Collaborating with Money
Three practical open source tools for re-imagining money with a different set of values
I work in the social impact space, where people are brought together by a desire to make a positive difference, and by values like cooperation and caring relationships. In this space, money sometimes gets a bad rap because people feel it doesn’t represent their values. Money brings a lot of baggage with it from our individualistic, capitalist society. It can be uncomfortable.
But I’m interested in what can happen when we stay with that discomfort instead of avoiding or shying away. Can we unpack what this money thing is and why it’s so powerful? What could it be with a different set of values?
I’ve been working on some projects that tell an alternative story about money, about growing trust, building commons, and strengthening community.
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Cobudget
I started working on Cobudget at Enspiral, a network of social entrepreneurs that does a lot with financial interdependence, pooling resources, and sharing income. We needed a way to involve a lot of different people in setting the budget.
It started as basically an ugly spreadsheet. I put all the financial contributions that month down the side and all the projects wanting funding across the top. People could come in and put their part of the budget toward the projects that they wanted to support.
Cobudget grew from a spreadsheet into a great piece of open source software, which is now used by many groups around the world. For example, the Edmund Hillary Fellowship used Cobudget to enable fellows to fund projects they wanted to support in the community.
What I’ve noticed about groups who use Cobudget is a real increase in engagement, feelings that the budget is accessible, and a sense that we can put our funds together, build things together, and share ownership of outcomes. It’s kind of like internal crowdfunding using shared resources, and it really helps build trust and strengthen the community itself.
Open Collective
Open Collective began with trying to solve a problem in the world of open source software. Distributed, collaborative communities come together to produce valuable open source software that does important things. People come to rely on this software and build businesses on top of it. There have been ways to contribute code back to these projects, but no real way to contribute money. People wanted to financially support these projects, to help them be more sustainable or get to the next level.
By definition, nobody owns a distributed collaboration. It doesn’t have one person’s name on it. There’s no company with a bank account that can issue receipts and invoices, which you need in order to interact financially in the world. Open Collective solved this problem through, essentially, a hack of fiscal sponsorship.
A project can come along and start an Open Collective, which kind of looks like a crowdfunding page with a ‘donate’ button, explaining who they are and what they build. They can start accepting and spending money in complete transparency, so everybody can see where funds come from and where they go. It’s accountable to the community at large.
The way the fiscal sponsorship part is accomplished is through an umbrella organization in the background, which is legally incorporated, has a bank account, hires an accountant, and pays taxes. Multiple Collectives can live under their umbrella, using it like a legal and financial commons.
Open Collective has grown beyond open source software to lots of different kinds of projects. Anyone can start one of these umbrella organizations, creating a legal and financial commons for the Collectives they want to host.
Here’s an example to make this a little more concrete. Women Who Code is an organization with a mission to support women in programming. They have a Women Who Code organization, which is legally incorporated and has a bank account. All the Women Who Code local chapters in cities around the world can have their own Open Collective with their own transparent budget.
The chapters can fund-raise in their local communities and host events through Open Collective (ticket sales go straight to their budget). They can support their community members to do cool stuff, like buying a 3D printer to hack on, or paying for childcare at events.
There is now a whole federated network of these Open Collective umbrella organizations that support different communities, each hosting a number of Collectives.
Dark Crystal
Here we cross a threshold, from the current internet we have today to the decentralized web, the crypto-powered web, web3, whatever you want to call it. (This is where we switch to black backgrounds and monospace font.)
Dark Crystal emerged out of a question:
Who gets to be a peer in peer-to-peer?
The decentralized web is the emerging future, so it’s really important that everybody gets to participate. But when you look at the demographics of who builds peer-to-peer (P2P) technology and who has cryptocurrency, unfortunately a lot of people look the same and come from a similar background. Meanwhile, other people are not able to access this world.
We were interested in why that might be. What are the barriers that people are facing? What’s putting them off?
My co-founder on this project decided to just give bitcoin to 50 of his diverse friends — people who probably otherwise wouldn’t have gotten involved with cryptocurrency — to understand their experience and what challenges they face.
We learned a lot from this experience. One of the strongest themes was around private key management, essentially passwords and secrets.
The cool thing about P2P systems is that you connect directly with the people you want to interact with. There is no bank, or company, or centralized server in between you, intermediating your relationship.
The hard thing about P2P systems is that you are responsible for your own security. There is no intermediary bank you can walk into and say, “Hey, I lost my password. Can you please let me back into my account?”
Combining anxiety around technology (for those who aren’t necessarily tech people) with anxiety around money, plus this really unforgiving security environment, was really putting a lot of people off.
We thought we could build a better way.
How Dark Crystal works
First, you take your secret, a password or any kind of secret, and put it in a crystal. Then, through the magic of math and cryptography, you split it into crystal shards.
Each of the crystal shards is unreadable; it doesn’t tell you anything about the secret on its own. You give these shards to people you trust — one to your coworker, one to your mom, one to your neighbor — and say, “Can you please keep this safe for me?”
If something happens to you or you lose your password, those people use their judgement to determine if the request is legit, and can decide to put their shards back together to reveal the secret.
Why Dark Crystal is different
The underlying technology of Dark Crystal isn’t new. What is new is backing up secrets using the trust in your social network, and the way we’re going about it.
Up to now, tools built on this technology have been really hard to use. We do this stuff for a living, and when we tried to do the sharding process we found it incredibly error prone and unwieldy. We’ve built Dark Crystal to be super accessible and easy to use.
It’s also built with a community-first mindset. Up to now, this technology has been used in really individualistic ways: enhancing personal security by splitting up passwords, so if someone breaks in to one place they can’t get the whole thing. Bringing a community mindset, focused on enhancing collective trust, creates different technology.
The other thing that makes Dark Crystal different and cool is that it’s fully P2P, built using the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol.
Scuttlebutt is maritime slang for gossip. The way a gossip protocol works is you have your device with your data, and if you come into contact (on the same network) with a friend, your devices gossip with each other. They go, “Hey, do you have any news about our mutual friends? What’s going on with that thing I’m interested in?”
If there are updates, your friends shares them with you, and you share updates with them. Then, you can go on to meet somebody else and pass on the information you learned. In this way, data can spread and people can be connected, without any central server or company in between.
There are a number of apps like Dark Crystal built on this protocol. It’s designed humanistically, mirroring the way human relationships actually work.
Building trust, commons, and community
I think we can re-imagine money. We can build different kinds of tools with a different set of values, to build the world that we want to live in.
