The plan for the plan

Toronto’s plan lives at /plan — the goals, the scenario, the ladder any organization can climb. This page is the reasoning underneath it: why these five goals, what the arithmetic actually looks like, how the adoption architecture and the coalition ladder fit together, and the calendar the whole sprint runs on. If /plan is the plan, this is the plan for the plan.

The five goals, tied together

Five goals, working as one system, not five separate projects:

• The conversations — ten thousand smaller conversations across Toronto in three months, each one returning a harvest: a vision, a complaint, or a nomination.
• One Big Conversation — the city-scale synthesis moment, roughly mid-October, where the harvest becomes one public plan.
• The plan — the crowd’s own plan, published with receipts, discussed as widely as the city will carry it.
• The candidates — a suite of candidates who publicly commit to implementing the plan, self-assembled by their own adoption.
• The coalition — a thousand-plus organizations agreeing to sprint the next year together.

None of the five works alone. The conversations feed the plan; the plan gives candidates something concrete to adopt; the coalition is what actually runs ten thousand conversations, because equipping a thousand organizations to host ten conversations each is the whole arithmetic of goal one. Pull one goal out and the machine stalls.

The honest math

Targets are labeled targets everywhere on this project, and here is the arithmetic behind them, shown rather than just asserted.

Ten thousand conversations works out to roughly a hundred and ten a day for ninety days. That number is not met by anyone showing up to host events full-time — it’s met by conversion. Toronto already holds thousands of gatherings every week: congregations alone number in the thousands, before counting teams, classes, meetups, and dinners. The plan doesn’t create ten thousand new events; it converts a fraction of the gatherings the city already holds into ones that harvest something, plus seeds new circles where none exist yet. That conversion needs four things everywhere at once: kits, a visible counter, a harvest that’s one QR code away, and organizations willing to adopt the pattern — which is exactly what the coalition ladder below is for.

Tens of thousands co-authoring the plan means signatures, vision submissions, room harvests, and participants in the city-scale synthesis, added together. A crowd that size is consistent with what a festival-scale civic moment in a city like Toronto can actually draw.

A million or more discussing it is a reach number, not a participation number — media cycles, shared posts, embeds, diaspora channels carrying it further than Toronto’s own borders. It is never published as something achieved. It’s published as an invitation: help us get there.

A thousand-plus organizations is the most achievable number on this board, because the tally of organizations already mapped across the city — congregations, unions, clubs, associations — already runs past a thousand before a single new one is added. The ask ladder (below) starts at zero cost, which is why this is also the number that makes the conversations arithmetic work: a thousand organizations hosting ten conversations each is ten thousand conversations. That’s the whole machine, and it needs no permission, including ours.

One naming note, held deliberately: the specific instrument used for the city-scale opinion mapping isn’t named publicly yet. It’s a real, proven, open-source tool already used at city and national scale elsewhere — we’re naming it once our own pilot has run and we can back the name with our own receipt, not before. Naming a tool before we’ve run it invites a gotcha; naming it after is a receipt.

The adoption architecture

The short version lives at Records, not endorsements — the full playbook, written for anyone to copy. Here is how it plugs into the five goals: the plan (goal three) is the thing candidates are asked to adopt; the adoption record (goal four) is what publishes as a result; and the whole architecture exists because a commons that picks favourites stops being a commons. Adoption, not endorsement, is what makes the crowd’s plan carry weight at the ballot box without this project ever telling anyone how to vote.

The coalition ladder

How a thousand organizations happens: one ask at a time, each one optional, each one a real receipt.

1. Pin — a zero-cost map presence. An organization shows up on the map; that’s the whole ask.
2. Host — one conversation, in the organization’s own room, under its own name, using a kit.
3. Quest — adopting one of the six citywide quests (happiest, healthiest, safest, cleanest, friendliest, most beautiful) with a public scoreboard.
4. Sprint covenant — the year-one commitment, signable, public: “we will point at the same goals at the same time.” The covenant itself is live and signable now.

Every rung is optional; organizations climb at their own pace; only the aggregate count of each rung publishes — never a roster, never a ranking of which organization has climbed furthest.

The calendar

The full narrative version, and why the year runs the shape it does, is at A year, school-shaped. Here is the arc itself, month by month:

• August — setup. The library, the kits, the rooms, the counter, and the candidate field all standing before the city takes its September breath.
• September — ignition. Every network in the city opens at once during the first week; all six quests launch together as evolving threads, each with a live scoreboard.
• Late September into October — the six weeks of wins: the conversation counter runs public, the coalition climbs from pins to hosts, the harvest window is open, and the adoption question goes out to every candidate in every race.
• Mid-to-late October — One Big Conversation and the State of the Conversation publish; the adoption record goes public. October 26 is the ballot — the mid-sprint scoreboard, not the finish line; the sprint is already six weeks old and does not pause for the count.
• November — the new council is sworn in with the plan and the adoption record already on its desk.
• Winter — the committee-room months, where commitments hold their dates or don’t.
• Spring — the work surfaces where everyone can see it.
• Summer — an honest public audit, failures published in the same typeface as wins.
• December, every year — rest, on purpose. No scoreboards, no asks. The gatherings don’t stop; they just stop counting.
• The following September — a second ignition that nobody has to light, because last year’s participants are this year’s hosts.
• Year two and beyond — the arc keeps running to the next reckoning, and eventually to export: the whole playbook translated, versioned, and handed to any city that wants to fork it.