We can't change the world by focusing only on dismantling, we have to really build up the alternative and show that it can work in a different way, and radicalize people, not through convincing them of the rightness of an ideology, but through their lived experience of true participation, of the collective power of livelihood in a non-capitalist... See more

it's important we don't rush.

Money is an important heuristic for groups to measure their capacity to support their work properly and not burn people out. Money is not the be all end all, but people get really put off by how it's been so co-opted by the capitalist, extractive system that we're trying to escape. My theory of change is, instead of running away from it, we need to... See more

It's hard to sit there complaining about paying money if you can see it costs $300 get the accountant to file that thing we need, and that the person you enjoy talking to gets paid this much. Seeing it all transparently is quite powerful.

When a Collective joins a Fiscal Host, they get a clear service: we'll hold your money, you don't have to go get a bank account and form your own legal entity, we're going to take care of some really annoying paperwork stuff for you, and we'll give you this nice online tool that lets you share your budget transparently and pay your expenses. On the... See more

If a commons is being managed successfully, individuals feel like they're getting back more than they're putting in, that the thing is more than the sum of its parts, that running it together means we have something more powerful than any of us could on our own.

I want us to be writing more of these utopian sci-fi stories, because that's my dream, living in that post-capitalist Star Trek world. We can start in the world that we live in now, creating little bubbles of that new future, really living it, and inviting more and more people to live in that different reality with us, in a in a deeply real, moving... See more

There's what I mentioned about the mission failing to translate across time. For six years, Open Collective has had people in the center holding very strongly to a certain set of values. If those people are no longer there, where's that strength going to come from? That's difficult to design. You can see lots of examples out there of large, diverse... See more

Design-by-committee is a real risk for a software company. It's so hard to build software, because you can literally build anything, there are infinite possibilities, so you have to have a really coherent design and product vision. I really don't think you can distribute that to thousands of people, so we have to figure out where in the system... See more