Coming soon
The human brain isn't cut out for the accelerating fragmentation, information, and change of modern life. This is especially true for modern online work. While early humans could once count on a stable set of collaborators, tools, and information, modern collaboration is orders of magnitude more complex. Online work is fragmented across:
- Time: We are spread across time zones and chaotic personal schedules.
- Groups: Collaboration is cross-functional and often blurs organizational boundaries.
- Tools: Getting even simple things done requires separate online tools, each with their own concepts of identity and an unlimited capacity for generating noise.
In the same way that the human brain has not kept pace with the accelerating pace of modern life, neither have our tools. Online tools often implicitly assume that we work in rigidly-defined, hierarchical teams that are roughly online at the same time and completing most of any given workflow on their tool.
The result of this mismatch between our tools and the reality of modern online work is ineffectivness and burnout. Contributors are confused about how they can contribute and what decisions have been made. Leaders are overwhelmed, drowning in a sea of notifications and bottlenecking their teams. We try to define processes to wrangle in the chaos, but it is fragile and quickly forgotten.
The collective action platform
Ize is a collective action and intelligence tool designed for the nature of modern collaboration. Ize allows you to design workflows that define how diverse stakeholders pool their collection attention to complete specific tasks. It is:
- Asynchronous: Ize allows for collaboration across time with little ambiguity.
- Cross-platform: Ize bridges different online identities and tools into seamless workflows.
- Evolutionary: Ize makes it explicit how collective workflows can evolve as the needs of teams evolve.
Ize allows you to create workflows that define how a group can make decisions, prioritize, and ideate together to achieve a specific objective. For example, you might define workflows to add a calendar invite to a shared calendar, run a sprint retro, post a blog post, change someone's Discord permissions, ideate and prioritize on team objectives, etc.
Workflows each define:
- Requests: Who can trigger the workflow (e.g. a set of email addresses, Discord Roles, or NFTs)
- Response: Who can respond and what response is being asked for - a vote, ranked priorities, a free text response, etc.
- Result: How those responses come to a final output (e.g. a decision, an LLM summary, etc) and action (e.g. trigger a webhook).
This level of configurability allows process flows that would be otherwise impossible. A leader can define how a collective can take some kind of sensitive action (pay an expense, add a new member to the group) without them needing to be the bottleneck. A contributor can propose and vote on whether to evolve a collective workflow. An organizer can define how diverse stakeholders ideate together, and use AI to make a shared output of all their perspectives.
The creative possibilities of collaborative workflows are endless, but the user experience of interacting with workflows is dead-simple. Workflows generate requests, which are explicit asks for someone’s attention and input - vote yes/no, rank options, write a free text response, etc.
The simplicity and clarity of requests are a critical component for solving the crisis of modern work. They are:
- Unambiguous about what is being asked for and what the results of past requests have been.
- Meaningful in how responses are used towards some larger objective.
- Relevant because requests are made to specific groups/people and are filtered out if they’ve already expired (e.g. a decision has already been made).
Everything in Ize happens through workflows and requests. For example, There is no “admin” concept in Ize. Instead, there are workflows that define how another workflow can evolve over time. It's workflows all the way down 🐢.
This means that that the flow of power in Ize is both fully transparent and evolveable. For example, a workflow might start off as a benevolent dictatorship, evolve into an optimistic governance process, then ultimately hand decisions over to an LLM. Ize isn't pushing any particular idealogy - we're just creating the rails for you to implement whatever works for you. With these rails, you can easily implement and iterate on forms of collective governance and intelligence that would otherwise be impractical.
Ize is a new category of tool but here are a couple different ways to think about what it. It's like a DAO tool (Snapshot, DAOHaus), but with task-specific, highly-flexible, evolutionary subDAOs. It's like an automation tool (Zapier, Pipedream), but for collaborative workflows rather than purely automated workflows. It like a decision/brainstorming tool (Loomio, Retrium), but cross-platform and with automatic execution of decisions.
Ize is ultimately about how we pool our collective attention to get shit done. Pooling our collective attention in the modern era requires bridging different online tools, groups, and identities into coherent workflows. The purpose of Ize is to offload this cognitive load to software, so that collaboration can once again feel connected, purposeful, and nourishing.
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If this sounds interesting to you - whether you're a builder, activist, open source maintainer, investor, whatever - we'd love to hear from you.