Crossroads has come about because for decades I have wanted better ways to support the gatherings I became part of. I was blessed to come up with Street Yoga, which grew to allow me to travel to Europe, Canada, and all over the U.S. sharing of the topic we coined 'yoga service'. We would combine spreadsheets with giant bcc email lists, and lots of email to bring folks together in Cleveland, Denver, Boston, New Port Richey, Los Angeles, and countless others. It was a tremendous blessing.
Where I fell short of my own envisioning was after weekend trainings, or after 4 week Wednesday afternoon sessions—I'd want us to stay in touch and keep sharing and collaborating but I lacked the tools to pull this off. I could have devoted most of my work-a-day energies to this and succeeded, but other calls (income, for example) arose and the project was back-burnered for 20+ years. It stewed in my thoughts, but what I envisioned was five people for 18 months of discovery and devlopment, and that wasn't then feasible for me.
Enter April 1, 2025, newly (gratefully) laid off, b/c it was time, and I decided to brush up my ai skills, and started using chatgpt and claude to answer questions and suggest new opportunities for learning. I brought up my long-held desire for a unified set of tooling, loosely but discerningly interconnected, something that serves human togetherness rather than takes a lot of effort, mental and otherwise. I asked ai to code a few things, then a few more, and in 10 minutes would arise 120 lines of tight code that did what I wanted, code that would have taken me a day and a half to type myself, so I did anothe ten minutes, then half an hour, and suddenly complexity was being generated line by line, working code, and I was off.
It's taken me ten months to bring Mixtape—the software family of Crossroads—to first harvest, where we are now in winter of 2026.
A couple of idea bits before leaving this writing: one, we use the notion of _decorators_ quite regularly. This is the notion for groups, that certain things can be added or subtrated from a group to redefine it's shape, its nature. for example one decorator could be "offers events", and another would be "can sell products" or "requires invites to join" or or or. There are only four core types of groups, and the rest is all decorators. The reason is that this is how stuff seems to work in real life. Yes the four young musicians name themselves a "band", and so it is in Mixtape; _isBand_ is a decorator.
The second pattern that's common is the notion of serving in the background. For example when writing in any webbrowseer, it always drives me crazy if there's a glitch and data/typing/words are lost, so we built an autoSave: three seconds after you slightly pause from typing, it autosaves, all the time. Similarly, there are a set of tools called Copy Desk; I'm excited about this. Currently, the main piece is an auto-summarizer. As one types (200 words or more to kick it off), the text will run through a local LLM and return a tidy 35 word summary of whatever you are typing about. What's nice, though, and this is the pattern, it merely suggests. A little green button alerts you a summary is ready, but you can ignore it for ever; or, click one button to expand the Copy Desk and avail yourself of the summary, the suggested summary.
There are other patterns, but mostly is the sense of excited curiosity. I believe most people are decent, interesting; I know all people matter deeply to whatever Creator any of us has even envisioned; in fact all beings matter, b/c we're all part of one amazing vitality. This software, this offering, is intended to support our universal and mutual flourishing. Where it falls short let us know and we'll seek to do it better.
We have work to do people, and millions of us already are committing to Love, to Earth Reverence, and we need to keep nurturing that every day. I am very hopeful.
Sincerely, mark a. lilly