The deck isn’t finished. What’s missing?
Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.
Most of what we make, we make in the dark. The half-drawn thing, the spreadsheet nobody’s seen, the mod that only works if you don’t breathe on it, the deck of cards that is fifty-five cards and two blanks and an open invitation to draw the fifty-sixth. This week’s Infodumplings is a show your work night: bring the in-progress thing, the unfinished thing, the thing you’ve been poking at for months and never shown anyone. Not the polished portfolio piece. The draft. The mess. The version with the seams showing.
To anchor it, we’re bringing our own unfinished thing to the table: Cavendish Cards, a public-domain, community-authored deck that is, by design, never done. It’s the perfect specimen for a show-your-work night, because showing the work is the work — the deck grows one card at a time, in the open, from whoever finds the gap and fills it.
Bring a project. Bring a blank card. Bring the thing you’ve been afraid was too rough to share.
Date and Time: Thursday July 16 at 7PM Central
What We’re Sharing
The featured project is the Cavendish Cards Starter Deck — a pictorial deck for naming sensory and niche-construction needs. Point at a card, or lay a few. No reading required to play. No points, no matching, no right answer, no winning. It’s part of the Cavendish Space Project, released CC0 into the public domain so anyone can print, translate, adapt, and remix it.
We’ll walk through the deck together — where it came from, how it’s built, what it can’t do yet — as a live example of working in public. Then the floor is yours: the open mic is a show-and-tell for whatever you’re building. A zine, a costume, a codebase, a garden bed, a card you drew for a need the deck is missing. In progress is not just allowed. In progress is the theme.
The Stimpunks Frame
A show-your-work night is not a pitch competition. The difference is where the value lives. In a pitch, the value is in the finished, defensible, winning artifact — and everything unfinished is a liability you hide. In show your work, the value is in the process, shared — the thread you pull in public so the people who love the same thread can find you. That reframe is the same move we run everywhere. Take the thing out of the private tower, put it where people can touch it, and let it be improved by the scene instead of guarded by the maker.
Cavendish Cards is that reframe cast as an object. It’s a deck whose defining feature is that it admits it isn’t finished — and hands you a pencil.
A deck that shows its work
The deck is Version: 0.1 (starter draft). It says so, on the tin. It lives in a public GitHub repo, one card per file, and it grows the way open source grows: use it, find the gap, draw the card, send it in. There’s no launch, no big reveal, no moment where it’s “done” and gets shipped. There’s just the default-to-open commit history — the whole messy process, visible, forkable, remixable.
That’s what showing your work actually looks like when you mean it. Not a highlight reel posted after the fact, but the draft left out where people can see the seams — and change them.
Fifty-five cards, seven families
The starter deck is 55 cards across seven families, plus blanks. Here’s the shape of it:
| Family | Cards | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| Places | 5 | The five Cavendish zones — cave, campfire, watering hole, library, habitat |
| Weather | 10 | Inner weather, not clinical states — buzzy, foggy, fizzy, warm, and the rest |
| What helps | 14 | The niche-construction family — the ways we change the environment so it fits |
| Lily pads | 8 | The in-between — transitions, pauses, “stuck” as information, not failure |
| Growers | 3 | Dandelion, tulip, orchid — who am I today, held without deficit |
| Love Locutions | 8 | Affirmations given as a gift, never earned, never a reward |
| Interaction | 5 | The interaction badges — how open I am to talking, right now |
| Blank | 2 | A template for the card the deck doesn’t have yet |
“What helps” is deliberately the largest family, because it carries the niche-construction work — and because it holds the good conflicts. Room to move against less talking. Just one person against a full group. The deck doesn’t resolve those tensions for you; it lays them out so a room can feel them.
Turning a card over is consent
Here’s the design detail we love most, and it’s pure show-your-work ethics built into cardboard. The deck has two card backs. One standard back for most families. One visibly different back for the Love Locutions, so a gift is never mistaken for a state or a need.
But the backs do something quieter, too. A spread laid face-down stays private until the person turns it up. The gesture of turning a card over is the consent. Sharing is something the person does — not something the deck does to them. You show your work when you’re ready, on your terms, and not one second before.
