on inner-map

Current state: The “Reactive Brain is not the enemy” caveat from v5 is preserved verbatim on inner-map as load-bearing commentary alongside the diagram. v5 names it as “the correction most likely to be lost at scale.”

What would resolve it: Confirm the wording. If the team wants to adjust, this is a deliberate Tool revision per CLAUDE.md §3 — the prior version should go into a ## Prior version block before any edit.

Current state: twelve-steps uses sponsor in “On Working the Steps.” The Guiding Principles use Guide / Traveler. Flagged on the twelve-steps page and in overview as an open convergence question — not yet a Fork (no clean Side A / Side B yet).

What would resolve it: Pick one of three branches:

  • (a) Fold sponsor into Guide–Traveler as a recovery-world synonym for the same form;
  • (b) Hold sponsor as a distinct 1:1 form with its own page and character;
  • (c) Treat the sponsor naming itself as part of the recovery-world stigma the team is moving away from — drop the term.

Action items (owned, not group decisions)

Julie — simplify instruction language

Julie: simplify instruction language on structure doc and anywhere else.

Carried over from the v3 open questions. Not a team decision — a Julie task. Worth confirming at the next meeting whether this is still on her plate and what “anywhere else” means concretely now that the wiki exists.

Whoever drafts deep-dive tool content — fill the stubs

30 deep-dive tools are filed as needs-export stubs in wiki/practice/tools/. Each needs the canonical description from the team’s Coming Home / Library materials. If Julia’s “The Inner Map” book contains many of these, ingesting that book would let us promote ~10–15 stubs to canonical in one pass. See the home page “What needs attention” section for the full list.

See also

  • Home — Status dashboard — auto-regenerated counts and category breakdowns.
  • overview — narrative version of where things stand, with prose context around the open forks and convergence-active slots.
  • Catalog by container — one-line description of every page.
  • log — append-only history of how the wiki got to its current state.
  • glossary — vocabulary conventions.

Edits welcome. As items are resolved, move them up to the Already resolved section with a one-line verdict + date. As new questions surface, add them under Open. This is a living agenda.

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