# content
Diagram of the Co-Creation Lab's focus areas and their interconnections

A vision for reclaiming tech for the arts, culture, and activism through holistic co-creation

“Technology” is often followed by the word “consumption” these days. It’s come to represent a one-way relationship, not a place to create. A broadcast, not a meaningful dialogue. But tech doesn’t have to only mean tracking, algorithms, and endless scrolling. Tools and practices like blockchain, peer-to-peer, open source software, and decentralized governance are putting power back into the hands of people that use it — so they might be shapers of tech not mere users. We at Hypha Worker Co-operative believe building tech that’s community-driven makes for richer futures and we’re dedicated to helping communities leverage these tools.

Announcing: Hypha’s newest practice area, Co-Creation Lab

Today we’re announcing Hypha’s newest practice area, Co-Creation Lab, which exists to help community-oriented arts, culture, and activist organizations explore and use tech’s potential to the fullest, on their terms. Co-Creation Lab gives projects like the ones Hypha’s already done for years with clients and collaborators including HEK (House of Electronic Arts), Furtherfield, and MEDLab a formal home.

Like Hypha’s other practice areas, Co-Creation Lab will provide embedded, end-to-end partnership across the entire tech development lifecycle, from discovery and design to ongoing management.

Friendlier tech through co-creation, not extraction

To us, technology on fairer terms starts with our belief that how something’s made is just as important as the thing itself. Hypha is incorporated as a worker co-operative, meaning we operate as a democracy. When we say we work collaboratively with our clients, we mean it — cooperation is in our DNA. We center our projects around our clients’ needs, not ours. We’re a non-profit, so we aren’t motivated by pure profit or the use of any particular technology. What does motivate us? Sharing our clients’ goals as artists, creatives, activists, policymakers, and archivists.

Tech that fosters access, autonomy, and sustainability

Access Technology has long been making it easier to access information and connection. But COVID brought new urgency to providing digital experiences and raised everyone’s bar for what they expect out of them. While cultural, arts, and activist organizations have been working to provide these new experiences, they’ve been facing access issues of their own — to the developer talent necessary to make their creative visions a reality and to get them done right at an affordable price. Co-Creation Lab is meeting this demand with an approach that teases out what clients really need while educating them throughout the process.

Autonomy We believe that software should serve, even enhance or extend, our clients’ ends. On top of that, we believe that their code should belong to them, give them control, and stay well-functioning for a long time. Often, organizations have to give up ownership to make their digital projects come to life. But using technology that can be permanently altered or taken down by a third party, or whose data is vulnerable to being misused, shouldn’t be accepted as the cost of doing business. Co-Creation Lab’s team features industry-leading expertise on the peer-to-peer and decentralized technologies that dramatically limit these risks.

Sustainability So much of today’s technology can be short-lived, with products and projects disappearing overnight. A lot of our work is experimental, done for boundary-pushing organizations, so it doesn’t need it to last forever to be considered a success. But the end of client tech projects should be up to our clients — not because it’s no longer working or they ran out of the resources to support it. For everything we build, maintenance and affordability are top priorities.

Beyond being a fantasy, necessary evil, or outright enemy, technology can be a valuable tool for connection and positive change. But the way it’s made must be more inclusive and informed: no small feat. Co-Creation Lab was started to tackle this challenge. We aim to show the organizations whose work we admire most that tech can be empowering — helping them reach more people in deeper ways, reliably and for generations to come.

Hypha is a worker-owned cooperative and technical consultancy, partnering with organizations who seek out our deep knowledge and expertise in cryptography, decentralized governance, web protocols, and distributed ledger technologies. Our focus is on creative partnerships and the human rights use cases of these emerging technologies. Working in solidarity with our global neighbours, we collaborate to imagine and create alternative digital futures.

Hypha’s Co-Creation Lab team consists of Andi Argast, Mauve Signweaver, and Vincent Charlebois.

Working in communications in the early 2000s, Andi Argast contributed to the rise of social media and has gone through many hype cycles since then. As she’s built her mastery in applying emerging technologies, she’s always fed her curiosity about how to use technology’s growing power for good. Andi’s experiences span the nonprofit, library sciences, government, and education sectors, and have included leadership roles at Girl Guides of Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science, and the Toronto Node of the Open Data Institute. An expert in raising digital literacy and building usable tech through human-centered design, Andi believes the key to doing good is understanding the toolset — something she helps her clients and team do every day as Hypha’s Strategy Lead.

Mauve Signweaver has been “poking computers” since they were a child — their first time on one predates their earliest memory. Mauve’s obsession with technology outpaced their family’s means very soon, so they’ve long been intimate with working around resource constraints. What began as figuring out how to do things with less has now transformed into a mission to spread peer to peer and mesh technology based on its wider merits. This technology is not only more affordable, but more reliable, resilient, and self-governed than the cloud solutions that dominate the market today. Mauve regularly consults, speaks, and publishes on this topic on their blog and at conferences like Causal Islands.

Vincent Charlebois is an artist-researcher and creative technologist who believes in the power of exploring multiplicity to inform understanding. After earning his BFA in intermedia arts, working in reforestation planting over a million trees, and solidifying his technical skill set at architecture school in Barcelona, he landed in Digital Initiatives at the McGill University Library. There, he deepened his passion for sharing knowledge and exploring emerging technologies. This passion led him to Hypha, where he now helps clients manage how their communities interact with technology while he continues his research on sustainable interactions between nature and tech through art.

