Hylo is a free, non-profit, open source community platform for purpose-driven groups.

We are building stewardship tools for communities that bridge online and on-the-ground collaboration. We give groups the tools they need to coordinate real-world action, through a prosocial network for emergent, decentralized impact.

Prosocial groups are highly cooperative, self-organizing, and effective in achieving shared goals with shared resources. We’re the only platform building collective governance and finance tools based on Prosocial and Sociocracy–the leading frameworks for decentralized decisions based on successful management of public goods.

The solutions to climate collapse require local and global coordination–online, on-chain, and hands-in-soil collaboration.

Hylo grows collaborative communities with a culture of stewardship–the precursor to successful use of web3 technologies. These communities need purpose-built tools that grow the trust and relationships necessary for effective group coordination, plus the governance tools to take action with shared resources.

For the past two years we’ve built Hylo with a distributed, multi-stakeholder coalition, without on-chain decision making. We’ve learned a lot about how to coordinate diverse stakeholders to build an open-source, public good, and non-profit software platform.

While we’ve focused on web2 technology in building Hylo, we’ve been in the web3 space for years. Our core stewards contributed to building DAOstack and Regen Network. Now that we understand the fundamentals of both community building and web3 tech, we are ready to take the first steps to integrate Hylo’s coordination tools with web3 technology.

Here’s our plan to build out tools for community wallets, token based authentication, & stewardship of group resources.

We will allow groups to associate their group on Hylo with a crypto wallet address, and we will pull in transactions and governance actions taken by that wallet and display them in Hylo’s UI for anyone in that group to view. This first step creates an initial level of transparency and accountability for groups on Hylo who are using web3 tech to benefit their communities, and makes Hylo usable for basic DAO organizing.

Next we will allow group members to authenticate with their wallet, which will allow group membership based on the contents of that wallet, such as a membership token or NFT.

The next step is the implementation of our reputation system, Trust Graph. We will allow group members to use conviction voting to indicate their level of confidence in another member’s ability to fill a leadership role. When the community’s trust in a member exceeds a certain threshold, that person is empowered to step into that leadership role as defined by the community.

At this stage, we can give groups the ability to collectively steward a community wallet. Members of the community will have access to the wallet based on the roles and trust defined by the group. Just as trust and access are granted by the community, they can also be revoked at the will of the community when circumstances change.

We’ve operated as a real-world DAO since 2020, with participation from our community of 400+ open-source contributors in co-creating Hylo as a public good technology. It’s time to make it official. With the infrastructure described above, we will activate our community as a full-fledged DAO, giving our stakeholders a formal role in the stewardship and evolution of Hylo.

This plan is adapted from our Gitcoin grants page. If you’d like to support our work, please head over there to contribute.

Next up, we’ll share about our partnership with Holochain and our plans to use agent-centric architecture to expand user sovereignty, security, and privacy.