Good ideas, @joriam. On a general level, this is precisely how this world is supposed to work. The “Major” and “Minor” refer not to narrative importance, but as a loose marker of how mainstream the ideas there are. The Major are ideas that are well-trodden, stretched to certain logical extremes. The Minor are less well-known but extremely interesting concepts that we want to explore.
At any point anyone should be free to create a Distrikt and plug it in - say someone proposes a radical new economic theory; we should be free to create a society and test it. We don’t even need to justify it by having cities float along and connect - the assumption is that this floating, partitioned mega-city is similar to Gorgemghast; there are precious few limits to what one can add to this. Now for specifics:
The fact that we propose major districts created by our team and allow other creators to propose minor districts (and this is paired with the fact that 590 words described the majors and only 92 were given to the minors) already points to the fact that we believe our team is more competent in worldbuilding then the outside world. But we shouldn’t. If we believe in open, collaborative, open-source projects (which I think we do!) we should give away and decentralize our narrative power.
To give away and decentralize narrative power requires, as I keep pointing out, some product to give away in the first place. As of now, we have little to nothing, and at the core of this, someone will have to write stuff down, so I do not see much value in a theoretical hivemind as opposed to a practical team taking input and weaving those inputs in until the project has enough mass to gather others willing to sit and write in. TV series and game studios have evolved their structures because they work. Otherwise this turns into every other Early Access game out there on Steam - released too early, tanked, forgotten.
Layer 01 is our anchor and our broadest. We don’t give it too much detail, just the essentials. We tell people that those few rules can’t be broken if they want to tap into our world.
Layer 02 and 03 are open.
This is, in a weird way, less freeing than the original spec I had in mind. In my view we should sketch out the history of the founding, the Districts Major (and there could be more or less or different, according to what gives us a fair diverse sheaf of economies to start with), and open the entire thing. As Alberto pointed out, resolution does not matter. So if someone comes along and wants to do a pre-history? Absolutely. If someone sees the article for, say, Terminus, and thinks we don’t talk enough about race issues within? Come right in, write. My gut instinct is that this increase the quality of the core as well. I am thinking of how projects on Github work. Problems - and spaces left intentionally empty for other people to plug in their ideas - are a great way of bringing in contributors.
And speaking of increasing quality: I really like your idea of the red flower-like design. It adds visual texture to the skyline, adds a new set of stories at the center. It also sets up some nice tensions, which are critical for stories to unfold. We can make it so that the Migrant train runs on the black infrastructure, because less radius - less fuel wasted - more efficient.
I can already imagine an economist-philosopher sitting by the docks, trainside, by the light of a dying sun, with a fat and angry-looking orange cat next to her. She has grey hair and a left hand that looks badly scarred. For the last so many years she’s been advising the Migrant Train Committee on the yearly train-route optimization, which at its basic level is a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem with some political tension thrown in. She’s been using the number of connected districts - and the radius of the train-circle -as a measure of how diverse this floating megacity is, but she’s also wondering whether size is a reliable indicator of diversity, given recent events; distrikts have seceded in the past, and she is deep in thought about whether there is an optimal arrangement of distrikts that enables even to most polarized of them to connect to the superstructure without fighting too much. Every so often she looks up as the train passes by and pets the cat absent-mindedly.
The cat, of course, does not care.
