Patient Intake
Independent / community project, 2026, language technology. Kokoy, an English-based creole spoken in four northeast Dominica villages (Marigot, Wesley, Woodford Hill, Clifton), created when the British imported English-speaking enslaved people to bridge a communication gap with a population that spoke French Creole.
Diagnosis
The language survives in daily oral use right now, in specific villages, but nothing durable documented it in a form the community itself could add to. A static dictionary, built once and left alone, doesn't fit a language that's actively spoken and evolving on the ground.
Prescribing Physician
Designed and built the platform end to end, but deliberately not the content authority. The actual dictionary grows through community contribution, maintained day to day by a community member from Wesley, Dominica.
Treatment Protocol
- Built the core dictionary and search interface first, the baseline any reference tool needs
- Designed a submission pathway with zero account requirement, requiring a sign-up before someone can contribute a word from lived experience was the wrong trade
- Added a moderation gate: submissions route to a review team before publishing, not live instantly, since an open, unchecked community-editable archive is a vandalism risk
- Included a GitHub Issue path as an alternate submission route for a more technical contributor, same underlying data, a different comfort level of entry
Dosage Limits
This couldn't be built as a single-author archive like the other two language projects, the entire premise depends on the community actually choosing to contribute, which is outside what design or engineering can force. Deprioritized: public submission attribution. Contributors are credited privately (name or village, optional) rather than on a public leaderboard, early trust mattered more than gamifying participation.
Clinical Trial Artifacts
The submission-to-publish pipeline — the actual design problem this project solves, more than the dictionary UI itself.
Efficacy Results
Live as an installable web app and Chrome extension, actively accepting community submissions from the four founding villages. Entry count intentionally not stated here, it grows continuously through community submission, and any fixed number would be stale by the time this is read.
Adverse Reactions Disclosed
The fully optional submission form (no required pronunciation, no required example sentence) keeps contribution frictionless, but it also means a meaningful share of entries arrive without pronunciation guidance, exactly the detail an oral-tradition language most needs preserved. A gentle nudge toward including pronunciation, not a requirement, would strengthen this without adding friction.