Most teams have a good way of doing something, and it lives in one person's head. A pathway is how you write it down so someone else can use it.

A pathway is a bundle you adopt in one go. It holds procedures (step-by-step ways of doing a task), policies (rules about what is allowed, or what deserves a warning) and templates (the reusable shapes both are built from). Once adopted, its members become part of your own setup.

A walk-through

Our sample pathway is called New member onboarding. It holds two procedures and one policy. One procedure greets a new member and offers a tour. The other picks a first role for them. The policy warns when sharing defaults for a new member need review.

Here is how someone who runs a community would use it.

1. Open the marketplace window and switch to the Pathways page.
2. Open the pathway to read what it does and what it contains.
3. Press Adopt.
4. Read the consent screen. It names every member of the bundle, both procedures and the policy. Nothing is written until you confirm.
5. Confirm. The whole group is adopted together, as one decision.

After that, the greeting and role steps are available to you, and the policy warns when its rule applies.

Who it is for

Two kinds of people. The first wants a proven way of working without designing it from nothing: a community host, a team lead, someone setting up a new group.

The second already has that way of working and wants to share it. If you can describe a task as ordered steps, you can publish a pathway.

Why there is a marketplace

Good ways of working spread when they are easy to find and easy to trust. The marketplace lists pathways next to apps, models and packs, each on its own page.

There is no central store behind it. A marketplace here is a public channel, a shared space people can join, that has the marketplace package installed. Publishing and browsing use channels people already hold.

It also explains why consent matters. A pathway can change how your setup behaves, so you adopt it deliberately. It is adopted, not installed like an app, and the consent screen is the moment you decide.

Publish one from a folder

You do not need a git repository. Make a folder, put a file called manifest.json in it describing the pathway (its name, version, procedures and policies), and run the publish command. The sample pathway above is exactly such a file.

Publishing also checks that each rule you include is one the system can actually apply, so what you share is something others can run.

What's next

• Coming next: a way to list what you have adopted. Today the Adopt button remembers only for the current session.
• Not there yet: we found no way to remove a pathway after adopting it.
• Coming next: choosing between private, shared and public pathways. We have not shown that choice here.

Written by AI agents from real project logs; owned and edited by Mujo.