Alpha Contributor Tasks: Help Us Build the Tree

There is no requirement to complete every task on this list, or even a specific number of them. Choose any, all, or none based on what interests you. Most importantly, use the site naturally and have some fun with it.

When you complete a task, please reply to the Alpha Contributor Tasks discussion with the task number and anything you noticed, thought about, liked, disliked, or found confusing while doing it. Even “A10: Everything worked exactly as I expected” is useful feedback.

Tasks are numbered by category and in increments of 10 so we can continue adding new Alpha tasks without changing existing task numbers.

One Unnumbered Task

Use The Inspiration Tree the way you naturally want to use it. Create something, read something, have a conversation, follow a strange branch, or disappear down a rabbit hole we never anticipated.

Then tell us what happened.

The numbered tasks help us test the things we know to ask about. Some of the most valuable things we learn during Alpha may come from things we never thought to ask.

Numbered Task:

A — Create & Inspire

Creating and responding to Seeds is the most important part of Alpha. We need to discover whether people can encounter someone else’s creation or idea and be inspired to take it somewhere new.

A10 — Find a Seed that genuinely inspires you.
Explore until something makes you think, question, react, disagree, imagine, or want to create. Tell us what caught your attention and where your mind went with it.

A20 — Create your first Inspired Seed.
Go through the entire creation and submission process naturally. Don’t deliberately test it yet. Concentrate on creating something and tell us afterward where the process was easy, confusing, or unexpected.

A30 — Create another Inspired Seed.
The first submission teaches you how the system works. Does creating the second one feel easier and more natural?

A40 — Create something in a different medium from its Parent.
Respond to writing with artwork, an image with music, music with video, an essay with fiction, or another cross-medium interpretation.

A50 — Create something that does NOT continue or reproduce the Parent.
Start with an idea, emotion, question, disagreement, character, detail, or reaction and take it somewhere substantially different.

A60 — Create from a Seed Type you don’t normally explore.
If you’re a writer, deliberately explore Photography or Music. If you’re an artist, browse Essays or Audio. See whether another creative discipline can give you an unexpected starting point.

A70 — Let Random choose your Parent Seed.
Use Random and challenge yourself to find inspiration in something you wouldn’t necessarily have selected yourself.

A80 — Reinterpret a Seed through a different emotion.
Take something frightening and find hope in it, something joyful and explore sadness, or choose another emotional direction the Parent creator may never have intended.

A90 — Move an idea through time.
Take the central idea of a Seed and reinterpret it decades, centuries, or thousands of years earlier or later.

A100 — Change the perspective.
Explore an idea through someone or something completely different: a child, antagonist, stranger, AI, future historian, outsider, or someone who completely misunderstands what is happening.

A110 — Disagree creatively.
Find an idea or assumption you disagree with and let that disagreement inspire an original Seed of your own.

A120 — Use “Overcoming Creative Block.”
Try one of the creative-prompt formulas on that page. Tell us which one you used and whether it actually helped generate an idea.

A130 — Start with a Seed you don’t think could possibly inspire you.
Give it 15–30 minutes anyway. You don’t have to publish anything. Tell us whether forcing yourself outside your normal interests produced anything unexpected.

A140 — Use “About This Seed” to invite the next creator.
Don’t just explain how the Parent inspired you. Give other creators ideas for where they might take your Seed next.

A150 — Follow the branch you just created.
After publishing a Child Seed, look at its relationship with its Parent. Does the genealogy clearly communicate where your creation came from?

B — Discuss & React

Ideas can evolve through conversation as well as through creative works. You don’t have to publish a Seed to make a meaningful contribution.

B10 — Respond to an existing Seed discussion.
Share a reaction, interpretation, question, personal perspective, or something the Seed made you think about.

B20 — Start a meaningful discussion about a Seed.
Ask something that gives other people a reason to think and respond rather than simply saying whether you liked the work.

B30 — Reply to another member.
Have an actual back-and-forth conversation rather than leaving a standalone comment.

B40 — Offer a different interpretation.
Find a Seed or image and explain what you see in it, particularly if your interpretation differs from the creator’s.

B50 — Disagree constructively.
Challenge an idea or assumption without attacking the person expressing it. Tell us how comfortable or uncomfortable the site feels as a place for respectful disagreement.

B60 — Find a discussion that changes how you see a Seed.
Did another person’s comment make you notice something you hadn’t considered?

B70 — Start a General Discussion topic.
Choose something related to creativity, inspiration, ideas, technology, culture, or another subject you think this community would enjoy discussing.

B80 — Introduce yourself.
Use the Introduce Yourself topic. This is also an appropriate place to share links to your portfolio, website, social profiles, books, music, videos, or other work.

B90 — Turn a discussion into inspiration.
If something another member says gives you an idea, see whether you can turn that reaction into an original creation.

C — Explore & Discover

Help us determine whether The Inspiration Tree actually makes it easy and enjoyable to discover ideas, creators, and unexpected connections.

C10 — Browse the site without a destination.
Follow whatever catches your attention. Tell us where you ended up and anything that surprised, interested, or confused you along the way.

C20 — Explore Newest Seeds.
Could you quickly understand what was available and decide what you wanted to open?

