Project Timeline

ButterflyDreaming is a long-term, non-commercial, volunteer-led project. This page records what has been completed, what is currently underway, and what is planned. Dates beyond Spring 2026 are indicative; pace is governed by the work team's capacity and the recruitment of collaborators.

Infrastructure & Public Presence

• Domain registration across all variants — butterflydreaming .org / .net / .com / .ai / .art / .me / .info
• Information website (butterflydreaming.info) published, open for comments and invitations to support
• Holding site live at butterflydreaming.ai
• Development and prototype host machine commissioned (MacBook M4, 128GB)
• AGPL-3.0 open-source licence adopted — a deliberate and long-term commitment to openness

Technical Prototyping & Confidence Testing

• Part design of the overall system architecture
• WebSocket dyadic test chat system written; child node data transfer to a cloud JSON database (MongoDB) tested
• Test opening of the chat system to the web via Cloudflare tunnel
• Push/pull of test data to an in-memory graph database (Memgraph, running in Docker); data load estimates completed
• Verification that Google toxicity screening runs client-side in JavaScript
• Confidence testing of local LLMs on the host machine
• Verification and research on music generation from text (ABC notation system with bespoke editor)
• Preliminary work on an external media project (literary novel) to demonstrate read-access use of butterflydreaming.ai

Ethics Framework

• Discuss and clarify privacy and safety issues through publication on a dedicated Ethics page — no further development proceeds until we are confident there are no legal or ethical constraints to the proposed platform

Outreach & Presence

• Publicising butterflydreaming.info; integrating comments and invitations to support
• LinkedIn profiles established for founding team; actively seeking advisors and collaborators

Organisational

• Formalising fiscal hosting arrangement via Social Change Nest (UK) and Open Collective for transparent, non-commercial funding
• Recruitment of external advisors in: platform design, symbolic content curation, therapeutic practice, technical development

Technical

• Further research into chat/AI/content handling; use of AI coding platforms to produce a new generation of code
• Verification of an adequate content moderation function:
  • Whitelist composition
  • Identity non-disclosure architecture
  • Toxicity detector code
• Pairing algorithm: design, implementation and initial testing — a novel and critical technical element
• Scale target: the platform is designed to demonstrate viability at several hundred concurrent users on local infrastructure — deliberately bounded, sufficient to evaluate whether the project warrants further expansion, and consistent with the text-only, layered-AI architecture

Content & Corpus

• Work team to research and structure primer content nodes for uploading when the platform is ready (open-ended, ongoing)
• Sourcing, rights clearance, and curation of the symbolic text corpus — poetry, myth, folktale, philosophy — that seeds the platform
• Continue integration research for external media usage

Research & Writing

• Preparation of an academic paper describing the project design

Platform Development

• Research, classification, and integration of priming content nodes into the AI-modulated browsing system

This is the critical and most challenging element of the project — the work on which everything else depends.

• Platform under test: further evolution of navigation and LLM integration for user browsing and pairing
• Security review — particularly given anonymous user data handling
• Begin adding text-input media engines based on client JavaScript modules (art, music, XR, …)
• Consider scope for further external read usage (e.g. performance media)

Community & Evaluation

• Guide possible local group formation and experimentation
• Soft/beta launch with a defined pilot group — size, selection criteria, and facilitation to be determined
• Begin formal evaluation: define success metrics, identify evaluators, agree pilot scope