✿ How Spectrum Path knows your path
The family mosaic
Every family that joins builds a mosaic of tiles in the two-minute joining wizard. The mosaic is how the site knows who you are without asking for a single document — and it powers matching, the personalised feed, and the resources shelf. Private to the community, always.
1Building the mosaic — the joining wizard
Five tap-through screens. Every answer is optional — a sparse mosaic is a valid mosaic. Each group of tiles carries a matching weight: the rarer and more life-shaping the trait, the more it counts.
💚 Support needs · weight 3
🗣️ Communication & sensory · weight 2 each
🧩 Co-occurring · weight 2 each
🌱 Life stage & presentation · stage 3, flags 2
🏫 School path · weight 2 + 🌍 Country · weight 1
2The finished mosaic — one per family
The ticked tiles become the family's mosaic — stored privately, visible only to signed-in members, never to the public internet, never sold (the founding charter). Display names can be anything you like. And everywhere on the site, the mosaic travels with the family as a small ribbon of their colours next to their name — on posts, replies, match cards and friend lists — so you recognise a familiar path at a glance.
✿ The Harlow family
United Kingdom · founding family #14
3Mosaics meet — how two families match
On the Families page the site compares your mosaic with every other member's, tile by tile. Shared tiles are highlighted ✿ and score their weight; the total becomes a match percentage. Only tiles both families actually chose are compared — nothing is guessed.
✿ The Harlows (you)
🌙 NightOwlMum & family
Shared weights 3+3+2+2+2+1 = 13 of your possible 16 ✿
4The mosaic quietly shapes the whole site
One mosaic, four jobs — all computed on the member's own device, no tracking, no algorithm learning from behaviour.
Privacy, as promised in the charter: mosaics are visible only to signed-in members · matching runs in your own browser · mosaic data never leaves the community database and is never shared or sold · display names can be anonymous · children are never named.