The sitting

For a table of four to twelve people, at a kitchen, in a church basement, in a staff room. About seventy-five minutes. Print it and go.

Before you start

Choose three roles. A reader, who reads the story aloud. A keeper, who writes, and whose page is the only copy until the end. A timekeeper, who is allowed to interrupt. Two rules hold the whole time: the wound is named precisely, and what was built is named beside it. And no one speaks twice before everyone has spoken once.

Minutes	Step	What happens
before	Choose the story	One page from a history room, or the story half of a pattern. Two sheets or fewer. Printed, one copy per person.
10	Read it aloud	One reader. No comment until the reading ends.
10	What happened, to whom	Facts only. Anything not in the text is written down as a question, not answered from memory.
10	The reading	Each person, one sentence: "this teaches…". The keeper writes every sentence up. None is chosen yet. No one speaks twice before everyone has spoken once.
15	The razor	Take the reading with the most hands. Act, actor, mechanism, magnitude, aloud. Then: where does it break, in the same story? If no one at the table can say where it breaks, it is a slogan. Take the next reading.
10	The present row	Where is this live in our own place, this year? Written as a dated row, not a verdict. A living person's name leaves the room only with their say.
15	One small try	Something cheap enough to fail. A person who will do it, a partner if there is one, a date, and the harvest: when it ends, or whose hands it passes to.
5	The return	The keeper reads the try back. The table decides what crosses onto the record, in the words as given, with any dissent written beside it. What does not cross is torn up. One person is named to bring the try back to the next sitting, and signs.

What is kept, and what is not

Until the last five minutes the sitting is a sampler: nothing is kept, and anyone may say anything. The return is the crossing. What the table agrees to keep is written onto the record in the words as given, with the dissent beside it. What the table does not cross is torn up at the door. A sitting can send its present row to the living wing, if the table agrees, and can send its try to the lab's bench, where it is listed in public as drafted until the harvest returns.

What this table refuses

No scores. No count of how many sittings you have held. No comparing your table's page with another's. No lesson language: this is not a course, and no one is being taught to think. A living person's name leaves the room only with their say. A try with no harvest date is not a try yet; give it one or set it down.

The razor, on one line each

Act: What actually happened, in the terms the story supports.
Actor: Who decided, and who had the decision taken from them. Every party a decision-maker, none of them scenery.
Mechanism: What did the work. This is the part that travels.
Magnitude: How large, how coerced, how final. This is the part that mostly does not travel, and saying so keeps the reading from wounding the people it borrows from.

This protocol is free to carry, copy, and change. It comes from the Open Shelf at shelf.goodprotocols.org/lab, and the razor comes from the working paper Provision Without Power at goodprotocols.org. Neither needs to be named at your table.