Back to Reference Menu of Services — "I can help with…" Capability Deck

Source: Team Retreat 2 (“The Revenge of the Studio”), Jun 11, 2026 — cache activity from Reuben’s “Bringing It All Together” section. Raw deck sorted on the Design / Develop / Disseminate wall. Feeds: Handbook 2.0 ROLES section, The Words (messaging), stakeholder role-play language, “do we have unique value to add?” decision check. Visualization: reference/capability-map.html

The shape of the team

Card counts per phase (typos cleaned, duplicates kept where two people claimed the same skill):

	Design	Develop	Disseminate	Total
Josh	10	4	4	18
Reuben	6	8	3	17
Joe	4	9	7	20

The team is a relay across the handbook’s own WORK cycle: Josh is front-loaded (frame it), Reuben is middle-loaded (build it), Joe is back-loaded (show it). Volume is nearly even (17–20 cards each) — the depth differences are in where each person concentrates, not how much they bring.

The deck (cleaned)

Design

Develop

◆ = claimed by both Josh and Reuben — shared capability.

Disseminate

Parking lot

What the wall says

The relay is real and complementary. Josh’s depth is the front of the cycle (scoping, learning design, thinking partnership), Reuben’s is the technical middle (AI, architecture, prototyping), Joe’s is production and the back end (media, publishing, storytelling). Almost no destructive overlap — the one shared card (“thinking through ways to accomplish a task”) is a feature, not a collision.
Two kinds of dissemination. Joe produces dissemination (media, graphics, publishing); Josh and Reuben translate and connect (explaining research, explaining technical things, connecting to experts). Production dissemination is a single point of failure: it’s all Joe.
Project management is everyone’s and no one’s. It appears in all three parking lots (and Josh’s Design column). Nobody put a phase claim on it with confidence. Handbook 2.0 should either name an owner or explicitly declare it a shared rotating duty.
Josh’s Develop column is the thinnest and that’s structurally fine — his Develop cards are connective (partnerships, team dynamics) rather than building. The director’s “develop” work is developing the team and relationships, not artifacts. Worth saying out loud in the handbook so it reads as design, not gap.
Reuben’s Disseminate column is translation, not publication. If Build-a-Bot / Flash Lab scaling depends on getting the word out, that pathway runs through Joe — or needs a deliberate capacity decision.
The deck doubles as the “unique value” test. The decision-framework question “do we have unique value to add?” now has a concrete answer key: if a request doesn’t hit any column of this wall, that’s a signal to refer out.

Proposed Handbook 2.0 ROLES replacement

(stop-slopped Jun 11)

ROLES: Who must do what?

We cover the work cycle as a relay: Josh frames, Reuben builds, Joe shows. The table comes from our June 2026 capability deck (“I can help with…”), where each line needed a receipt from the past year.

Name	Title	Come to me for
Josh Weiss	Director of Technology and Innovation	Strategy, budget, messaging, and keeping the train running. The front of the cycle: project scoping, workshop and curriculum design, a learning theory lens, roadmapping what can go right and wrong, creative thinking partnership. Getting connected to an expert, an external partner, or the right person at Stanford.
Joe Sherman	Digital Media Lead	Making the work visible. Media production end to end: photography, video, 360° and audio, graphics, storyboarding, proof-of-concept media for funding. Case study storytelling, event coverage, social publishing. Plus LMS and large-scale data management.
Reuben Thiessen	Emerging Technology Lead	Figuring out whether the thing can be built, then building the pilot. AI prompt design, personas and agents, AI-assisted coding, technical architecture and feasibility, VR, 3D printing, websites and infrastructure. Using AI in a pedagogically sound way, and explaining technical things to non-technical people.
All three		Project management and thinking through ways to accomplish a task are shared. (Open from the retreat: PM landed in all three parking lots. Name an owner or make the rotation explicit.)

Proposed Handbook 2.0 THE WORK replacement

(stop-slopped Jun 11 — keeps the team’s original verbs and bullets where the deck backed them; adds AI, media-in-design/develop, feasibility; merges the duplicate network bullets)

THE WORK: What do we do?

As a team, we focus on a 3-part cycle to get research happening out in the world: design, develop, and disseminate. We cover it as a relay: Josh frames, Reuben builds, Joe shows. Relationship work (check-ins, sounding-board sessions, thought partnership) runs through all three phases; it is the most common touchpoint in our seed-grant tracking.

Design focuses on shaping ideas and preparing a trajectory. Given our unique specializations, this can look like:

Centering projects with research-backed learning techniques and a learning theory lens
Scoping projects and roadmapping what can go right and wrong, especially for less experienced project leads
Designing pedagogically sound uses of AI: prompts, personas, and the affordances specific to your context
Planning media early: storyboards, video specs, and proof-of-concept media for funding opportunities

Develop focuses on gestating promising applications and feeling out scalable solutions. Given our unique specializations, this can look like:

Investigating solutions to tech and research blockers alongside research teams, with a bias for action
Checking technical feasibility and architecture before anyone over-commits
Concocting prototypes to animate research (and vice versa) in a sustainable way
Producing media end to end: photography, video, 360°, audio, and the infrastructure underneath (LMS, websites, large-scale data management)
Developing the partnerships and team structures projects need to last

Disseminate focuses on sharing out to mobilize knowledge and seed new possibilities. Given our unique specializations, this can look like:

Translating early signals of solutions, especially fast-moving tech, for non-technical audiences
Capacity-building around practices that increase impact via consultations and workshops (Flash Labs, Build-a-Bot)
Telling the story: case studies, event coverage, interviews, graphics, and social publishing that invigorate community members and invite people in
Connecting people to experts, communities of practice, and wayfinding at Stanford

Source: reference/menu-of-services.md

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