Here we tweak the 'trinity/stack/specials' frame, resulting in an extended trinity.
On one hand, things have evolved since the trinity/stack/specials frame was assembled (2019). On the other, some of the 'more specialised' tools seem to warrant being promoted to the top level of 'basic' tools. We deal with this through framing an 'Extended trinity' of basic tools for organising.
> There's an extended version of a 'learning space' slide deck, covering trinity and extended trinity, here pdf 
Promoting some elements, extending the trinity
The extrended trinity looks like this . . .
An extended trinity
It can be seen as three trios.
# 1 A trio for being in touch The original trinity constitutes a basic trio for being in touch: text chat, curated threads for deliberating, library/document repository/reference collection.
Extended trinity as three trios
# 2 A trio for actively collaborating
**Video chat & meetings** Text-chat (original Trinity) continues to be in the mix. But video rooms have become an everyday ‘chat’ expectation. So they join text-chat, in an extended trinity.
**Cloud file share** The library/repo function in the original trinity (eg a wiki, a web portal, a shared list of links) might be fulfilled tacitly by disciplined use of ‘cloud’ options in the extended trinity. It doesn't have to be a dedicated repo-tool like wiki or git. Since the trinity construct was first proposed, cloud fileshare has become ubiquitous, and now warrants promoting to an 'extended trinity'.
**Shared authoring** Shared-simultaneous authoring of documents and a shared cloud store of documents, which were originally in the Stack, warrant being promoted to the extended trinity, as basic means of collaborating. The usage and availability of both kinds of tools has deepened since the trinity was first proposed.
These tools include both word-processing in the cloud (like Gdocs, or OpenOffice in the Nextcloud stack) and live-shared markdown pads (Etherpad, Notes in NextCloud, HackMD/Hedgedoc, etc).
# 3 A mapping & navigating trio Some more specialised or rare functions that originally were 'specials' seem now to warrant being promoted to the extended trinity - even if the availability of good tools isn't so widespread yet, or the skills required to use them fluently are not so widespread either. They can be seen as tools for mapping of shared space and navigating in extended, evolving spaces beyond the immediately visible and explicitly referenced spaces of p2p collaborating.
'Promoted specials' in an extended trinity
- **Mapping** - Means of applying a user-specific custom mapping layer to any field of content - eg tagging, and tag-cloud maps. >This is ‘the world as I/we, specifically, need to engage with it’
- **Analytics or ‘mirrors’** - Means of identifying emergent pattern in a big, undisciplined field of ‘scraped’ data, or a complex, distributed, unclearly bounded network. *These need to be channelled to the participant-contributors in that field, rather than syphoned off as ‘intelligence’, by some digital landlord, as tacit rent or taxation on the use of some superficially ‘free’ digital space (eg social media).* And . . we don't mean 'trending' and other 'follow-me' clickbait. We mean tuneable, like a radar scan or a survey. >This is ‘the world that is evolving, beyond my/our immediate perception, where I am tacitly an actor’
- **‘News from elsewhere’** - Means of publishing, broadcasting, narrowcasting. Means also, of hearing from and tuning-into other locations - in place, in time, in culture. *News, journalism, alerts. History, legacy, origins. Accounts of life being lived across fields of very uneven development. Includes ‘free speech’.* Grounded in the free-web principle of **federating**. >This is ‘the world that I/we intend to affiliate with, or resonate with’
The elements in this 'mapping and navigating trio' are **affordances** rather than stand-alone apps. They're essential for systemic engagement in a real-world external environment - and in that sense remain similar to the tools that remain in the 'specials’ category.
While the other tools in the extended trinity are *means of coordination*, this trio are **means of engagement & perception**.
They may not be implemented well in a given app or platform or protocol, and they may call for unusual skill, and meta-vision, to use them well. As so often, this is as much a matter of **culture** as of tooling - eg work organisation, common genres and social protocols, vision & intuition. Let's not get too techie about this 🙃