I have spent my career working at weaving the heart of the arts with the difficult needs of sustainable business. From years in grassroots activism and social justice organizations, to six years as a program manager for PEN America fighting for free speech, to running PageDAO—a decentralized autonomous organization for unstoppable publishing—I have seen the same pattern repeat itself.
Successful for-profit organizations thrive because of exploitation. Large scale holistic recovery for our planet requires a different kind of organization.
I've worked with management consultants, hedge funds, and startups, and I've witnessed the callous approaches to traditional operations. Over the last several years I've partnered with EthiKai Consulting in the UK and Platform Coops in Berlin to learn more about how to build thriving digital platform cooperatives. Group coordination has many hidden challenges. We know the visible ones: in-fighting, bad actors, unreliable partners. But we pay little attention to the overall conditions we operate in.
Our society is experiencing a rational erosion of trust in governments, institutions, strangers, and meaning beyond survival in late-stage capitalism.
This is a fight. irl.coop is not just software; it is a defiant weave of solidarity economy principles and the local/slow movement against the status quo.
The Pull to Centralize
Why do we keep losing this fight? Because there is a "hidden physics" to our social systems.
Network theory, from Barabási’s work on scale-free networks to Tirole’s analysis of platforms, tells us that systems tend to coalesce around hubs. Preferential attachment means the big get bigger. Network effects mean the useful get more useful.
This centralization lowers the coordination cost. It is simply cheaper and easier to trust a monopoly than to negotiate with a confederation. I've watched DAOs crumble because the friction of decentralized governance—the endless voting, the opacity, the in-fighting—was too high. Without distinct design, cooperatives self-limit. They hit a glass ceiling of complexity and collapse back into hierarchy or chaos.
Ostrom's Exceptions
But there are exceptions. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for documenting them. She found that local communities could manage shared resources (the "commons") sustainably for centuries without a central leviathan or privatization—from Swiss alpine pastures to Nepalese irrigation systems.
She identified Polycentric Governance as the key. These systems worked because they had:
- Clear boundaries: Who is in and who is out.
- Proportional equivalence: Costs align with benefits.
- Monitoring and Sanctions: Graduated penalties for bad actors.
- Nested Enterprises: Local groups nested within larger systems.
These polycentric systems lower the cost of cooperation through experimentation and overlapping jurisdiction. They are rare, but they are the only proven antidote to the tragedy of the commons.
irl.coop: The Polycentric Weave
irl.coop is an open-source suite of tools designed to encode Ostrom’s principles into digital infrastructure. We are building the finance, operations, revenue, delivery, and culture tools needed for a solidarity economy—but with a privacy primitive at the core.
We use technologies like Lit Protocol, Ceramic, and Citus to ensure data is user-owned. We are building for organic growth, decay, confederation, and separation. We want infrastructure that supports the lifecycle of a group, rather than causing its breakdown.
Here is how we apply polycentric fixes to the specific blockers that strangle cooperation today:
| Vision (what you want) | Main blocker (why it’s hard today) | How irl.coop helps (the everyday‑language fix) |
|---|---|---|
| Community solar networks | Trust gaps – people don’t know if the energy they’re buying really comes from the local solar project, and they can’t be sure the revenue is being split fairly. | Nested Ceramic streams + proportional splits – irl.coop stores the solar‑farm’s production data in a Ceramic data stream that’s publicly readable but cryptographically signed. Each household’s share is calculated automatically, so the “who gets what†math is transparent and tamper‑proof. The nesting lets a local micro‑grid sit inside a larger regional grid without losing that same auditability. |
| Local food collectives | Opacity fights – growers, distributors, and consumers can’t see who’s doing what, leading to disputes over quality, pricing, or fair wages. | Agentic operations + IPFS bounties + local monitoring – irl.coop gives every participant a lightweight “agent†that records actions (harvest, delivery, payment) on the decentralized IPFS network. Bounties reward people who verify data (e.g., a farmer confirming a batch’s weight). Because the logs are public and immutable, everyone can see the full supply‑chain trail in real time, cutting the guesswork and mistrust. |
| Dev / machinist co‑ops | Misalignments – the value each member contributes (code, machining time, design) often doesn’t line up with the share of profits they receive, causing friction. | Coherence pools + graduated sanctions – irl.coop creates a “coherence pool†that automatically matches contributions (hours logged, code commits, parts produced) to a proportional share of revenue. If a member repeatedly under‑delivers, the system can apply a graduated penalty (e.g., reduced payout) that’s visible to everyone, encouraging accountability while still being fair. |
| Space / food / events / mutual‑aid projects | Civic fatigue – volunteers get burned out when coordination tools are clunky, meetings are endless, and it’s hard to see the impact of each effort. | Federated no‑code + collective‑choice events – irl.coop supplies a no‑code UI that lets organizers spin up “federated†event pages (each community runs its own instance but they all share the same data schema). Participants can vote on tasks, see progress dashboards, and sign up for shifts without learning a new platform. The federated design means each local group stays autonomous while still contributing to a larger network of mutual‑aid actions. |
| Volunteer campaigns (door‑knocking) | Evaporating pools – fundraising or volunteer pools dry up quickly because donors can’t verify that their contributions are being used effectively, and turnout logs are scattered. | Privacy agents + nested turnout logs – irl.coop adds privacy‑preserving “agents†that record who showed up, when, and what was achieved, but only reveal aggregate data to protect individual privacy. The nested logs let a campaign embed its turnout data inside a larger civic‑engagement network, giving donors a clear, auditable picture of impact without exposing personal details. |
The Ensemble
I believe in the power of the ensemble. I believe that when we align our egos to a higher cause, we can stretch what humans are capable of.
We are not just building tools. We are building a choice. A choice to walk away from the extractive platforms that treat us as data points, and to walk toward a future where we are sovereign partners.
This is an invitation to weave with us. Fork the repo. Deploy a home server. Braid your community into irl.coop.
Written by
irl.coop
hello@irl.coop