I applied to 's Entrepreneur in Residence pilot.
In the process of assembling my application, I wrote a bunch of stuff I've been trying to articulate for months. I have so many unpublished posts from the past 6 months in my leaflet drafts that attempt to say much of what I submitted. So, I'm sharing my submission! It doubles as a bit of a bio so y'all can learn more about me, my motivations, what I've been working on, and what I'd like to work on in the future.
If anyone sees anything that seems inaccurate, let me know in the comments and I'll correct. Won't fix my application but New Public is tagged here so I'm sure any major and/or awkward corrections would get back to them. 😅
What past project or product are you most proud of and why?
I cofounded an organization called C4 Atlanta in 2010, a nonprofit who’s founding mission was to “connect Atlanta's arts entrepreneurs with the people, skills, and tools to build a sustainable creative practice”. I spent nearly 2 years working on this project and in that time I recruited the founding board as well as the initial cohort for Entrepreneurship in the Arts, a workshop series that took sixteen working artists through their first real business training and produced the organization's first earned income. The impact may have been small relative to what many in tech and activist spaces aspire to, but the relationships I built and the impact we had on the lives of artists around Atlanta, and especially the sixteen artists who participated in our first workshop series means more to me than anything I’ve ever worked on. Where I’ve spent most of my career trying to empower cultural workers and changemakers through tech, here I actually got to do the work directly.
Describe your hunch in 50 words or less:
A group's ability to decide and act together is agency ceded by default to their tools' architecture and administrators. A system of group interoperability that lets groups directly hold and transfer and revoke authority deliberately would let them keep that agency instead of ceding it.
Describe your hunch and how you plan to explore it (2–3 paragraphs):
A group's ability to decide and act together through online tools is agency ceded to those tools and whoever administers them. More than a matter of choice in community tools or who administers them, this is a matter of 40+ years of computing architecture. A person with admin rights on a shared drive or a Discord server doesn't necessarily give their consent or have the group's consent to decide anything on the group's behalf. They may be the person who set the tool up, or the member others have decided is "the technical one." This plays out the same way whether the group is a mutual aid coalition, a cooperative, an arts collective, or a fandom forum: the architecture defaults to putting power in the same hands regardless of what any specific group actually wants. A fix built into one app for one kind of group can only return agency to the groups using that particular app. And such solutions inherently can’t be transferred elsewhere without expensive and complicated integration work that only large enterprise systems have ever been able to invest resources into. The pattern itself needs an answer that isn't specific to any one tool. Using ATProto as a foundation, I want to build a system of group interoperability that helps communities keep and practice collective agency.
I'm starting with Groundwork, a governance tool I'm about to put into use in working groups I facilitate directly. It's built around the role-based authority and accountability at the center of sociocracy: someone takes on a role through a specific offer they accept rather than through appointment. At any point they can revoke their consent to hold the authority of a role for any reason such as if the accountabilites attached to that role change. Groundwork is one governance system the underlying protocol is designed to support, not a prescription for what governance should look like for all groups. I'm starting here because everything I want to build next depends on proof the protocol supports the needs of communities to distribute authority while exercising it collectively.
I'll test Groundwork in partnership. First inside working groups I'm forming and facilitating myself, through Ecosystem Action Research (@ecosystemaction.com) and with creatives working on storytelling and media-making projects as well as small creative tools. Interest has been expressed by people in the ATproto community to augment their own governance practices, including at least one group wanting to experiment with Groundwork to help manage their sociocratic decision-making processes.
What comes next are experiments in building services that bridge authority between individuals, groups, other apps and platforms, and AI systems. Examples of this kind of service are already being explored in the Atproto ecosystem through projects like Arbiter from Roomy, Habitat, OpenSocial, and the evolving “Concierge” framework. This is a new class of tools for managing group permissions that a group can swap out with alternative vendors and implementations, that carry the group’s decisions around authority and information security into the other systems. These can be apps custom built for these systems, centralized platforms like Discord and Youtube, as well as AI Agents acting on behalf of a group. This way decisions, discussions, and systems administration stop living in disconnected apps that don't natively integrate with each other. The three months of this program will be spent in exploration that informs how to get there: what groups actually need once Groundwork is shown to facilitate effective governance work, where the underlying protocol expands and limits collective agency, and what kind of tools will facilitate sustainable community co-design.
