About Hylo

Hylo was created to support people coming together to solve the great challenges of our time.

Our mission is to empower communities to build a world that works for everyone.

We envision a world where people everywhere can effortlessly share resources, solve problems, and create together to produce a more just, resilient, and sustainable world.

• Seven-generation care — We are building tools for long-term planetary thriving. This is an infinite game that goes beyond our lifetimes. We hope our work today will make life easier for our children's grandchildren. We do this work as an offering to the communities of the future; to fulfill our responsibility to be good ancestors.
• Relationship-centered design — We work in deep partnership with our stakeholders, optimizing for trust and relationship-building with every community this work touches.
• Transparency — Hylo is open source and our code, operations, finances, and governance are open to all.
• Interoperability — We use, contribute to and create open standards and protocols wherever possible, and work to integrate with as many existing platforms as we can, especially those which are also open source and values aligned.
• Privacy and data sovereignty — We never sell ads or user data. You can export and delete your data as you wish. As our work on interoperability progresses, Hylo participants will have the freedom to import content from other platforms and push content elsewhere, as you see fit.
• Inclusivity — We are committed to ensuring these tools are shaped by and serve diverse communities. Hylo will be accessible to all by remaining free to use in perpetuity. Our vision for inclusion includes support for low-bandwidth connections, international languages, accessibility standards, and usability for people with various degrees of technical aptitude.
• Collective stewardship — Hylo is already developed in deep partnership with our participants and partners. The core stewardship team practices consent-based collective decision-making to care for the platform. We look to a future where Hylo participants have a formal voice in governing the platform. As we work toward this future, we are inspired by Prosocial, sociocracy, the web3 community, and wisdom traditions from around the world.

(from the Greek hyle, “matter”; zoe, “life”): The philosophical doctrine holding that all matter (including the universe as a whole) is alive and conscious.

We believe that all life is fundamentally interdependent, and that we are all responsible to each other, the Earth, and future generations.

Hylo's mascot is an axolotl. Axolotls have the ability to regrow parts of their body over and over. Axolotls are also forever young. Unlike most amphibians, they reach adulthood without undergoing metamorphosis and keep their gills and watergoing-ways for life.

We chose this endangered amphibian from the lakes of central Mexico as a symbol of the resilience and regenerative power of nature and networks, and because we believe that the youthful enthusiasm expressed in joy and play are important parts of community building and creativity. (We also think they are super cute.)

You can participate in building this platform and the world we need.