Context:

The Collaborative Technology Alliance is in the process of a “Collabathon” in which members are creating proposals to allocate funds that the collective has designated for the purpose of advancing the mission of the collective. One key issue for those interested in building sustainable socially cohesive technology is how to negotiate the question of a business model, because the traditional ways of building scaleable social tech have led to a host of unintended and negative consequences. Might we be able to imagine a business model, starting from scratch, that could become a blueprint for other teams and projects who are interested and willing to put aside the idea of becoming a hypergrowth popular tech platform but still committed to making a huge impact, doing so in a way that reflects the principles we share? Much like traditional funding structures, it needs to be both customizable and particular enough to accommodate a certain group of teams, funders, and purpose while being open enough to be useful as a jumping-off place for other teams, funders, and purposes. This is a proposal to allocate funds towards that important, possibly essential goal.

Introduction:

The Collaborative Technology Alliance brings together technologists from many backgrounds with many different visions for how tech may be built. Among technology builders in the CTA and beyond, there’s a major challenge in resourcing, especially for technology that puts social impact above hypergrowth and investor returns.

We think there are possibilities for reshaping the system, starting with an experiment with just a few people, learning in public, and creating a repeatable model for a more co-operative approach that might inform a wider group of CTA and other builders going forward, who embrace the pledge of the CTA and want to use collaborative models that work. The core principles that we agree to in the CTA are wellbeing, co-creation, agency, justice, openness, and emergence. Using these principles, we believe we’ll discover a more healthy way to build technology, one that aligns value creation for builders, funders, and most importantly, the people who rely on the products.

Problem Statement:

CTA members are well aware of negative downstream effects of building tech within the traditional tech ecosystem:

1. Incentive structures that put speed and growth above sustainability and responsibility
2. Frequently, a shift away from mission into profit as companies grow and “compete” in winnner-take-all framings of the marketplace
3. Disregard of people who use the products, especially those from marginalized identities or backgrounds that are under-represented among those who build tech, partly as a result of incredibly inequitable representation among those funded
4. Reinforcement of extractive approaches in general that typically lead to exploitation of common resources (including people’s attention and time) in service of only a few people receiving benefit
5. Generally speaking, early-stage investment is difficult to access, especially for those in non-dominant groups and for companies that are not primarily focused on narrow and quickly-scaling problems that are easier to reason about in terms of quick and outsized returns, including co-ops

We’re also aware of some of the traditional challenges that lead teams to work within the traditional ecosystem:

1. Software designed to scale has large up-front capital costs typically with at least a 2-3 year timeline before meaningful revenue is captured, often more like 5-7 years.
2. Part of the expense relates to developer costs and part to the need to pay for other kinds of 3rd party services that enable technology development to happen more incrementally
3. Technology entrepreneurs have been trained to think in terms set by VCs, partly because other funding options are limited, partly because there’s been a culture of fundraising-as-a-mark-of-success, partly because capital has recently been cheap and plentiful. “Scale” is the goal because VCs typically distribute investments across a number of companies with the expectation that few of them will in fact return the investment, so the ones that do need to do so in multiples only possible with quick and dominant scaling and “owning the market”
4. Entrepreneurs often have an outsized belief in their own capacity to build a sustainable company, achieve product-market fit, and satisfy and retain customers.
5. Opting to make social technology open source often occurs in a developer-driven way without resources to include design, research, or product management, and often leads to problems of ongoing maintenance as contributors drift away.

Goals & Objectives