Journey
Each community's journey unfolds like a fern frond: each turn remembers what came before, and opens wider. Each cohort is one turn through Gather, Vitality Portraits, and Vitality in Motion; after at least four cohorts, or at saturation, the community can join the Compass season across the network; and Stewardship carries it on, with each renewal opening a new, deeper turn.
The three seasons, Discovery, Compass, and Stewardship, overlap at their edges: tending seeds of action, for example, begins in Discovery and carries on through every season. In formal documents, such as ethics protocols and funding proposals, the seasons can be called phases.
At the heart of this unfolding is the rhythm of every Living Lab: seeing, re-imagining, and acting. Each cohort's turn ripples out from it, so the whole journey grows from that one living center.
The Living Lab grows as a fractal: the same shape repeats at every scale. A dialogue, a person's portrait, a cohort's, and the community's all move through seeing, re-imagining, and acting, and look across the same four levels, from personal life to the planet. So each layer grows from the one inside it: one person's dimensions weave into a cohort's themes, and a cohort's themes into the community's, with nothing lost on the way, and everyone can recognize themselves at every scale.
Discovery season
The heart of every Living Lab, and complete on its own. Cohort after cohort, at least four and until the picture is saturated, each turn moves through Gather, Vitality Portraits, and Vitality in Motion: listening fresh to each dialogue, weaving the cohort on its own terms, then widening the community's picture, with a portrait at every scale. Whenever the community is ready to present, typically every four cohorts and always at saturation, a milestone version is served to the whole community, woven into the living story: a milestone, not an ending.
Compass season
Where the Vitality Signal comes into being. Validating a survey needs more voices than most communities can give alone, so communities that have completed at least four cohorts, or reached saturation, can bring their milestone versions together into one shared survey: refined with a psychometrics advisor, piloted, distributed, and validated across the network. The Signal is shown as a flower whose petals are whatever the evidence validates, so it looks gentle while the research behind it is rigorous, and it is co-stewarded with every participating community. The first framework is provisional by design; later rounds confirm it.
Stewardship season
Tending what has grown, and renewing the journey. The community keeps seeing, re-imagining, and acting on what it has learned, with the living story keeping its journey alive between gatherings, and every one to three years the next turn begins, deeper than the last. Along the way grow offerings from the network, the Global Vitality Signal Report (with the community's consent, and never naming individuals), and the Steward strand, the Steward's own inquiry. In time, members who have walked the Steward journey may hold the community's own renewals, with MAGICommons walking alongside as a companion.