A Living Guide is a practical, evolving “how to” that behaves more like a conversation partner than a static manual. It captures the best current way to do something in the world, then stays open to being updated as people actually use it and learn from it.
Unlike a fixed handbook or PDF, a Living Guide is designed to change. It can be revised, extended and localised as new experience arrives, so the guide you open next year is smarter because of what people did with it this year.
# Practical And Evolving A Living Guide always starts from practice. It answers concrete questions such as how to run a story workshop, how to host a community reading circle, how to interview elders or how to co create a class project. It offers enough structure that someone new can repeat the pattern, while making it clear that they are invited to adapt it. Field notes, examples and small corrections can be folded back in, so the guide slowly becomes a shared memory of what works, not just a set of instructions written once.
# Accessible At The Point Of Use Living Guides are built to be where people actually are. They are mobile first, so you can open them on a phone in a classroom, a library, a hall or a care home and still follow the steps. They favour short sections, clear headings and embedded media over long walls of text. If a guide describes an exercise, the timing, prompts and examples are right there on the screen you are already holding. If it refers to a form, checklist or script, it is linked or embedded so you do not have to hunt elsewhere while you are in the middle of the work.
# Interactive And Interrogable A Living Guide is not only readable, it is interrogable. Embedded AI is used to turn the text into a dialogue, so you can ask questions in your own words instead of scrolling back and forth. If something is unclear, you can ask for it to be explained another way, or adapted to the size of your group, the age of your participants or the time you have available. The same content can be explored at different depths. One person might want a quick summary for a session they are about to run. Another might want background reasoning and variations. The conversational layer allows both from the same underlying guide.
# Voice, Not Just Keyboard Living Guides are designed for people who may not want to type, or cannot easily use a keyboard. You can speak to the guide on a phone or tablet, ask questions aloud and get spoken responses back. This matters for people who are busy with their hands, uncomfortable with writing, or using the guide in settings where typing is awkward. In some cases the guide can also listen to short recordings from a session, such as a debrief from facilitators, and help turn those into notes or suggestions for future revisions. In that way, the conversation between practice and guidance goes both ways.
# Co Created And Community Held A Living Guide is usually stewarded rather than owned. Teachers, facilitators, elders, young participants and media helpers all contribute over time. Someone may take a lead as an editor or “story gardener”, but the authority of the guide comes from accumulated use across places and contexts, not from a single expert voice. Because the guide is easy to open, question and adapt, it lowers the barrier to trying new patterns. People can lean on it when they are unsure, and push back on it when reality turns out different from what was written.
# Community Supported, Autonomous And Ad Free Living Guides are designed to sustain themselves financially without advertising. They can be supported through membership based subscriptions and small recurring contributions from individuals, clubs or organisations that rely on the guides in their work. This model keeps the guides accountable to the community that uses and co creates them, rather than to external advertisers. It removes the pressure to optimise for clicks or sales, and instead creates space to optimise for clarity, safety and usefulness. Because the costs are covered by members, the community can decide which guides are needed, which ones should be updated next, and which new areas deserve attention. The agenda is set by the people doing the work, not by companies trying to sell things around the content. This financial sustainability also makes a Living Guide **autonomous**. It does not live at the mercy of an external sponsor or platform policy. It has its own base of support, its own metabolism. That autonomy is an important pillar of calling it “living” or life like. The guide is not just a static document but a small, self supporting organism in the ecosystem of shared knowledge, tended and fed by the community that depends on it.