Episode 11: The Future of Community Oriented Technology (Part 2)

with Tibet Sprague

My next guest is Tibet Sprague and this is my second interview with him and likely not to be the last.  Because the conversation we had around technology and what we might call appropriate tech or conscious technology is one of the most important conversations we could be having in culture right now, and I really want to honor and give gratitude to Tibet and his whole team at the Terran Collective and Hylo for the way they are stewarding and developing not just Hylo but also the Collaborative Tech Alliance.  They are truly showing the way for this entire industry around how to uplift the values and principles that are needed at the foundation of civilization redesign. 

In many ways it gets very very simple - how are we choosing to make decisions that impact the choices other people make when using our technology.  The kinds of responsibility for people working in tech companies, when in alignment with the codes of life and institutions like Center for Humane Technology, is on a whole other level.  Then we are talking about stewarding the commons.  Because technology can scale, the impact potential is great and can be global. The minute you put something on the internet and you make it available for people to use to help them coordinate and find each other and work bioregionally and to share resources and to become sovereign empowered citizens and give them adequate information you are touching at the heart of culture creation.  This is the essence of the stewardship of the commons.  

What Tibet is doing in Hylo and CTA holds immense integrity.  They authentically care so much about community building and right relationship to the earth, about healing and sovereignty, about giving voice to the voiceless, about reparations - all of this consciousness and care is woven into their technology.  Please check out Hylo, look at Part 1 of our interview and look at the episode with another guest working in technology - Adam Apollo.  And begin to see that the trend is shifting.  I am here with Awakening Together making visible the things that in the current mainstream are still very invisible.  WE are not just telling a new story, we are embodying that new story.  I hope you enjoy this conversation with this extraordinary human and get to know their work in Hylo.  Let’s see a mass shift from our current social media platforms into these new conscious technology platforms that point the way toward our future!

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Bio

Tibet Sprague is a communitarian technologist, working for a world where all beings can thrive. As a core steward of the Terran Collective and Hylo his mission is to amplify cooperation among those working to heal and regenerate our communities and our planet. 

Tibet is an experienced entrepreneur, technical leader and community builder. He has been coding since age 10 and starting companies since he was 22. He has built numerous software platforms from scratch, while growing and managing software teams from 2 to 18 people. Tibet spent six years helping grow the residential solar industry as one of the founding employees and VP of Engineering for One Block off the Grid. They helped drive down the cost of home solar while building some of the very first tools for remote solar system design using satellite imagery. 1BOG was acquired first by Pure Energies and then NRG Home Solar who mismanaged and ruined all that had been built. 


This past experience led Tibet to the belief that the mainstream model of VC backed startups is unlikely to create the kind of radical change needed in the world right now as we face so many existential crises from climate change to political polarization and misinformation. So in 2017 Tibet co-founded the Terran Collective to experiment with different organizational models, and create a structure that would protect their work from corruption and co-optation by the forces of neo-liberal capitalism. Terran runs as a for-profit/non-profit hybrid using sociocracy as their governance model. The work of Terran weaves together community building, technology, and culture creation, to foster greater trust and collaboration, with a particular local focus on bioregional coordination in the Bay Area. Tibet is the technical lead of their primary project Hylo - the social coordination platform for a thriving planet. Other projects Tibet is involved in through Terran include the NorCal Resilience Network and Collaborative Technology Alliance.

LINKS

TOPICS

  • Role of Conscious tech

  • Role of Collaborative Tech Alliance (CTA)

  • Need for interoperability

  • Hylo’s Theory of Change

  • What’s the role of the next generation 

  • Hylo Principles

  • CTA Principles

  • Role of integrity in everything

  • Role of good design

  • Building better communities

  • Supporting the ladder of community coherence

  • What features are needed

  • The problem with DAOs

  • Stewardship tools

  • How we manage the commons