Mutual Aid
Made Visible
A quiet tool to surface what’s needed, what’s offered, and who can respond.
Commonhood is a prototype digital platform developed through research in design, political economy, and technology. It supports groups in organising shared provisioning without relying on markets, money, or extractive platform logics.
Born out of collective questions about how we meet needs together, Commonhood enables communities to articulate, share, and connect offers and needs in a way that centres trust, slowness, and care.
Commonhood is not for "scaling communities", but a tool designed to surface relational potential and make the commons feel more real. It continues to be developed through a process of iterative design, partnership, and testing with people already engaged in diverse economies.
How does it work?
A group forms a constellation: a defined collective with shared context and mutual commitments. Participants in that constellation can:
Add their own offers and needs, browse the constellation's relational commons, explore matching relationships surfaced through a hybrid logic (semantic similarity + shared value orientation), and reach out beyond the platform to connect, coordinate, or collaborate
Participants decide which entries are visible, and to whom. Access to each constellation is held through real-life relationships, not open sign-ups.
Contribute offers and needs that reflect your capacities and situations
Coming soonCollective offers and needs, surfaced when multiple participants overlap
Browse contributions from others
Discover matches based on what you need or what you offer
Coming soonForm connections across constellations and enable translocal reciprocity
Learn why a match might matter
Coming soonCommunity storytelling to reflect on shared provisioning patterns
Commonhood is not just another platform. It is built to resist extractive defaults and support collective autonomy. Here’s how it stands apart:
Selective permeability: No open sign-up. Joining a constellation requires real-world trust, and shared commitments.
Peer governance: Decisions are made in facilitated assemblies using consent-based methods like sociocracy.
Cash-free: No money changes hands. The platform supports needs and capacities, not transactions.
Let’s begin a
conversation
Commonhood is currently inviting collectives, cooperatives, and community groups to explore setting up a constellation. If you’re interested in using Commonhood as an infrastructure for your shared practice, let’s talk.