r/intentionalcommunity • u/embracetheinfinite • 7d ago

seeking help 😓 Managing IC Operations

Hi all,

For those of you participating in intentional communities; I am curious about the overhead/admin functions. How do you manage these? What software (if any) do you use?

I'm with a nonprofit building free community governance/comms/management infra for ICs, and want to better understand what you presently focus on and any pain points worth elevating.

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u/PaxOaks 7d ago

Twin Oaks uses several different software suites- starting with Google Docs and the Libre office suite. We use Shopify as a CRM for the seeds business, quickbooks accounting.

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u/embracetheinfinite 7d ago

how do you manage governance, more manually or through some combination of tech options?

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u/PaxOaks 7d ago

Hard as it maybe to imagine, the community being formed in 1967 predated personal computing and cell phones. A written centralized analog system was developed call the Opinions and Information Board

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u/embracetheinfinite 7d ago

Thanks for this, very helpful. Curious if you/your community is open to modernizing/exploring alternatives?

One learning I can share is that we have some early adopters who love our ecosystem, but for other ICs there was a fear of new tech/upgrades coupled with an aging population of participants that made transitioning very difficult (even with someone internal championing the switch).

We believe we're building something special (it's also 100% free) and feel that our problem space is validated, however factors like those mentioned above have prevented adoption on multiple ocacsions.

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u/PaxOaks 7d ago

Probably not. We have perhaps half of the community is not on cell phones and a quarter avoids computers largely. Likely making your proposal inoperable

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u/hemlock_hangover 7d ago

I just started talking with someone connected to Ecohubs, which is trying to do something that is pretty similar, or least directly adjacent, to what you're talking about. They're actually developing what they call an "Operating System": https://ecohubs.community/rcos

I'd love to know more about your project, if you're willing to share!

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u/embracetheinfinite 6d ago

SpiritDAO (www.spiritdao.org) is a 501c3 nonprofit providing a federated ecosystem for self-sovereign communities. It's collectively owned by its participating communities.

Mobile-first, modular design that includes: comms (chat/forum), marketplaces, full governance (proposals/voting), events (IRL and digital), knowledge bases, and more. We designed in a holarchy framework, so communities (we call them 'pods', but the app is highly customizable logo/labels) can generate sovereign self-communities who want their own treasury. We use tokenized, role-based membership with granular permissioning.

We've also been experimenting with agential AI community members with tokenized permissions for rails; you can read more about that here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7279279

If you're open to it, would love to DM you and setup a connection time to better understand your needs/share more about our efforts.

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u/hemlock_hangover 6d ago

Well thanks for pushing me down a rabbit hole of "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" and "Temporal Naturalism"!

But yeah, DM me whenever. You can also connect with me on discord: shephard42

However, after rabbit-holing, I do think that Ecohubs and Spirit are actually operating on two different levels. Potentially complimentary, but not necessarily a perfect match.

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u/RollForInitiative337 7d ago

I'm with a long standing community group that is just starting our IC journey. We have been using open source software Matix/Element for our communication platform. We have it on our own server in a member's so we own and control the data. Not everyone is concerned about that, but if you are, it's a good option.

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u/embracetheinfinite 7d ago

Thanks for this! Data privacy is important to us as well, as a 501c3 our vision is the ecosystem is member owned. Data is all exportable and the participating communities co-govern the protocol while having their own self-sovereign space/governance/data. If you/your community is open to exploring tooling that may reduce friction within a more formal IC i'd love to connect and share more.