What we do not know

The limits of what one family can honestly claim.

Carried in the open, because a framework that hides these is a pitch. None of it is a disclaimer. All of it is the actual state of the evidence.

The one that matters most: everything on this site generalizes from a single family. We cannot tell from the inside how much of it was the method and how much was just us — our particular people, our particular city, our particular decade.

A second family would find that out almost immediately. That is the single strongest reason this site exists.

Things we assert and have never tested

  • Weekly works. We do not know what else would. We believe the meeting has to come round faster than a family drifts apart. We have never tested a gentler rhythm, and we have never measured how fast a family actually drifts. The weekly interval is what we happened to choose in 2022, not a figure anybody derived.
  • We say the monthly gathering has to be in person. We believe showing the work in a room is different in kind from describing it on a call. That claim has never been tested against a family spread across a continent, and it is the requirement that would exclude the most people.
  • The least visible part is the least evidenced. Being available to each other between meetings is, we think, what actually holds the thing together. It also left almost no written record across four years, so much of what we have written about it is reasoning rather than observation.
  • It assumes goodwill and cannot manufacture it. Where the willingness to help is not already there, no rhythm will supply it. We have nothing useful to say about a family with active unresolved conflict, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
  • We do not know whether it needs to be a family. Our guess is that what actually matters is a relationship that outlives the group's usefulness — which is why a fallow year kills a group of strangers and did not kill us. A long-standing friend group or a congregation might do as well. Family is the condition we have tested, not the condition we have shown to be necessary.
  • Nobody has ever asked a family outside ours whether they want any of this. As far as we know, you are among the first to be asked.

What would show us we are wrong

Written down in advance, so that we cannot reinterpret whatever happens as agreement.

  • A family runs the weekly meeting faithfully for a year and is no better off. That is the central claim failing, and it would matter more than any number of families who liked reading about it.
  • A family finds the weekly interval unnecessary — meets monthly, and the thing still compounds. Our most confident claim would be the one that fell.
  • A family needs something we have not described at all in order to make it work. That would mean we have been mistaking our own circumstances for the method, which is precisely what we cannot detect from in here.
  • It works for a group that is not a family. That would be good news and would still mean we had written the wrong document.

Things we got wrong about ourselves

We published incorrect claims about our own history twice before anyone checked. Both were confident and both were plausible.

We said the weekly rhythm had held since roughly 2021; our own archive puts it in May 2022. We said “five years of practice,” when the agreement was six years old and the practice was four. Counts like “285+ meetings” circulated in our drafts and did not survive checking, which is why no count appears anywhere on this site that cannot be re-derived from a source.

We keep the corrections rather than quietly editing the originals. How a group gets its own history wrong turns out to be more instructive than the history.

The corrected account

Who holds this

Unsettled, and we would rather say so.

Kinvergence was built by four people over several years. The practices are all four members' work and the name was chosen together; the documents were written by one of us. We agreed that Ed would steward it. We never discussed who owns it, and the two questions got conflated because nothing forced them apart.

Inviting anyone outside the family to take part makes that ambiguity somebody else's problem rather than just ours, so we are settling it rather than deferring it. Our working position is that the practices are methods and are not the kind of thing anyone owns, that the written material should go to the commons under an explicit license, and that the name should stay protected. That has not yet been agreed by all four of us, and until it is, no license has been granted.

Nothing about any of that stops a family from running the weekly meeting tomorrow.

We would rather be corrected than agreed with.

If you try this and it does not work, that is the most valuable thing anyone could currently tell us. Tell the person who sent you here.

What to try