WebTree builds and studies systems where people create more together—and have good reasons to help each other succeed.
Its long-term mission is to explore better ways to coordinate people, establish trust, recognize contribution, share resources, and make collective decisions. We build practical products and investigate the rules that shape how participants work together.
More than the sum of our efforts
Different skills, knowledge, and resources can become more useful when they connect. A shared tool can save many teams from repeating the same work. A contribution can become the starting point for someone else’s discovery. A group can tackle a problem that none of its participants could easily solve alone.
The intuitive idea is 1 + 1 > 2. That additional value is a possibility to design for and test. It does not follow automatically from putting more people in a group.
The challenge is making that cooperation dependable: finding the right people, agreeing on the work, handling problems, recognizing contributions, and learning from the result.
Creating more total value is only part of the challenge. Participants need worthwhile outcomes, and the arrangement must account for costs it imposes on others. We also want useful competition between approaches to remain possible.
Three connected areas of work
WebTree has its own mission. Each participating project has its own purpose and product experience. The projects provide different environments for learning about cooperation; their individual products do not define the whole of WebTree.
MakeLocal is our first priority: lowering the barriers to production so people can combine their skills and get things made locally.
0CAD explores reusable parametric designs that people can adapt and improve, with a planned path into MakeLocal production.
Our development tools support the work behind both projects. We are developing toward tools and organizational practices other teams can reuse.
A larger question
Over the next decade and beyond, we want to investigate better ways to coordinate people, establish trust, recognize contribution, share resources, and make collective decisions.
Some ideas are already shaping our product work. Others—including contextual contribution evaluation and new governance mechanisms—remain research questions.
We expect the practical projects to change the theory as much as the theory shapes the projects.