SOIL, short for Studies of Organizational Illness and Loss, describes itself as a project to build a systematic database of organizational autopsies. It invites founders who have closed their ventures to share what happened, and it presents the work as a way to find closure while helping future founders avoid the same path.
The site describes a structured interview framework with six modules: organizational mapping, financial analysis, a timeline of events, environmental factors, founder context and a meaning-making narrative. Contributors are promised anonymization by default, and the project says it plans to make anonymized datasets available to researchers. Each closed venture gets a cenotaph, a memorial page, and the collection of these is called the Cenotaphery.
The research section lists resources it is building, including a bibliography integrated with Zotero, a research atlas of scholars, a dataset registry, and a pathology classification called SOIL-PC v0.1. A lexicon and a research gaps map are marked as coming soon, and the diagnostics center, learning hub and clinic are marked under construction. Roles on the community side include founders, researchers, keepers who lead regional communities, and volunteers. Treat it as an early research initiative rather than a finished product, and read its privacy terms before submitting a story.
