Mapping the Climate Ecosystem

The field is not short of effort, money or events. The team mapped 1,800 Climate Week events and guesses at another three thousand. And yet, there is minimal advancement on climate change, or the grand challenges of our time. Vincent's point is that we have the solutions and lack coherence. He borrows the basin of attraction from system dynamics. Scatter a hundred golf balls across a course and over time they collect in the pond and the sand traps. Gravity, wind or a pigeon moves them. Every organization sits in such a basin. The silos are not laziness or bad faith. The system's forces push people into them. Climate Week pulls everyone into the center for a few days. On Monday the same forces push them back. Gatherings matter, he says, but being close for a week does not change the system.

The silos run across fields. People working on health care, education and mental health belong in a climate room too. They run across scale. Global networks, local communities like Dear Crisis and individual change makers rarely meet. They run across stage. Older projects get stuck in their ways, and students with a vision rarely meet people who have done the work for sixty years. His favorite silo is between technology platforms, because those platforms decide how people coordinate when they are not in the same room.

He draws most software on one axis. At one end sit tools built for one purpose: a vibe-coded app used once, or Luma, great for tickets and nothing else. At the other end sit Google Sheets and Airtable, used for everything and good at little. He wants tools that are fit for purpose and easy to use at once, connected so each one builds on the last. The team's earlier platform, Catalist, could do almost anything, and users kept calling it too complicated. Doing everything, he concedes, is not doing what you need well. Ben pushed them toward small, specific tools on shared infrastructure. Through OMNI-Mapping, a Buckminster Fuller Institute Design Lab project, they volunteered to help groups define what their map was for. They have built hundreds of ecosystem maps that way, each with its own purpose, all able to share data.

The first building block is detailed privacy permissions. With AI, a record of every change maker and their work is the best tool an organizer could want. It is also frightening as surveillance grows. So each piece of information needs its own boundary: private, anonymous, or shared with a network of trust. Most tools lack this. Ben had to add a question to every Luma event asking which contact details a guest wanted shared. Imagine a second privacy question under every question in a Google Form, Vincent says. Privacy is an afterthought, and people are trained not to think about it, so part of the problem is cultural. The second building block is context. Humans and AI both work badly with a flat spreadsheet. Behind the interface the team keeps a multi-dimensional knowledge graph.

Two weeks before the talk Vincent told Wendy and Rob they would build a Climate Week calendar. They said it was crazy. Adapting a system he had built to gather New York's dance events, it pulls from WhatsApp groups, calendar feeds, the Climate Week website, spreadsheets and Airtables. It merges duplicates and keeps the chain of where each listing came from and who curated it, so credit goes to the right people. The map view shows that nobody can reach ten percent of it, which he says cures FOMO. Each event sits in a graph, so a curated calendar takes about twenty minutes. The team built ones for UNGA, for the Buckminster Fuller Institute's events, for policy and for climate tech. Nobody had to re-enter a single event.

About fifty people filled out full profiles. The app suggests people, organizations and events for each of them. Every field has its own audience. What you work on can be public. The days you are in town can go to your connections. Your email can stay with you or go to anyone signed in. The AI matchmaker is itself an account, with access to some fields and not others. It can pair two people because they live near each other without telling either one where the other lives. Vincent calls it a neutral third party for coordination. He wants that standard in every tool, so that an AI knows what it may not touch.

The same data can be viewed almost any way. A branding moodboard switches to a gallery or to a spreadsheet of connections. A map of the Long Island coastal bays shows protected areas as shapes, linked to the work around them. One article about oyster reefs links to the Shinnecock Bay Restoration Program that enabled it. For Design Science Studio, a partner from the start, they built what he calls the most complex ticketing platform ever. It has conditional ticket types and a database of partners and sponsors. Earth Kind and Dear Crisis now use it, after about a day of customizing. Every build for one partner gets reused by the next, he says, and that is how the commons improves. Any item can have its own view and edit rights. A private note or a team-only comment can sit on a public record.

