Serving Zebras Unite and the Cooperative Movement on Hylo
We are excited to announce that Zebras Unite has moved its community onto Hylo! Zebras Unite is a cooperative of founders, investors, and allies creating a more inclusive economy by helping each other balance profit and purpose. They made a huge splash a few years back when they declared “Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break,” offering a resounding critique of venture capital and making the point that business can be both profitable and good for society. They’ve been growing and doing great work ever since, and today ZU is a global movement, catalyzing the community, capital, and culture for people building businesses that are better for the world.
Zebras and Hylo
Terran Collective core steward Tibet Sprague began collaborating with advocates at Zebras Unite through his work stewarding the Collaborative Technology Alliance, as well as through the Exit To Community (E2C) movement.
Since 2018, Zebras Unite has hosted their community on Mighty Networks. That platform hasn’t met their need for an interconnected group architecture that reflects the complex and global landscape of their organizing efforts across the community, the co-op, and its catalytic programs, including the Inclusive Capital Collective, a growing network of community fund managers and entrepreneur support organizations designing and developing shared technical and financial infrastructure for aggregating and deploying financial capital and other resources to entrepreneurs and communities of color in the US.
Zebras Unite made the transition from Mighty Networks to Hylo to offer their community a more supportive environment for peer-to-peer learning, sharing resources, and coordinating to build models and frameworks for ethical and inclusive entrepreneurship and finance.
“Hylo deeply serves the needs of our global community — to create connection, share knowledge, and catalyze action in support of businesses that are better for the world,” said ZU Managing Director Madelynn Martiniere. “Their platform is purpose-designed to increase collaboration, coordination, and cooperation, and we’re delighted to have the support of the Hylo team and ecosystem as we enter this next chapter. “
Hylo is an ideal collaboration platform for the ZU community because it is designed to build relationships and enhance trust among distributed groups. ZU needed a more robust and effective way for their community to connect and discover other zebra organizations. Enhancing trust and transparency between members at all levels is an essential need for the ZU network to continue growing and taking collective action.
Through this partnership, Zebras Unite and Hylo will work together to co-develop new features on the platform to serve their needs as a global movement. Hylo will offer in-depth community management support through our new Community Stewardship support program.
New Features from this Partnership
In terms of co-development of Hylo, the features we’re building with ZU have been long sought after by our stakeholders and our own team. We strongly feel that this phase of development is going to take Hylo to the next level and support communities on Hylo in a whole new way. Here’s what we’re working on together this winter:
Extended API Functionality and Zapier Integration
Hylo is extending API support for the ability to connect seamlessly with Zebras Unite Co-Op’s membership database system of record (Knack), to enable the flow of information between their community directory system and Hylo. This is an exciting feature as it lays the foundation for integrating Hylo with a multiplicity of other tools via Zapier!
Custom Admin Tags/Member Categories
Zebras Unite Co-op members are categorized in different ways, and we are building the functionality for administrators to create and display custom tags for members related to their function and engagement with the program. These tags will be visible to all on members’ Hylo profiles, and folks will be able to search the member directory by these tags. These tags have the potential to become the basis for “Roles” in Hylo groups that go beyond the single role of moderator that currently exists.
Internationalization & Multi-Language Support
The Zebras Unite community is international and there are chapters all over the world. As such, there is a need for Hylo to support multiple languages and allow users to choose which language in which to view Hylo. The first language we will offer is Spanish, and we are calling on our open source community to let us know which other languages are important for your communities. We are also seeking contributions of translations for the interface, which is a cool way to contribute to an open source technology without needing to know how to code!. We are thrilled that this is in the works, and excited to better support the global community in collaborating on Hylo.
Membership Engagement Analytics
Visibility into member participation is a key need for groups to understand the level of collaboration and impact happening in their group. Together with Zebras Unite, we will co-design simple analytics for groups in a way that honors our values for Hylo member privacy and sovereignty. These analytics will form the basis of a Community Dashboard that will eventually make these data points transparent and available to all members of a community.
This work is under the stewardship of Zebras Unite Co-Op in partnership with Zebras Unite nonprofit and Second Muse Foundation, with support from the Economic Development Administration for Cultural Innovation.
