Motivation

Why build infrastructure for collective work?

We’re deep in a poly crisis with seemingly no end and no hope in sight: everything from political uncertainty in the US and elsewhere, health insecurity stemming from a global pandemic, workplace insecurity from AI, geopolitical insecurity, to environmental insecurity.

The systems we’ve tried until now haven’t helped. If anything, they either caused it, made things worse, or simply can’t react fast enough to what’s unfolding.

Maybe time for something different?

We believe the world needs functional democratic organisations. Now.

You can call them many things: democratic organisations, consensus-based organisations, participatory organisations. But it all means the same thing: groups where people discuss and decide together on the issues important to them—collectives, newsrooms, unions, cooperatives, NGOs and others.

Instead of mega corporations, we should aim for lots of small, resilient organisations and groups. Not in theory, not eventually, not one day. Now. Working at scale, backed by secure infrastructure that works, blends into the background, and lets people organise without burning out.

The issue feels urgent because we're in a moment where democracy feels fragile, alternatives to extractive capitalism are desperately needed, yet the very organisations building these alternatives lack the tools to scale effectively.

Participatory organisations don’t have the right tools.

They’re struggling with extractive, inappropriate software exactly when the world needs them to survive what we’re in and what’s coming.

These organisations are combining together seven subscriptions, training people on absurd workflows and workarounds, and hoping group memory doesn’t vanish when the disappearing messages run out or their tool changes its pricing and everyone has to move off the tool because it's become unaffordable.

Big Tech solutions are the default choice for organisations who should not be letting their data anywhere near these platforms. And the safe alternatives are so painful or inappropriate for their needs that people give up.

When bad systems are convenient and good systems require effort, the bad systems win by default.

Right now, there’s no software designed for democratic governance from first principles, that also guarantees privacy.

We want to build that alternative: a tool that makes collective reasoning visible, preserves context, and enables distributed decision-making, all without harvesting data or spying on users.