Unleashing the capacity of purpose-driven groups to change the world
Hylo is a community-led, prosocial coordination platform for purpose-driven groups.
Hylo is open-source, non-profit, and driven by participatory design with real-world groups at the forefront of regenerative agriculture, community resilience, peer learning, equity, inclusive capital, and place-based organizing.
The tech has many unique aspects such as nested groups and cross-group collaboration, which lead to emergent cooperation between groups — generating broader coalitions with more power to address common goals.
Hylo is more than a codebase; we are community leaders and prosocial facilitators that guide our member groups on best practices in community stewardship. We are learning together alongside our ecosystem of friends and partners, and we know that successful coordination takes more than technology — it requires deep trust, strong relationships, and a lot of human care.
Our Vision & Theory of Change
Technologies are products of the culture in which they emerge, and they guide the emergence of new cultures. New culture and new tools are co-evolutionary. As we work towards the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, we must envision both the culture and corresponding tools that can birth that future.
Hylo activates the full potential of purpose-driven groups to create a livable future for all.
Hylo does this by helping groups evolve a healthy culture. A healthy group is prosocial: productive, equitable, and collaborative. It features a resilient constellation of relationships marked by trust and accountability, with clear agreements including protocols for decision making, distributing resources, and handling conflict.
Our theory of change is that deep trust, strong relationships, and a collaborative culture lead to the most impactful groups. Before people can successfully engage in complex coordination like making decisions together about money, they need to know each other, and they need to trust each other.
Technology will be essential to coordinating at a scale necessary to bring our ecosystems back into balance, but tech alone is not enough. The proper place for these tools is to enhance in-person experiences and strengthen face-to-face relationships, not replace them. Hylo is a prosthesis for reconnecting individuals to community and purpose within their local landscape.
We envision a future where humans are liberated to live a life aligned with purpose; where everyone is free to give their gifts in service to a greater whole. In this future, human society is aligned with the wellbeing of the living biosphere and the more-than-human world, rights of nature are protected, and Indigenous leadership is respected. In this future, the healing and wellbeing of individuals and communities is prioritized, systems of oppression are dismantled, and human culture deeply embodies care, peace, and unity. In this future, our children are thriving. We offer this work for our ancestors and the ones yet to come.
How We Work: Participatory Design
Hylo is built through 100% relationship-driven development. We listen to the needs of our partners — people already working to grow healthy communities — and collaborate to co-design tools to amplify their work. The tools we build into Hylo as a result of these participatory design processes are then available for every group on Hylo to use and benefit from.
Our partners include the Planetary Health Alliance, Prosocial World, OpenTEAM, Regen Network, Salmon Nation, and many other active groups leading the movement to create a world that works for all. Because Hylo is built in deep partnership with these groups according to their real-world needs, this platform is a unique expression of these communities and their values. Hylo stands out precisely because it is birthed from and embedded within this web of relationship — it is an integral part of the emerging ecosystem powering the regenerative movement.
Hylo's Stewardship
Hylo is maintained by Terran Collective, a California Bay Area community of care and practice dedicated to amplifying cooperation among people regenerating our communities and the planet. Hylo Foundation is a fiscally-sponsored 501c3, and Terran co-stewards Hylo with Holo Ltd (the makers of Holochain) who make the technology available under the open source Apache License 2.0. We are in the process of assembling an advisory board and establishing an indepedent business entity for Hylo. Our goal is to transition to a structure that enshrines Hylo as a technology commons with a participatory governance model that formally includes stakeholder voices.
Our team operations follow the dynamic governance framework of Sociocracy, with a General Circle, Purpose Circle, Product Circle, Dev Circle, and Community Circle connected to our broader ecosystem of stakeholders.
Tibet Sprague, Director of Technology
Tibet Sprague is a systems entrepreneur, communitarian technologist, and passionate evangelist of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. He is founder and core steward of the Terran Collective, and Director of Technology for Hylo. He also stewards the Collaborative Technology Alliance, facilitating collaboration and interoperability among humane social technologists and platforms. Tibet loves to weave community, facilitate councils and other prosocial processes, and bring people together to regenerate the Bay Area bioregion he resides in. Tibet graduated from Brown University with a degree in Computer Science.
Clare Politano, Director of Product
Clare is a mother, a technologist, a land steward, and a community organizer weaving systems and tools for a regenerative future. With a background in non-profit communications and software engineering, she has spent over a decade at the forefront of using technology as a tool to mobilize communities for change. Clare leads product development for Hylo, where she facilitates processes to co-design tech solutions for real-world groups. Through this work, Clare has developed a specialization in participatory governance and community stewardship, guiding numerous groups to grow communities that are equitable and impactful. She is a ProSocial facilitator and holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Virginia.
Krisha Subramanian, Community Lead
Krisha has a background in business development and sales, though her passions lie in holistic wellness, regenerative living, social justice, and earth-based traditions. She is a life-long student of Ayurveda and is in perpetual inquiry around how we can live in greater harmony with ourselves, our community, and planet. She stewards a 50-hectare regenerative land project in the cloud forest of Costa Rica.
Aaron Broduer, Director of Design
Aaron is an interface and systems designer, artist, musician, builder, and entrepreneur. His work in technology designing and building social apps, sales systems, satellite solar design tools, distributed governance tools, and nationwide activism platforms has touched millions. He is dedicated to designing systems and tools for resilience and thriving in an uncertain future. He experiments with building closed-loop products with lighting business Alchemica, and he is a contributor to the Holochain ecosystem through Lightningrod Labs.
Tom Watson, Senior Software Engineer
Hailing from Canberra, Australia, Tom arrives into 2024 deeply pondering 1) our relationship to place, 2) cultural practices that build community (eg: rites of passage) and 3) What is “regenerative culture”, and can we define it without it being captured by the marketing departments of the hegemony. Tom has been focusing on mobile development for the team over the last year.
Yasmine El Baggari, Community Steward
A native of Morocco, now based in San Francisco, Yasmine is passionate about connecting people and bridging cultures to encourage a more peaceful caring world. She launched Voyaj, a platform that connects people from around the globe for one-on-one meaningful exchanges to foster global understanding. For the past four years, Yasmine's reach has included work with the World Bank, a Masters in Human Development and Psychology at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and with the US State Department as an "Engage America" Ambassador. She has spoken at international conferences, including the World Economic Forum, the Middle East Studies Association, and Obama's Global Entrepreneurship Summit. Yasmine has traveled to all 50 U.S. states, 40+ countries on her own and was welcomed by 250+ families globally. She is simply on a mission to bring back openness, curiosity, and empathy into our world.