To Community

To Community is a set of strategies for bonding companies to communities. It’s also an open research program on how to transition society to new forms of community ownership and governance. Here’s what we’re working on:

1. Transitions Calculators: calculators to help transition companies and open source software projects to community governance, funded by the NSF and DIIF (Ford, Sloan, Omidyar, Schmidt Futures, Open Collective).
2. Open Founder Interviews: research on founder openness to alternative financing, leading toward a public article. See below for summary and how to contribute.
3. Product Discovery as Cooperative Communication: mathematical modeling research. See the project 1-pager.
4. Software for E2C: an open-source software framework to help companies exit to community. See the To Community 1-pager and our YC pitch video.

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Open Founder Interviews

We are looking for collaborators—founders, investors, and researchers—on the founder interview project. By talking to founders and investors, we hope to better understand the incentives and openness to collective financing in early-stage technology startups. For example, how open are founders to setting up a community pool for their users and stakeholders? Under what conditions can founders negotiate capped returns with investors? Under what conditions can investors tell founders to implement some form of democratic decision-making in their startup?

Our target deliverables are (in order):

• a decision tree for collective financing and an updated causal system map of startup and investor incentives
• an open data set of interviews with founders and investors (including other ethnographic data)
• through interviews, a decision on whether to focus on founders or investors for further research and development
• a public business-model canvas for “To Community” itself, as an open-source and collectively-governed entity (either nonprofit or for-profit) that helps companies pursue collective financing
• a proposal for collective financing (legal, technical, etc.) synthesizing token airdrops, progressive decentralization, exit-to-community, capped returns, and other options
• an HBR-style general audience article summarizing these results

If you are interested in getting involved, please message Divya Siddarth on the Metagov Slack or via email.

If you are a founder or investor and would be willing to sit down for a quick 15-minute interview with us—summaries and notes from all interviews will be posted publicly in our lab notebook—please use this Calendly to grab some time!

Current contributors

• Joshua Tan, Metagov & Oxford (@thelastjosh)
• Tara Merk, CNRS, Metagov, and Blockchaingov (@mpgdd)
• Seth Frey, UC Davis
• Divya Siddarth, Collective Intelligence Project (@divyasiddarth)
• Nathan Schneider, CU Boulder
• Patrick Shafto, Institute for Advanced Studies & Rutgers
• Luke Miller, Notre Dame (@lukvmil)

This website (and the corresponding GitHub repo) represents our lab notebook. We’ll be posting updates here regularly. Like any open-source project, you can contribute.