Foundation

The Neighbourhoods Foundation is a trust registered in New Zealand that oversees and steers development of the Neighbourhoods framework. The Trust represents our commitment to maintaining the Social Sensemaker as a free and open-source technology. Accordingly, its objectives are to build and maintain a suite of tools enabling the creation of digital social spaces that enhance social coordination, sense-making, and community self-determination.

Mission

We are building the social spaces we want to be in! Our mission is to open up the black box of social media algorithms through a set of modular tools for social coordination that are customizable enough to fit the needs of a wide variety of groups, from small families to large coalitions. As a core project in the Holochain ecosystem, we aim to make its uniquely efficient, secure application framework easier to adopt.

Our team shares a community-driven vision for a distributed web that increases the ability for non-technical users to contribute in a fundamental way to the social spaces they occupy. For this reason, we build tools that make data-use and application feedback loops transparent enough for everyone to gain an understanding of how their social interactions ripple through networks. We are enthusiastic about tools that give rise to participatory cultures; not only because it’s right, but because it’s fun. We believe in both dignity and play online.

Our commitment to social coordination and sensemaking also arises from concern about the current state of the internet and social cohesion in the face of multiple, overlapping failures of Empire.