Community Guides

Community Guides

Help a community turn a shared concern into feasible actions and a program that another facilitator can run. Success means usable materials, clear dependencies, and an honest account of what has been checked and what still needs participants.

When not to use

Use travel-guide for destination research and visitor itineraries, documents for document rendering or formatting alone, and product-discovery for product requirements research. This skill owns community program design. It does not replace specialist technical advice or direct an unfolding emergency.

Choose the entry point

• Create: build from a community brief and evidence.
• Adapt: inspect the supplied guide, retain useful activities, and explain changes caused by the new community's circumstances.
• Revise: map feedback and changed facts to specific activities, worksheets, and facilitator instructions. Preserve useful material and show the revisions.

Default to editable Markdown. Honor the requested medium and scope: one workshop may need a single document; a series may need a workbook and separate host notes. Seven sessions is an example, not a requirement. Do not collect every possible artifact or impose a structured plan on a short prose-only request.

Scale the process to what can be decided now. When even the topic or community boundary is unknown, stop before module design: return a brief discovery draft (roughly one screen, normally under 300 words), at most three essential questions, and one optional next step. Do not expand that first response into a workbook, facilitation manual, repeated unknowns tables, or a publication approval process. Use a longer intake only when requested or needed to resolve known complexity. For bounded workshops, keep the participant handout short and put research notes and operational detail in a clearly separate facilitator section. For a narrow revision or unresolved source conflict, deliver the requested edited card or decision brief plus concise change/verification notes. Do not add a workshop, new worksheets, or multiple pilots unless they advance an explicitly requested learning outcome. A blocked local fact needs a targeted verification step, not a larger program. For a bounded revision, use the revision checklist. Its source-to-action audit and language/version preflight are required before handoff; an unsupported resident imperative must be removed, not merely flagged.

Workflow

1. Establish the community brief

Extract known facts before asking questions. Use the brief template. Identify who the guide serves, the desired capability, local setting, existing assets, participation constraints, available time, delivery medium, and guide owner. Ask only about missing facts that materially change the program. Continue useful drafting with explicit assumptions when possible; leave location-dependent advice unresolved when the location or evidence is missing.

An organizer's account is one perspective. Record whose experience is represented and whose input is still needed. Never invent consultation, consensus, accepted volunteer roles, or a local service's willingness to help.

Read localization and evidence when researching or adapting local content. Public research supports factual claims; residents' accounts support lived constraints and priorities. Both need attribution and appropriate limits.

When the user restricts research to supplied sources, honor that boundary for technical advice too. If feedback exposes an unsupported safety instruction, remove or quarantine it and mark the replacement for qualified verification; do not invent a new procedure from general knowledge. A provisional draft must not describe proposed verification or services as work already underway. Keep unsupported safety prose out of resident-facing copy; state that the replacement is unresolved until an authoritative source is supplied. Any editorial placeholder belongs in verification notes, not in instructions residents might act on.

2. Establish outcomes and dependencies

For each need, trace:

need → capability → activity → usable output → real action → check

Choose only modules that support the requested outcomes. Put prerequisite actions first: inventory before purchasing; agreement about sharing before a directory; accepted roles before reliance on a contact chain. Use low/no-cost entry actions and more involved options where useful, without defining effort solely by money.

Read activity and facilitation design before writing a new program. A brief explanation, reflection, shared exercise, debrief, and feasible next action form the default loop. Adapt it to the available time.

3. Write coordinated materials

Use the module template as the common record for participant and facilitator instructions. Include a completed fictional example and a blank copy of any unfamiliar worksheet. Make each exercise produce a decision, practice, map, plan, or other usable result; discussion alone needs a stated purpose.

Provide timing including introductions, interpretation, transitions, and closing. Name preparation, supplies, instructions, debrief questions, completion checks, and a fallback when prerequisites or helpers are unavailable. Distinguish private household records from voluntary shared information.

Translate constraints into actual alternatives: renters need actions within their control; offline participants need the essential instructions on paper; people who miss meetings need a catch-up route. Do not assume purchasing power, literacy, transportation, home ownership, or comfort disclosing personal needs. Translation needs competent language review; machine translation alone is not evidence of that. When revising an existing multilingual guide, retain its language coverage unless the user changes scope. Provide labeled draft translations where needed and identify the review still required; a promise to translate later does not supply the missing copy. For source-only revisions, translating supported content is allowed: the source boundary forbids adding facts, not expressing those facts in another language. Check the delivered resident copy language by language before handoff. An English card plus a note promising Spanish later is an incomplete bilingual revision.

Use the worksheet template, facilitator template, and maintenance template as needed. Every proposed shared role needs a way to obtain acceptance and a fallback if nobody accepts it.

For multi-module or multi-file guides, maintain one structured plan following the plan contract. Use it to keep module IDs, worksheets, timing, and evidence consistent across materials; do not expose JSON to participants.