Coordination surfaces
Where the work can incubate
Places where work can grow across the four organisations — without any one organisation owning the result.
What is a sandbox?
A sandbox is a shared workspace for a single domain — like audio-visual, or content curation — where work can incubate without any one organisation owning the outcome. Sue Seccombe proposed the model in the closing forum.
Three things define it. Permeable edges that let a sixteen-year-old creator with a good idea sit next to a fifty-year reader. A focus on best practices rather than every practice. And a structure modelled, loosely, on the Foundation’s study-group directory — coordination without ownership.
Sue named six possible sandboxes by way of illustration. After re-reading the full Roundtable, the room actually justifies two today, plus one capability commons (a coordination utility that isn’t a sandbox in Sue’s strict sense). The rest of her examples — and several other promising areas — are on the watchlist: real signals, no anchor team yet.
“We can't just do a little bit of everything. The focus part of it is we have to push ourselves for best practices… of everything in that sandbox, there's a few things maybe that will be the most effective or the most useful.”
Sandboxes
Practice incubators that meet all three of Sue’s criteria.
Capability commons
Coordination utilities — shared toolboxes that serve many sandboxes rather than incubating a single practice.
Watchlist · 6 nascent areas
Real signals from the room — youth, Africa beyond Nigeria, children’s content, Spanish coordination, the study-group portal, open-source infrastructure — that do not yet have a cross-org anchor team.