👷 What I'm working on
I work at Protegra.
We build custom systems for private companies, governments, and non-profits since 1998. We’ve always been 100% employee-owned.
Oldest I could find of our site in the Wayback Machine from Dec 2000.
The best part of working at Protegra is building our own stuff.
Bonafide
We created Bonafide because the internet needs it.
Read my short book for a plain language account of what went wrong on the internet, and how we can reclaim it together.
Pools
Your don't use a protocol directly - you use the apps built on it.
Pools is the first app we made with Bonafide.
It lets you create private, invite-only spaces to share different things with different people. It's more intentional and organized than group chats, without the noise or performance of broadcast social media. You can start simple, and just try it out with one other person. A Pool is a new sharing primitive, and when Bonafide is open, other people can build interoperable apps with it.
Download on iOS or Android.
Local Frequency
My first experience in creating apps to solve meaningful problems was Local Frequency.
I got deep into the idea of the local multiplier effect, local currencies, and credit clearing systems. Eventually, we created a collective shop-local rewards program in Winnipeg and expanded to other communities.
After seeing all the different local currency projects and shop-local programs fail over the years, we thought we could create a sustainable program that economic development organizations or membership organizations could use. Local Frequency is both a “shop local app”, and “local economic development in a box”.
COVID slowed down our momentum, with the focus of our program being in-person shopping, but the core concept remains strong. Local economies need shared infrastructure that ties together loyalty, payments, marketing, and charitable donations, while keeping the clearing account at a local financial institution. A service, and not a gatekeeper.
There may be more of a need for Local Frequency now than when we started it.