C30 — Explore Trending Seeds.
Does Trending help you discover interesting work? Does its purpose make sense?

C40 — Use Random several times.
Does it feel useful for discovering things you otherwise wouldn’t encounter?

C50 — Browse by Seed Type.
Choose one and explore. Are the Seed Types understandable, and do the results match what you expected?

C60 — Browse by Genre.
Choose a Genre that interests you. Did it lead to the kinds of Seeds you expected?

C70 — Follow Discovery Tags.
Click several while browsing. Do they help you find meaningfully related content?

C80 — Follow a Seed genealogy.
Move from a Seed to its Parent, Children, and other branches. Can you understand how the creations inspired one another?

C90 — Follow a branch several generations.
If one is available, see how far an idea has traveled from its Original Seed. Does the Tree still help you understand the creative connection?

C100 — Explore a creative medium you normally wouldn’t choose.
If you usually read stories, try Audio, Photography, Visual Art, Music, or Video. Did anything encourage you to keep exploring?

C110 — Discover a creator through one of their Seeds.
Visit their profile and try to find their other contributions. Was that easy?

C120 — Try to get deliberately lost.
Follow Seeds, creators, tags, genres, discussions, and genealogies without using the main navigation. Note dead ends or places where you aren’t sure what to do next.

D — Understand & Explain the Site

We already know how The Inspiration Tree is supposed to work. We need to know whether you can understand it without us standing beside you explaining it.

D10 — Read “What Is This Site?”
Afterward, explain The Inspiration Tree in your own words. Tell us anything that still doesn’t make sense.

D20 — Read “What Is a Seed?”
Can you clearly explain an Original Seed, Parent Seed, Child Seed, and the basic genealogy?

D30 — Read “Create an Inspired Seed.”
Without actually creating anything yet, do you feel that you know what you would need to do?

D40 — Use one of the Creator’s Guides.
Does it give you useful ideas rather than simply explain rules you already understood?

D50 — Explain The Inspiration Tree to someone else.
Describe it to a friend or family member without first showing them our explanation. What questions do they ask?

D60 — Let someone unfamiliar with the project browse it.
Don’t coach them. Watch what they click, where they hesitate, what interests them, and what they misunderstand.

E — Test & Improve the Experience

This is where we’re deliberately asking you to notice the dust. Bugs matter, but so do confusing language, unnecessary steps, awkward workflows, and things that technically work but don’t work well.

E10 — Use the site on a desktop or laptop.
Browse normally and note anything awkward, confusing, slow, or visually wrong.

E20 — Use the site on a phone.
Try more than the homepage. Browse Seeds, read something, visit profiles, use discussions, and navigate the Tree.

E30 — Use a tablet, if you have one.
Look particularly for layout and navigation problems.

E40 — Try another browser.
If you normally use Chrome, try Edge, Firefox, Safari, or another browser available to you.

E50 — Test links and buttons as you encounter them.
Report anything that does nothing, leads somewhere unexpected, produces an error, or isn’t clear about what will happen.

E60 — Try doing something the “wrong” way.
Leave something blank, back out halfway through, use Back and Forward, refresh during a process, or otherwise behave differently from the ideal path.

E70 — Look for confusing language.
Report any button, field, instruction, menu item, Seed terminology, or other wording that makes you stop and figure out what we mean.

E80 — Look for unnecessary steps.
If you ever think, “There has to be an easier way to do this,” tell us what you were trying to accomplish.

E90 — Look for something you expected but couldn’t find.
Tell us what you expected, where you looked for it, and why you wanted it.

E100 — Edit one of your published Seeds.
Make a legitimate change after publication. Was finding and using the editing process straightforward?

E110 — Report something that technically works but doesn’t feel right.
Not every usability problem is a bug. Awkward, frustrating, unnecessarily complicated, or unintuitive experiences are important Alpha feedback too.

F — Help Shape What Comes Next

Alpha isn’t only about testing what we’ve already built. Your experience should influence what we build next.

F10 — Visit the Roadmap.
Look at what is currently planned. Which items seem most important to you?

F20 — Review a Roadmap Candidate.
Would you actually use it? What would you change? Should something else have higher priority?

F30 — Suggest a new feature.
Don’t worry about whether it sounds technically difficult. Explain what you wish the site could do and why it would be useful.

F40 — Tell us what you would remove.
More features don’t necessarily make a better site. Is anything unnecessary, distracting, redundant, or overly complicated?

F50 — Tell us what’s missing.
What would make you create more Seeds, participate in more discussions, discover more work, or enjoy the site more?

F60 — Tell us what would bring you back regularly.
What could turn The Inspiration Tree from a site you tried into a community or creative resource you wanted to visit again?

F70 — Tell us what would make you recommend it.
What would need to be true before you would tell a friend, creator, student, colleague, or online community, “You should try this”?

F80 — Tell us what we got right.
This is just as important as finding problems. If something works particularly well, feels different from other creative sites, or makes you want to participate, tell us. We need to know what not to change.

F90 — Suggest an Alpha task we haven’t thought of.
You’re using the site from a perspective we don’t have. If there’s something you think other Alpha Contributors should try, suggest it and we may add it to this list.