Together We Flourish: Celebrating Hylo’s Community and Collaborations in 2023
Can’t believe we did all this in 2023! First, a few little nuggets:
Hylo Quick Stats
- Hylo has double the number of active members compared to this time last year; 100% year over year growth!
- Hylo has 60% growth in the number of posts created compared to last year.
Hylo is hiring!
We are seeking a heart-centered community organizer to help steward online spaces on Hylo. Applications open until December 31 and we’d love to hear from you!
What We’ve Been Up To
We saw steady, organic growth all year as leading-edge groups joined Hylo to host communities of care and practice, peer learning groups, bioregional groups, and interest groups all working to create a world that works for all in their own special way. We deepened our collaborative partnerships and started new ones with groundbreaking organizations like New_ Public, Holo, OpenTEAM, ProSocial World and Zebras Unite.
While we continue to polish and improve Hylo’s foundations and grow the feature set, we also find ourselves more and more in an advisory role offering guidance to our member communities on best practices for community stewardship and success in online organizing.
Here are some moments from 2023 we’re proud of:
We kicked off 2023 by supporting Zebras Unite with a successful transition from Mighty Networks to Hylo, stewarded by Krisha Subramanian, Hylo’s Community Lead. The Zebras community on Hylo is going strong with 677+ active members, many of whom Clare Politano, Hylo’s Product Lead, got to meet in person at ZU’s DazzleCon event in DC in October! We can’t wait to see what 2024 holds for this dynamic community dedicated to inclusive capital.
We collaborated with Salmon Nation Trust to host the Edge Prize, a bioregional accelerator with the goal of identifying local leaders, bringing them together for collaboration, and amplifying their stories. We hosted the Edgewalkers on Hylo and facilitated a participatory budgeting and award process to distribute $80,000 in prize money to Indigenous leaders and other innovators working at the Edges of our bioregion.
We launched a new phase of our partnership with OpenTEAM to co-create technology for regenerative agriculture through their USDA grant on Climate Smart Commodities.
- Together, we are building out the Stewardship Toolkit on Hylo — a suite of governance tools for groups including Purpose and Agreements, Roles and Responsibilities, and soon, Proposals
- In 2024, Clare and Tibet, our Technology Lead, will lead an OpenTEAM Collabathon, a participatory design process for an “Agricultural Data Wallet” that empowers land stewards to easefully manage and share their data.
- We are working closely with another OpenTEAM member, Our-Sci, on a redesign of farmer survey app SurveyStack led by Terran Design Lead Aaron Brodeur.
Tibet and Aaron teamed up with Holo to help build and launch a distributed conference management at DWeb Camp, hosted by the Internet Archive. Aaron has continued to collaborate with Holochain and LightningRod Labs designing experiences for their first suite of apps. Aaron says, “Now that I’ve seen it working, I am convinced: Holochain will change the world in profound ways. It is revolutionary. To see just how revolutionary it is, look to the edges where there is limited connectivity to the internet. While it works just fine alongside the internet you know and love, in places where there is not reliable access to the internet — or no internet at all — you can still use your apps within your community if they are built on top of Holochain.”
We applied for our first government grant from the National Science Foundation, for Pathways to Enable Open Source Ecosystems! This was a huge effort led by Day Waterbury and Clare, and made possible through collaboration with our friends at ProSocial World. If we are selected, this grant would resource us to transition Hylo into a tech commons with more robust pathways for community contribution and participation. We will hear back from NSF by March.
Our relationship with Prosocial World also grew this year, with a vision for a technical integration between Hylo and PW Research Tools that would allow groups to analyze their in-group interactions and track and grow their level of prosociality. We look forward to co-fundraising together in the new year to secure resources to support this exciting vision.
We embarked on a fruitful partnership with New_ Public to design and prototype solutions for core product opportunities on our platform, with the goal to publish and share results with the community of folks building prosocial technology. We’ll share the results in 2024, but right now we can say that we learned so much from the NP team and from the Hylo member research they organized.
We launched our Community Stewardship Support program, offering onboarding and community management support to aligned Hylo communities, and piloted the offering with a number of our partners. With the support of Rising Foundation, Krisha and Clare are taking what we learned and writing a course on community stewardship to be released in early 2024!
We actively participated in many additional communities and initiatives including the Collaborative Technology Alliance (Tibet), Regen Foundation’s Regen Commons (Clare), r3.0’s Global Thresholds and Allocations Network (Clare), and a dialogue with residents of Auroville, India to develop methods and tools for communities to assess their holistic wellbeing.
We grounded our work and lives in land-based communities and ecosystems in California, Washington, and Costa Rica. When we’re not working on Hylo, our stewardship team is growing food, caring for livestock, planting trees, parenting, playing music, dancing, weaving, and caring for our communities and kin.
Dev Updates!
We made about ~20 significant new releases of Hylo in 2023, including the following major improvements:
- My Home context with 4 new views: My Posts to see all posts you created, Interactions to see all posts you have commented on or reacted to, Mentions to see all posts you have been mentioned in, and Announcements to see all announcements made in all groups you are a member of.
- Support for oAuth Authorization Code flow to enable full API integrations with other apps!
- Zapier support, opening up lots of integration possibilities with Hylo
- Group specific analytics tracked and available for groups to view in Mixpanel
- Group Roles and Badges: Admins can add roles/badges which are an emoji and a name, and then attach them to group members. These appear next to the member’s name everywhere in the group.
- Internationalization! With Spanish as our first additional language option.
- MVP of timezone support for posts so times appear correctly in emails
- Added Purpose field to groups
- Post Aggregation: Display which posts are coming from child groups and let you toggle on/off that view of them in parent groups.
- Improved Support menu
- Many UX improvements, bug fixes, better in-app instructions, and quality of life improvements throughout.
- Mobile app almost fully caught up to the web app, with emojis, custom views, and much more.
An Invitation to Share Your Story
Whether you’re a community organizer, a champion of prosocial technology, or part of a group making a positive impact, we invite you to tell us your story of how Hylo has helped catalyze connection, collaboration, and change within your community or organization. We are looking for case studies to feature on our website and in our upcoming course on Community Stewardship. If you are interested, please reach out to Krisha (krisha@terran.io).