Why did you pick this idea to work on?
My primary motivation is to empower social movement organizing networks by changing the mechanisms for holding and exercising power on the internet and in sociopolitical and economic spheres. Furthermore, I’ve been looking for opportunities to build systems like this for the past 20+ years on platforms and protocols with similar ambitions to Atproto that have for one reason or another panned out. The existence and efforts of groups like Blacksky, Roost, and New Public tell me that we’re closer than we’ve ever been to being able to deliver an Internet tuned towards collective agency to local and virtual communities alike.
Do you already have domain expertise in this area?
My work as a technologist has primarily been at the intersections of community organizing, nonprofit organizations, small businesses, and government organizations. I’ve worked as a facilitator and translator between technologists and non-technologists my entire career, and have helped many new organizations get off the ground or pivot through strategic planning, brand development, and community co-design processes.
Who do you imagine your users/customers to be? How do you plan to find them?
The people this is ultimately for are movement organizers: union stewards, mutual aid coordinators, cooperative members, people already doing the types of decision-making and tech administration Groundwork is being designed for. They're not who I'm starting with. Movement organizations run with tight resource constraints and can't afford to spend time or money on tools that don’t work or serve them. Asking them to bet on something unproven asks more of them than is responsible. They’re also not a viable vector for adoption or sustainability.
The early adopters I’d like to build with are communities focused on arts, culture, and storytelling. Communities where the stakes of trying something new are lower. The working groups I'm already forming around storytelling and media-making are the actual mechanism for reaching them. Organizers already move through the same cultural networks these communities occupy, so proving my hunches there builds a tested path back into organizing work.
Why does building healthier social technology matter to you?
Take your pick. I want people to thrive. I want to live in a more equitable society. I want to empower people working on every dimension of environmental and humanitarian crisis. I want to help small businesses build in reciprocity with their communities. I want to take down giant multinational corporations through cultural organizing and shifts in power dynamics whether through technology or policy and build new bottom-up coalitions of institutions to take their place. Again, take your pick.
What are other ideas you might want to pursue? (optional)
Every idea I have (and there are many, all the time) builds on this same foundation. Pivoting to new projects or hypothesis ultimately still furthers my same underlying goals. I’m also interested in helping other people with their projects. It’s the collaboration with other creative people rather than any specific project idea that feeds my soul
It just occurred to me that I could have mentioned in my application that I want to build Web Browser tech on top of all this.
It looks like @vivaldi.com entered the enterprise web browser market! The biggest opportunity for browser innovation is to build a social browser that does everything an enterprise browser does but for distributed networks. Enterprise capable, but bottom up ad-hoc org coalitions too. Again:
Kinda wish I'd added something about this to the application, but it was already pretty crowded.
Every once in awhile I'll see someone talk about building an atproto browser. I think focusing on the protocol misses the true opportunity which is to bring the affordances of the protocol to all browsers, and thinking in terms of building for a narrow community/lifestyle experience can open doors.
Whether I get in on this Entrepreneurship in Residence program or not, this is essentially what I'd love to be working on (aside from the ecosystem sustainability work I'm about to kick off).
I dream of a cross protocols effort to define interoperable distributed groups/communities with role-based membership rather than acls, and ocaps/concaps/zcaps/ucans/etc for qttached services and extensibility. In my mind this would be the baseline for collective agency to rebuild computing around.
I posted that a month ago while trying to figure out language for talking about all this stuff. If nothing else, this application has helped me find words and possibly some coherent narrative around work I'm doing!
And if I don't get one of the EIR residencies, I hope my other efforts will help support the people who do!