The team's theory of change needs shared data, shared standards for building maps and tools, and small apps built for one purpose that pass data between them. Today everyone has their own vibe-coded app. Vincent wants channels that let information and funding flow where they are needed. That is different from pushing people to work together. It sets up incentives so that collaborating is the obvious choice. He adds that technology is not the main barrier to collaboration. Legal and financial structures stop people from sharing data or working together. He hands over to Wendy, who spent seven months on those.

The waterfall sets the order in which profit is shared once it arrives. First, early money comes back to the people who put it in. Second, legacy contributions provide historical reciprocity. Anything contributed with an agreed value goes on a ledger. It is repaid as the company earns. That lets the team tell someone holding a valuable data set: we cannot pay you now, but you will get repaid over time when we are successful. It encourages people to put their work into the pool, and they all benefit together once money flows. Third, Wendy added a pool for the commons, which in this context is a share set aside for the coordinators and weavers at the center of a wider ecosystem. She does not yet know what that center will be. She thinks every operating agreement should have this pool.

Wendy put investor returns fourth, not first. Money buys no ownership and no decision power. Ownership follows role. Investors get their money back with interest as thanks, with a multiple up to a cap. They then join everyone else in the shared abundance pool where, along with all other contributors, every person gets the same share. Investors, owners and contributors all win together. Last comes the exit. An owner who leaves does not take all their equity at once and risk the company's financial stability. Instead their equity converts automatically into a recovery pool and is paid back over time. The way in and the way out both get softer.

Most agreements work like a marriage, Wendy says. You sign everything up front. If it turns out not to suit you, you leave quickly and it is uncomfortable. Hers follows how collaborations actually grow. Two people try something for a few months, and if it works, they do more. Then they sign something small. Contribution tiers let people take part without becoming owners or managers. When managers leave, they can do so without putting the company's fiscal health into question. Softer entries and exits.

Wendy is publicly sharing this body of work so no one else has to recreate it. It is a 135-page Collaborative Operating Agreement with 16 schedules and 24 exhibits. Nine companion documents cover investors, managers, legacy contributions and IP reassignment. It took ninety-eight AI working sessions and thirty-two meetings for vetting with lawyers and a CPA. Now it is signed and in operation. Mycelial Law, which practices what it calls relational law in service to Earth, has taken the agreement on as a cornerstone and will help other groups adapt it.

Activity on an event map follows a bell curve. It peaks in the middle of the week and then fades. People go home and the maps decay. It was never their everyday tool, and the one person maintaining it often runs out of time or grant money. It is nobody's fault. It is how the tool was built.

So collaboration has to be designed in, he says: into the software, into the legal and governance structures, and into the norms people keep. A map is a snapshot someone made about you. A commons is something you take part in, and it compounds. He cites David Bollier: a commons is the resource plus the social rules that govern it. It has boundaries and principles. A living commons can produce thousands of maps that stay current. He imagines this week's connections still active three weeks on, and next year's Climate Week starting from what this one built.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for studying commons. She set out eight design principles and showed that commons work when those principles hold. Rob draws from her work what he calls the strongest predictor of whether a commons survives: the people who use it are the people who maintain it. People keep up what they already use for their own reasons. So the design does not have to rely on goodwill. It rests on self-interest, which includes an interest in the commons itself. Wendy adds that aligned incentives make it easy.

Arcos Earth is not built to be the only tool, Rob says. It is meant as one layer in a wider set of shared tools for the planet. The Climate Week knowledge graph already exists, and organizations have started claiming their profiles in it, so it will not vanish when the week ends. Vincent adds why the wider commons is not fully public: opening it will be like undamming a river, and the permissions have to be clear first. People are not used to a public bookmark holding a private note and a team-only note. So far there are 20,000 items people chose to make public and 238 framework sets, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, serving as an interconnected ontological backbone. A form can pull those in with a click instead of retyping every indicator.

By their own count the team has put in over three million dollars of work across five years. It has had a couple of investments. Revenue stays small because the clients they choose have little money. The three of them are the bottleneck. They can work closely with only three clients at a time, and they can name more than thirty-five organizations asking. Short term, the model is consulting and subscriptions, to build their own capacity. Long term, collaborating with other platforms will cost more. It means paying back people in the field who have also worked for decades without pay.