People have shown a tremendous willingness to invest their free time and energy contributing to projects that don’t benefit them financially. This “cognitive surplus”–the free time that people have on their hands to engage in collaborative activities–has the potential to realize vast stores of social value that the traditional marketplace tends to neglect.

Modern technologies like the internet, along with more recent innovations like distributed version control, have opened a pathway to more fully realize this value, but dependence on a still ad hoc, fragmented infrastructure means we’re not being as efficient or effective with this resource as we could be.

This project is about removing the barriers that keep social production flowing at a trickle instead of a stream and providing a more robust, integrated core infrastructure to service this growing community of amateur creators and contributors.