The factory, taken apart and rebuilt

On stage: the nine fade; a new bar begins.

Narrator. That night the factory was taken apart. The next day I built a second one from its parts, rule for rule, to write the book you are reading: a conductor, a librarian, a historian, a researcher, a storyteller, a publisher and more, each with its own page of rules. Its first job was to read the first factory's record.

Narrator. Now I am planning a third, bigger one, and it shares three things between people: one brief, one board where the work is written down, and one hold. It is for a team I am taking to Web Summit, the technology conference in Lisbon: several people, each to run their own agents. It has not run yet. The parts are the same as the first factory's.

Conductor (pacing, to the reader): Same clock. Same hold. More hands on it.

Dramatised (the conductor's line). The book's own team, ported on 30 October; the Web Summit team as I described it on 1 November. The second and third factories are this book's record, not the talk's.