Changelog

Notable changes to this project. Not strictly Keep a Changelog format, but same spirit — human-readable, most recent first.

2026-08-16 — Repo gardening: Reason Commons branding, clean landing page, tidy explainers

A housekeeping session with no new content, but the site now looks like a project rather than a workspace: the front door reads as an invitation, the finished explainers stand on their own, and the scaffolding behind them is out of sight.

• Rebranded to Reason Commons. Site title and README header still said "Issue Trees & Logical Thinking Process"; both now match the naming decision recorded in docs/brand-and-domain-naming.md. Stale links to the old repo name were fixed across config.json, the dashboard manifest and the skill docs.
• README is a landing page now. It leads with a plain-language pitch instead of a pointer to another file, puts the demos near the top, and keeps the backstory to a short "About" at the bottom. The stale June "Next Steps" checklist is gone — planning lives in GitHub issues, which is also why PLAN.md was retired.
• explainers/ reorganised. Each piece is now <nn>-<slug>/index.md (the article) plus scrolling.html (the scroll-driven version); scripts, critiques and superseded drafts moved into explainers/_process/, hidden from publishing. The series index became markdown, and NEXT.md moved to the repo root — there's now exactly one.
• Root docs lowercased (motivation.md, changelog.md) so Flowershow gives them clean URLs; README.md and AGENTS.md keep their uppercase names because tooling looks them up literally.
• Two working conventions recorded in AGENTS.md: this changelog convention, and a preview workflow — main is the live site, so render checks go to a separate Flowershow preview site (fl . --name reasoncommons-preview --yes) rather than to production.

2026-08-15 — Explainer trilogy: drafted, built, and shipped in two formats

Three-part LTP explainer series in explainers/, replacing the earlier single story/ piece as the project's introductory narrative. Each piece went through a script pass (draft → self-critique → independent fresh-agent critique with no authorship context → revision), then a visual build.

• Added skills/scrollable-explainer/ — general-purpose write-up of the scroll-driven ("scrollytelling") explainer form, with a full measured teardown of a ProPublica piece as the worked case study.
• Wrote and built three pieces: The Wrong Queue (01-bottleneck), The Arrows Nobody Checks (02-thinking-made-visible), Five Shapes (03-five-shapes).
• Each part now ships in two forms from the same finalized prose:
  • article.md — static markdown with inline SVG figures, no <script> (matches the story/draft.md convention)
  • index.html — scroll-driven animated version, via shared explainers/scroller.js / scroller.css
• explainers/index.html lists both formats per part.
• Mobile portrait layout for piece 1's five-station diagram (pieces 2–3 still pending).
• explainers/NEXT.md — checkpoint with open questions and a prioritized follow-up list. Tracked in issue #6.

Known gaps: pieces 2–3 need the same mobile pass as piece 1; piece 3's HTML page renders empty with JavaScript disabled; the scroller uses an ad hoc palette rather than the real Organic design tokens; story/'s fate is undecided.