Learn more about Co-Creation Lab

# contentMap.en
Diagram of the Co-Creation Lab's focus areas and their interconnections

A vision for reclaiming tech for the arts, culture, and activism through holistic co-creation

“Technology” is often followed by the word “consumption” these days. It’s come to represent a one-way relationship, not a place to create. A broadcast, not a meaningful dialogue. But tech doesn’t have to only mean tracking, algorithms, and endless scrolling. Tools and practices like blockchain, peer-to-peer, open source software, and decentralized governance are putting power back into the hands of people that use it — so they might be shapers of tech not mere users. We at Hypha Worker Co-operative believe building tech that’s community-driven makes for richer futures and we’re dedicated to helping communities leverage these tools.

Announcing: Hypha’s newest practice area, Co-Creation Lab

Today we’re announcing Hypha’s newest practice area, Co-Creation Lab, which exists to help community-oriented arts, culture, and activist organizations explore and use tech’s potential to the fullest, on their terms. Co-Creation Lab gives projects like the ones Hypha’s already done for years with clients and collaborators including HEK (House of Electronic Arts), Furtherfield, and MEDLab a formal home.

Like Hypha’s other practice areas, Co-Creation Lab will provide embedded, end-to-end partnership across the entire tech development lifecycle, from discovery and design to ongoing management.

Friendlier tech through co-creation, not extraction

To us, technology on fairer terms starts with our belief that how something’s made is just as important as the thing itself. Hypha is incorporated as a worker co-operative, meaning we operate as a democracy. When we say we work collaboratively with our clients, we mean it — cooperation is in our DNA. We center our projects around our clients’ needs, not ours. We’re a non-profit, so we aren’t motivated by pure profit or the use of any particular technology. What does motivate us? Sharing our clients’ goals as artists, creatives, activists, policymakers, and archivists.

Tech that fosters access, autonomy, and sustainability

Access Technology has long been making it easier to access information and connection. But COVID brought new urgency to providing digital experiences and raised everyone’s bar for what they expect out of them. While cultural, arts, and activist organizations have been working to provide these new experiences, they’ve been facing access issues of their own — to the developer talent necessary to make their creative visions a reality and to get them done right at an affordable price. Co-Creation Lab is meeting this demand with an approach that teases out what clients really need while educating them throughout the process.

Autonomy We believe that software should serve, even enhance or extend, our clients’ ends. On top of that, we believe that their code should belong to them, give them control, and stay well-functioning for a long time. Often, organizations have to give up ownership to make their digital projects come to life. But using technology that can be permanently altered or taken down by a third party, or whose data is vulnerable to being misused, shouldn’t be accepted as the cost of doing business. Co-Creation Lab’s team features industry-leading expertise on the peer-to-peer and decentralized technologies that dramatically limit these risks.

Sustainability So much of today’s technology can be short-lived, with products and projects disappearing overnight. A lot of our work is experimental, done for boundary-pushing organizations, so it doesn’t need it to last forever to be considered a success. But the end of client tech projects should be up to our clients — not because it’s no longer working or they ran out of the resources to support it. For everything we build, maintenance and affordability are top priorities.

Beyond being a fantasy, necessary evil, or outright enemy, technology can be a valuable tool for connection and positive change. But the way it’s made must be more inclusive and informed: no small feat. Co-Creation Lab was started to tackle this challenge. We aim to show the organizations whose work we admire most that tech can be empowering — helping them reach more people in deeper ways, reliably and for generations to come.

Hypha is a worker-owned cooperative and technical consultancy, partnering with organizations who seek out our deep knowledge and expertise in cryptography, decentralized governance, web protocols, and distributed ledger technologies. Our focus is on creative partnerships and the human rights use cases of these emerging technologies. Working in solidarity with our global neighbours, we collaborate to imagine and create alternative digital futures.

Hypha’s Co-Creation Lab team consists of Andi Argast, Mauve Signweaver, and Vincent Charlebois.

Working in communications in the early 2000s, Andi Argast contributed to the rise of social media and has gone through many hype cycles since then. As she’s built her mastery in applying emerging technologies, she’s always fed her curiosity about how to use technology’s growing power for good. Andi’s experiences span the nonprofit, library sciences, government, and education sectors, and have included leadership roles at Girl Guides of Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science, and the Toronto Node of the Open Data Institute. An expert in raising digital literacy and building usable tech through human-centered design, Andi believes the key to doing good is understanding the toolset — something she helps her clients and team do every day as Hypha’s Strategy Lead.

Mauve Signweaver has been “poking computers” since they were a child — their first time on one predates their earliest memory. Mauve’s obsession with technology outpaced their family’s means very soon, so they’ve long been intimate with working around resource constraints. What began as figuring out how to do things with less has now transformed into a mission to spread peer to peer and mesh technology based on its wider merits. This technology is not only more affordable, but more reliable, resilient, and self-governed than the cloud solutions that dominate the market today. Mauve regularly consults, speaks, and publishes on this topic on their blog and at conferences like Causal Islands.

Vincent Charlebois is an artist-researcher and creative technologist who believes in the power of exploring multiplicity to inform understanding. After earning his BFA in intermedia arts, working in reforestation planting over a million trees, and solidifying his technical skill set at architecture school in Barcelona, he landed in Digital Initiatives at the McGill University Library. There, he deepened his passion for sharing knowledge and exploring emerging technologies. This passion led him to Hypha, where he now helps clients manage how their communities interact with technology while he continues his research on sustainable interactions between nature and tech through art.

Learn more about Co-Creation Lab

# attachment[].name
A diagram illustrating the Co-Creation Lab's key focus areas and its connections to various elements. The central purple circle labeled 'Co-Creation Lab' has arrows pointing to three circles on the left: 'Art,' 'Culture,' and 'Activism,' and to three circles on the right: 'Sustainability,' 'Autonomy,' and 'Access.'