*** DRAFT May 24, 2024 *** Our shared community vision We are people from diverse backgrounds who are concerned about the state of the world and want to find a way to make a positive contribution in building a peaceful, thriving world for everyone. We are concerned about a visible breakdown in the "civil" part of "civilization" as well as the social dangers posed by the rise of Artificially intelligent "chatbots", especially to youth. We believe that it is important to achieve healthy relationships among diverse people at all scales, from individuals to cultures and nations - in other word, the wealth of "social capital." We appear to be in a climate of hostility, quickness of taking offense or misunderstanding each other, with resultant polarization, anger, outrage, and, increasingly violence. Part of the problem seems to be that many people today, especially youth, have never learned some very basic skills, such as meeting a new person, making friends, and developing best friendships and long term relationship maintenance sufficient to have and raise health children. In too many cases, they have not experienced healthy relationships and may not even believe in them. They have experienced neglect and abuse at home and at work, frustrating their better urges and belief in the possibility of mutually supportive communities. This site carefully avoids advocating any specific position, from politics to gender to climate change, focuses instead on simply improving the way conversations occur and ways we can achieve sufficient consensus using words not violence to move ahead with social progress. To that end, we are developing a set of simulated personal experiences, as well as spaces for moderated and facilitated experiences with multiple people, from partners to public meetings to business meetings. A fast list of the kind of experiences we are talking about would be: * Active attentive, emotive listening * Breaking the ice upon meeting a new person, especially one not like you * Carrying on a conversation with the aim of discovery, curiosity, and making new friends * Social discourse on topics which may be emotionally charged * Known difficult conversations such as * with a spouse or partner * with a child or parent * with a teacher or boss or someone in authority above you * with a coworker or neighbor * Conversations with a purpose: * building trust * persuasion and advocacy * public debate on community issues * responsible salesmanship * both sides of interviewing for a job * project planning meetings & facilitation * "Motivational Interviewing" in therapy and nursing * "Accompaniment" and the lost arts of mentoring and apprenticeship * Dispute and conflict resolution * moderation and mediation * repairing relationships * (re) establishing peace and harmony without wrong compromise * reaching fair solutions with "justice for all." Note importantly that this list is dynamic and will evolve over time, quickly at first, as we experience successes and failures in our improvement efforts. We expect fairly rapid cycles of rough understanding, attempting to act based on that with eyes open, seeing what results actually happened ( versus what we thought would ), reflecting on that and "user feedback", tweaking our mental models and next effort, and repeating the whole process with continuous small realistic achievable steps of improvement. The history of simulated experiences, rehearsals, and "mental sports" * Aviation - Flight simulators with a detailed pilot training syllabus * Health care - Simulation Centers in Medical and Nursing Schools to practice clinical skills in a safe environment with oversight * Mentoring and coaching environments, including sports Aside - there has been a huge rise in the job position of "facilitator" and "business coach" with the realization that the first step in teaching anything and changing behavior by imparting wisdom is establishing authentic, serious, relationships of trust. Until people trust someone else, they simply cannot hear even great advice. So while we hope individuals, on their own, will take advantage of the free training experiences this site will provide, a major focus is on providing tools for larger institutions to use in developing the capacity of those they serve or care fo. What else is needed besides clever chatbots To that end, in addition to having a set of experiences which can be assembled into a structure sequence of lessons, we have a focus on providing the rest of the infrastructure such group education involves: * connection to a LMS - Learning Management System to track what is yet to be done and what has been done * Student Activity Management See easily who has not started, who has done what how well, etc. Identify students who need some kind of intervention or support * Scoring and grading where appropriate, a Pass/Fail or grade * A defensible, even-handed system of standardized experiences that allow for comparison across different students * Serious self-evaluation of the system itself, identifying and establishing well thought out evaluations of "before " and "after" type metrics to prove that the system "works" * Vendor Stability and Reliability no one wants to use a system that will be discontinued mid-term, or that wil lbe hacked, or that will go out of business mid course. * Appropriate privacy and confidentiality of personally identifiable information satisfying regulations such as HIPAA, Educa?, GDPR, (?) etc. * Rolling forward seamlessly to new AI technology as it becomes available and stable * Best practices in software development and user engagement and feedback, satisfying ISO-9000 "best practices" and transparency Comment on the Business Plan: Chatbots are in wide use and the concept of simulations and chatbots will not become protected intellectual property. We believe that a paid, well supported version of even the "freeware" is possible, as is the "Red Hat" version of Linux. The rest of the support infrastructure ( as described above ) is a major investment and running cost, but a combination of paid "professional" versions, longer-term contracts and grants, Patreon type support, and user donations will be sufficient to keep things running and growing appropriately. The "freemium" model of two tiers, one free and one paid, is based on a for-profit underlying corporation. "Non-profit" companies too often are convinced that is a business strategy, not a tax strategy, are undisciplined, and have short lives. Even the US government believes in the "SBIR - Small Business Investment Research" model, that no one wants great ideas without a support organization for them that will still be here tomorrow. A growth rate above zero but well within the stable, controllable, conservative range is desired. The point of the finances is to sustain and adapt and, where it fits with those constraints, seize new opportunities and grow to meet them. The company is not intended as a vehicle for executives or stockholders to become rich. A strong Board of Advisors and strong user-groups are key to keeping the company on track. Affiliations and partnerships with other groups with similar missions are a requirement. "Shewnexti LLC" is not a "B-corp" in the USA but may be transformed into one soon, depending on due diligence re that course of action.