A Hitchhiker Guide Writer is a specialist author and editor who creates and publishes professional Guides for the Hitchhiker universe and its real-world projects. Their craft is to take messy reality and turn it into something navigable: clear pages, coherent story arcs, usable instructions, and trustworthy signposts. A Guide Writer is not “just a writer”, but a publisher with responsibility for clarity, tone, and the reader’s journey.
Guide Writers work under the moderation and tutorledge of a Hitchhiker. This is not managerial oversight in a corporate sense, but the kind of facilitation you find in good studios, good classrooms, and good community projects: someone helps set purpose, holds standards, protects the culture, and supports the writer to do their best work. The Hitchhiker does not “own” the Guide, but helps it become something the whole community can trust.
# What a Guide Writer produces
A Guide Writer produces Guides that are meant to be used, shared, and built upon. The output is usually a small set of well-structured pages that can stand alone on a phone screen, and that invite forking rather than fragile perfection.
A Guide Writer also produces storycraft around those Guides: introductions, summaries, learning paths, glossary pages, and small “next-step” prompts that help readers move from curiosity to action.
# Field Researchers as the supporting cast
Guide Writers are supported by a diverse group of community members called Field Researchers. Field Researchers gather background material, local context, examples, interviews, links, screenshots, experiments, and evidence from the real world.
A Field Researcher is not required to write polished prose. Their job is to bring back good ingredients: raw notes, firsthand observations, “here is what actually happened”, “here are the constraints in my region”, “here are the best sources”, and “here is what confused people when we tried it”.
# The Hitchhiker as facilitator-leader A Hitchhiker is the modern kind of leader: a facilitator who helps a group do meaningful work together without turning it into bureaucracy. They hold the tone, protect psychological safety, encourage respectful disagreement, and maintain momentum. In practice, the Hitchhiker sets the editorial mission for a guide-cycle, moderates forks and disputes, mentors Guide Writers, and makes sure Field Researchers are welcomed and credited. They also make the call on when a Guide is “ready enough to publish” and when it should remain in experimental space.
# How the three roles work together
The simplest pattern is a three-layer pipeline. - Field Researchers explore, collect, and report from the world. - Guide Writers select, organise, and publish what matters, shaping it into Guides that other people can use. - Hitchhikers facilitate the process, keep standards consistent, and ensure the work remains inclusive, ethical, and fun.
This structure is designed to let many people contribute without forcing everyone to become the same kind of contributor.
# Standards: what makes a Guide “professional” A professional Hitchhiker Guide is readable, scoped, and honest about its limits. It uses plain language where possible, defines its jargon where needed, and keeps the reader oriented. A professional Guide is also fork-friendly. It should invite local variants, translations, and upgrades without shaming imperfect contributions. A professional Guide is backed by visible research. It shows where claims came from, includes references, and makes uncertainty explicit rather than hiding it.
# Tutorledge and learning-by-publishing Guide Writers are always learning, and tutorledge makes that learning social rather than solitary. The Hitchhiker’s role is to coach writers through the invisible craft: structuring pages, developing voice, maintaining accuracy, handling feedback, and building the habit of shipping. Field Researchers also learn by contributing: how to verify sources, how to observe carefully, how to interview respectfully, and how to bring back usable evidence. The result is a living writers’ room that produces Guides as a byproduct of community learning.
# Why this role exists The Hitchhiker project needs Guides that can survive contact with reality. Many communities have enthusiasm but lack time to turn that energy into polished, reliable documentation. The Guide Writer role exists to make sure the knowledge becomes usable. A federated culture needs people who love the final mile: naming things well, making them legible, and keeping them updated. Guide Writers are the stewards of that legibility.
# See - Vision Fish - Hitchhiker Studio and Green Room - Hitchhiker Avatar