Building a community or organisation and building software are not so different. They're both about system architecture, in different materials.
I see software product design through a facilitation lens, but scalable. Tools and workflows that can turn complex problems into an intuitive, accessible experience.
AI that finds community groups the grants they match best with, and helps them write the application. I lead the product, and increasingly build the AI automation behind it.
An international platform that lets groups raise and spend money transparently, without a huge compliance burden. I was on the exec team building the company and the product.
Software for making decisions together, used by groups around the world. Built by a worker-owned cooperative of technologists, facilitators and activists.
Back up your secrets using the trust in your social network — peer-to-peer, decentralised, and built to make cryptography usable by regular people.
Legal, financial, and strategic plumbing to remove barriers, meet compliance requirements, and unblock resources so they flow where they do the most good.
Led a large strategic change initiative to increase equity and improve data-driven decision-making at Aotearoa's largest community grant funder, Lotteries.
Charitable fundholding for unincorporated New Zealand initiatives, enabling $8m to reach 170 groups so far, increasing compliance capacity while decreasing the compliance burden.
Trustee for seven years, holding fiduciary responsibility for a donor-advised fund that has given more than $100 million to charitable causes in Aotearoa since 2009.
US fiscal sponsor to hundreds of education, social impact and civic participation initiatives. Donations grew a hundredfold to US$30m during my tenure.
Fiscal sponsor to thousands of open source software projects worldwide. I built the governance board, team and organisational structure from the ground up.
Aotearoa's first national fundholding service for social enterprises, letting more than 100 unincorporated groups raise over $6m.
Building a community is systems architecture too. Shaping the flow of information, leadership, and human energy to maximise autonomy and collaboration simultaneously.
A network of social entrepreneurs that grew from a dozen people in Wellington to hundreds around the world, inventing its own governance, funding and decision-making as it went.
A framework for understanding diverse leadership and project lifecycles in collaborative groups and emergent environments.
Co-author of Enspiral's book on how to build radically collaborative, self-managing workplaces — real stories and tools rather than theory.
We open-sourced how Enspiral actually works — its governance, money and decision-making — and in doing so started documentation-driven leadership across the network.
Loomio's processes and policies for running a worker-owned cooperative without bosses, published so other co-ops could copy them.
What if you started from facilitation principles and worked toward the software, rather than the other way round? Applying facilitation to online spaces.
Software and processes for collaborative funding — pool money and decide together how to spend it.
An international conference bringing technology, business, government, education and civil society together — applying the principles of open source well beyond software.
A social lab for youth mental health and wellbeing, run as a partnership between Enspiral and the Ministry of Social Development.