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The fellowship's founding documents get a glow-up — By-Laws go emoji-rich, twelve legacy minutes preserved in full

MediumWordPress sites 3 min readBy Christopher W
TL;DR: Two documents got the care they deserved today: the By-Laws now render on GitHub like a friendly webpage instead of a wall of legal text, and twelve Tech Committee reports from 2023–2024 are preserved in the AstroLog with their complete text — each as its own dated entry, now living on the Tech Com desk in the proper order of the work they describe. The fellowship's institutional memory should be easy to find, easy to read, and impossible to lose.
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📜 The By-Laws get their glow-up

The By-Laws of Psychedelics In Recovery™ – PIR® have always been thorough — ten articles, officer job descriptions, the conflict-of-interest policy, the annual statement form. What they hadn’t been was easy to visit. The blob page read like a PDF that wandered into a terminal.

Now it reads like the fellowship itself: emoji-coded article headers (🗳️ Meetings, 🪑 Directors, 🧭 Officers…), a friendly intro that tells you what you’re looking at and why it’s the canonical source, and a full table of contents. The legal text is untouched — this is presentation, not revision. And like the original document, the By-Laws now have subtabs: Officers, Members At-Large, Compliance Requirements, and the Conflict of Interest appendix.

This matters because the By-Laws now serve as the single source the websites render from: the main site’s By-Laws page and the service site’s By-Laws page both point here, and the Google Drive link lives in exactly one place — on the main site’s page. One document, one canonical copy, one place to update.

📚 Twelve reports, twelve entries

Meanwhile, the legacy Tech Committee minutes got the deeper treatment. When the old Tech Committee page was rebuilt, its links pointed to Google Docs — links that could one day expire, taking a year of service history with them.

So the twelve documents now live in the changelog itself, as twelve dated entries — each dated with the day its document was written, so they rest in the true chronological order of the work, from the first Tech 2.0 agenda in August 2023 to the calm before the website launch in July 2024. Every one carries the complete text, collapsible and searchable, plus a link back to the original Google Doc. They live on their own Tech Com desk — Tech 3.0 giving the minutes of Tech 2.0 a permanent porch of their own.

The archive, in order:

  1. Tech 2.0 kicks off with a new Zoom link — Aug 11, 2023
  2. Keeping meetings safe with host training — Oct 18, 2023
  3. The calendar lands on staging — Oct 28, 2023
  4. A document database is born — Nov 9, 2023
  5. Calendar complete and a service email coming — Dec 9, 2023
  6. Meet Alex — the website overhaul begins — Jan 10, 2024
  7. The redesign begins behind the scenes — Feb 10, 2024
  8. We will build it ourselves — Mar 12, 2024
  9. Hosting renews and budget season opens — Apr 13, 2024
  10. The cost of keeping meetings online — May 4, 2024
  11. The new website readies for launch — Jun 8, 2024
  12. Holding steady before the launch — Jul 11, 2024

A small mystery solved along the way: the old page carried a thirteenth link that led not to a document at all but to the By-Laws. A stray link, now untangled — the By-Laws have their own canonical home, and the minutes have this one.

🧭 The pattern

Both changes serve the same instinct: the fellowship’s memory should live somewhere that can’t expire. Google Drive is a great place to work; it’s a risky place to rest. Git history doesn’t have a 7-day auto-delete, doesn’t need a renewal invoice, and never asks anyone to re-share a link.

And there’s a roadmap hiding in these old reports: they mention digest mailers, document databases, and minutes flows — ideas the 2026 committees are still carrying forward. If you served in those years and your report is missing, say the word — uploading is easy, retroactive included. The A.L.E.X. helpdesk and the Tech Committee are already plotting how to make future minutes flow straight into git, automatically, with room for the PR and Publications Committee desks already waiting on the porch.

Preserving the past is also service.