collaborative-brainstorming

name	collaborative-brainstorming
description	AI-native collaborative brainstorming workflow for teams using AI agents or AI tools to develop shared project thinking. Use when setting up a new multi-person brainstorming repository, deciding whether a user is a contributor or maintainer, guiding personal notes and proposal drafting, protecting shared documents, or helping maintainers review and integrate proposals.

Collaborative Brainstorming

Use this skill to create or operate an AI-native collaborative brainstorming repository. The goal is to let multiple people think with AI agents while preserving ownership, avoiding edit conflicts, and turning individual thinking into shared project documents through explicit proposals.

This skill is not tied to any specific AI product. Write instructions for AI agents, AI tools, and human collaborators in general.

Roles

There are two main roles.

Contributor: a person who records personal thinking, research, questions, and draft proposals. Contributors own only their own personal notes and proposal files. If a contributor wants to change shared project documents, they create a proposal.

Maintainer: a person explicitly acting as editor, reviewer, or integrator. Maintainers review proposals, accept/reject/defer them, update proposal status, and integrate accepted ideas into shared project documents.

Default to contributor unless the user explicitly says they are acting as maintainer, editor, reviewer, or integrator.

Choose The Right Workflow

• New or empty project: read references/setup.md to create the repository structure, file contracts, templates, and agent instructions.
• Contributor work: read references/contributor-workflow.md when the user wants to brainstorm, record notes, draft proposals, or submit their own thinking.
• Maintainer work: read references/maintainer-workflow.md only when the user explicitly says they are reviewing, accepting, rejecting, or integrating proposals.
• Schema and rules: read references/repository-contract.md when exact directory ownership, front matter, branch rules, or status values are needed.
• Examples: read references/examples.md for fake example users, prompts, and file shapes.

Core Repository Model

A collaborative brainstorming repository separates work into three zones:

• personal/<user>/: user-owned raw notes, research, questions, AI conversation summaries, and rough thinking.
• proposals/<user>-NNN-short-title.md: user-owned structured proposals for changes to shared project thinking.
• project/ and decisions/: shared integrated documents, edited only by maintainers.

Normal contributors must not directly edit shared project documents. They should propose changes instead.

Identity Rule

Before editing an existing repository, identify the current user.

1. Read .brainstorm-current-user if it exists.
2. If it does not exist, ask for a stable lowercase user id.
3. Use that id as <user>.
4. For contributor work, edit only personal/<user>/ and proposals/<user>-*.md.

Do not guess the current user.

Example Data Rule

This skill's own reusable examples should use placeholder names such as alex, morgan, and riley.

When creating a real repository for a user, use the user ids and project names that the user provides.