A platform for cooperative community and project governance
Purposeguild is a cooperative platform for groups of people who want to tackle community projects, debate ideas, or find ways to give back. Convert an existing project group to Purposeguild or invite a handful of people you trust enough to disagree with, weigh real choices, and use Purposeguild's built-in bridging technology to find the decisions you can genuinely agree on across your differences. Then act, share what you are learning, and keep an honest record of what changed.
If your group already does this, here's a better-shaped home for it
These groups already do the hard part — a few thoughtful people deciding where money or effort should go. Purposeguild gives that work a ready-made shape: structured deliberation, bridging to find genuine agreement across the room, a decision by consent rather than a narrow majority, and an honest public record a board or a donor can read. It holds and moves no money — your grants and gifts flow exactly as they do today; this just gives the deliberation somewhere considered to happen and somewhere clean to land.
How a guild decides something together
A guild is 5 to 20 invited people. A decision moves through a clear pipeline — and bridging is the step that turns honest disagreement into common ground.
- 1
Gather a group and frame real choices
Invite people you trust enough to disagree with. Instead of a chat thread that wanders, frame what you are deciding as a few clear proposals — a concrete option to weigh, not an open-ended argument. You show a public handle; how you stand inside the guild stays private.
- 2
Weigh in honestly, one proposal at a time
Mark each proposal agree, unsure, or disagree. There is nothing to chase and no reply to win — just where each person actually stands. Disagreement counts here; it is the signal that tells you whether an agreement is real.
- 3
Let bridging find your common ground
Bridging surfaces the proposals that won support from people who otherwise disagree — the common ground, not the loudest voice. You record your own read before you see where the group is leaning, so the agreement is one you tested. The software only interprets what the group decided; it casts no vote and ranks nothing on its own.
- 4
Decide by consent, then act and follow up
When no one blocks, the guild ratifies by consent and publishes a record — attributed to the guild as a whole, arriving clean, with no carried reactions or scores. Then you do the thing you decided to do, and post what actually changed as a dated outcomes log.
Bridging: guiding a group toward what it actually agrees on
Most platforms surface whatever gets the biggest reaction. Bridging does the opposite. As members mark each comment and proposal agree, unsure, or disagree, Purposeguild looks for the points that earn support from people who usually land on opposite sides — and brings those to the center. Instead of rewarding the loudest voice, it shows a group where it already agrees across its differences, and guides the conversation toward a decision people can genuinely consent to.
Difference isn't a problem to smooth over; it's how you know the agreement is real.
It stays honest, too: you record your own view on a point before you see where the group is leaning, so the common ground it surfaces is discovered, not manufactured.
How the method works
Members react to each comment — agree, unsure, or disagree. Each comment is scored by how much agreement it earns among members who react differently elsewhere: a cluster-free measure of agreement across difference (breadth of support, weighted by how dissimilar the agreeing members otherwise are). That score is only ever a yes/no eligibility gate — whether a deliberation has found real common ground — never a ranking or a leaderboard, because a ranked score would just become something to game. The software interprets the signal and writes it back in plain language; it never casts a vote or judges a comment on its own. And when a deliberation is genuinely divided, Purposeguild detects the camps and colours them on a reaction-space map — but only when that structure is real, tested against a chance baseline, so it never invents factions where there are none.
The approach has a track record well beyond us: Taiwan’s vTaiwan process used it to help citizens find common ground on divisive policy, and X’s Community Notes uses the same idea to show only notes that people who usually disagree both find helpful.
Yes, it's social — share what moves you, by pull not push
Purposeguild is also a place to share. Post a link to an article or a video and it arrives as a clean preview — play the video right in place when you choose. The difference is the model: sharing is pull, not push. What you post goes to your guild-mates and the people you have connected with, and they see it when they choose to visit — there is no endless feed pushing things at you, and no follower counts to chase.
A clean preview, not a raw link
Plays in place when you choose