The interaction badges are the one deliberate exception — their whole job is to be shown, worn face-up, flipped as your capacity changes through the session. (Come say hi. People I know. Not right now. Ask first.) They’re the color communication badges from Autism Network International and the first Autreat, 1996, brought into the deck. Even there, the flip is always the wearer’s choice.
That’s the whole philosophy of a good sharing space, really: open by default, shared by consent, no one turned over against their will.
The blank card is the whole point
Every starter set ships with blank cards. A blank front, the family colors down one edge so it can join any family, and a prompt that doubles as the deck’s entire thesis: The deck isn’t finished. What’s missing?
This is the show-your-work loop made physical. You use the deck. You find the need it doesn’t name yet — the specific flavor of buzzy, the exact transition that breaks, the help that isn’t on any card. And instead of filing a complaint, you draw it. You make the thing that was missing and you send it back into the competency network, where it becomes part of what everyone gets to hold.
So: bring a blank card energy on Thursday. What’s the card your day needs that no one’s drawn yet? That’s a project. Show us.
Scenius, not genius
Austin Kleon borrows Brian Eno’s word for it — scenius. The idea that great work isn’t birthed by lone geniuses but by an ecology of talent: people supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, borrowing, remixing, contributing. Cavendish Cards is scenius as a product. Nobody owns the finished deck because there is no finished deck; there’s just the scene that keeps drawing cards.
Showing your work creates serendipity — the more connected you are, the more ideas find you. Be an open node. Put the unfinished thing out where the people who love the same thing can find it. That’s not a marketing tactic. For a lot of us it’s how community happens at all.
Broken systems, not broken people
One line from the deck’s own notes carries the whole Stimpunks lens: a child laying cave, buzzy, headphones has handed you a design brief, not a behavior report.
That’s the reframe we protect on a show-your-work night. When someone shares the rough, in-progress, held-together-with-tape version of their thing, the room is not there to audit it against a standard of done. The room is there to receive a design brief. “Here’s what I’m making and here’s where it’s stuck” is not a confession of inadequacy. It’s an invitation to a scene. The gap in your project isn’t a flaw in you — it’s just the next card nobody’s drawn yet.
Join Us
Infodumplings happens every Thursday at 7PM Central in the Stimpunks Learning Space.
Bring a project — in progress, unfinished, unshown, whatever state it’s in. Bring a blank card. Or bring nothing and just come watch the deck get walked through; lurking is a real way to show up.
Want to curate a future session? Get in touch →
How the Hour Goes
| Time | Segment |
|---|---|
| 7:00 PM | Welcome & housekeeping — introduce the show-your-work theme |
| 7:05 PM | 🃏 Walk through Cavendish Cards — where it came from, how it’s built, what’s missing |
| ~7:30 PM | 💬 Discussion — the deck, the philosophy, your own works-in-progress |
| ~7:40 PM | 🧠 Bodymind break — 5 minutes, do whatever you need |
| ~7:45 PM | ✏️ Draw-your-own — blank card prompt, optional |
| ~7:50 PM | 🎤 Sparkles in the Dark: show-and-tell open mic |
| 8:00 PM | ✨ Cozy overflow + next week’s reveal |
Sessions run approximately one hour with cozy overflow after. Camera optional, chat always open, safe foods and stimming always welcome.
Related Glossary Entries
- Show Your Work
- Default to Open
- Scenius
- Created Serendipity
- Competency Network
- Open Source
- Niche Construction
- Cavendish Space
- Caves, Campfires, Watering Holes
- Broken Systems, Not Broken People
Reflection Questions
- What’s a project you’ve kept in the dark because it wasn’t “ready”? What would sharing the draft actually cost you — and what might it create?
- The deck treats “stuck” as information, not failure. Where are you stuck right now, and what design brief is that stuck-ness handing you?
- What’s the card your day needs that nobody’s drawn yet?
- Who’s in your scenius? Who are the people looking at your work who make it better?
- When you share something unfinished, do you get to choose the moment you turn the card over — or does something turn it over for you?
Resources
- Cavendish Cards — Starter Deck (the full 55-card list)
- Cavendish Cards repository (CC0 — fork it, remix it, add a card)
- Cavendish Space Project
- Show Your Work philosophy
- Interaction & Communication Badges
- Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon