❤️Our Values and Design Principles

We embed our values at every level of the stack.

Hylo is driven by a strong set of values. These values were derived by the current Hylo stewardship team through a prosocial process to identify the most strongly held and shared values that animate our work. We are committed to upholding them in all that we do, and we ask that everyone using the platform honor them as well.

Stewardship

We approach our world, our communities, our ecosystems, and our tools (such as Hylo) as shared resources that all people are invited to manage with care and responsibility. We steward the places, resources, lands and waters we belong to, for the generations yet to come.

Related: Responsibility, respect, integrity, accountability, maturity, governing the commons, distributing power, "power with"

Our Commitments

• Our stewardship of Hylo will always be guided by our purpose of activating the full potential of purpose-driven groups to create a thriving future for all.

• We will communicate clearly, honestly, and transparently with our users and stakeholders to the best of our ability.

• We are working to create a participatory governance structure for Hylo to include the voices of all stakeholders and become a true technology commons and public good.

Co-Creation

The products of our work are higher quality and more beautiful when we create them in partnership with each other. Co-creation is the means through which we find ways to give our unique gifts, be part of something greater than ourselves, and meet our need to be part of a group: seen & accepted. We all have a role to play in creating a world that works for all.

Related: Collaboration, cooperation, connection, common ground, relationship-centered design, participatory, interdependence, pluralism

Our Commitments

• We facilitate co-creation of Hylo through our participatory design processes, engaging our stakeholders in the development of our tools and platforms.

• We create opportunities for input and open-source contributions through the Building Hylo group.

• Before building new systems or tools, we look for and integrate or adopt solutions that are already working.

• Our code is open source, and we work to use open standards and protocols whenever possible to enable interoperability with other tools and platforms.

Wellbeing

We are nurturing a world where individuals, communities, ecosystems, and economies are healthy, joyful, and flourishing. To support the wellbeing of our members, Hylo is a place where we grow healthy groups for a healthy world.

Related: Care, thriving, mutual support, safety, belonging, people care, planet care, future care

Our Commitments

• We commit to creating technology that nurtures the wellbeing of Hylo members and their communities, caring for them as whole beings, not just “users.”

• We take responsibility for the impact our technology has on the health of our global ecosystems.

Liberation

We are consciously building Hylo to support the work to repair harms, end inequity and injustice, and dismantle systems of oppression to create a world that works for all. "No one of us can be free until everybody is free." - Maya Angelou

Related: Justice, freedom, equity, diversity, inclusion, anti-racism, reconciliation, healing, solidarity

Our Commitments

• We commit ourselves to building safe and inclusive digital spaces.

• We commit to equitable distribution of compensation and recognition among Hylo's core stewardship team and contributors.

• We are informed by global wisdom traditions including traditional, Indigenous, and place-based knowledge, and incorporate these learnings into our design, development practices, and product direction.

• We commit to following the Design Justice principles.

Adaptation

We commit to conscious evolution and growth in response to learning more about the needs of our communities on Hylo, what works, and what doesn't. With every interaction, we listen, learn, and adapt to better serve our communities.

Related: Learning, listening, iteration, emergence, feedback, evolution

Our Commitments

• We incorporate feedback loops into our design processes and are always open to adapt and evolve our technology and practices according to new voices and ideas.

• We hold Hylo as an emergent, organic, living system that is dynamic and responsive to the needs of our ecosystem.

• We move at the speed of trust, knowing there is always enough time for care, relationship-building, and doing things right.

Agency

We honor the sovereignty of individuals and groups over their data, their privacy, and how they choose to engage with technology. We are building appropriate technology that gives people agency to achieve their goals without getting in the way through extracting data or harvesting attention.

Related: Decentralized, distributed, consent, interoperability, openness, privacy, accessibility

Our Commitments

• No hijacking members' experience with black box algorithms. You control your experience on Hylo by customizing Notifications, Stream ranking, and Post aggregation to suit your needs.

• We never share personal data without informed consent.

• We endeavor to make Hylo usable across ability, culture, and context, by working on Internationalization, accessibility, and low bandwidth technology.

Design Principles

The Hylo stewardship team draws from these design principles in developing the platform, and we use them to guide us in making the best decisions possible to care for it.

• 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 participant sovereignty — We will never sell your data or share it without your explicit request. 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.