Hylo is a co-created and community-led platform. As an open-source project (as opposed to closed-source, proprietary technology), everyone is free to look at the codebase and add to it, and we don't charge people to use the platform. Hylo doesn't exist to maximize revenue for anyone. Instead, Hylo's purpose is to help groups organize impactful action.
Hylo relies on donations - of money, and of time and energy from people who share a vision for a world where our collective resources are shared as a commons. Our water, our land, and even our technology tools can be cooperatively stewarded by the community, for the benefit of all.
Do you dream of a world that works for all? If so, Hylo could benefit from your care. Here’s how to get involved.
As the builders of a collaboration platform, we strive for helpful and respectful interactions. Our culture is kind and encouraging, and it’s important to us that the community creating Hylo is a safe and welcoming space for all.
These are the values we embed at every level of our stack. Please read our Code of Conduct to learn more about how to move in this space.
We are building tools for long-term planetary thriving; so that our children have clean air to breath and healthy food to eat.
We work in deep partnership with all stakeholders, optimizing for trust and relationship-building with every other community this work touches. We do this by prioritizing co-creative product and design sessions, sharing a transparent product journey, and inviting suggestions and engagement from all Hylo stakeholders to ensure we are building for real needs of real communities.
Hylo is open source and our operations, finances, and governance are open to all.
We contribute to and create open standards and protocols wherever possible, and work to integrate with as many existing platforms as we can, especially those which are open source and values aligned.
Your data belongs to you, not us. We will never sell your data or share it without your explicit request. You can export and delete your data as you wish.
We are committed to ensuring these tools are shaped by and effectively serve diverse communities. Hylo will be accessible to all by remaining free to use in perpetuity. To support the development, we lean into the Gift and ask every stakeholder to contribute what they can.
Hylo is already developed by consensus among the Terran Collective stewards, and in deep partnership with our users. Eventually, Hylo will be stewarded by the community as a platform cooperative, where all users are stakeholders who may participate in the collective governance of the platform and receive abundance from its success.
If these resonate with you, we’d love for you to join the community of Hylo contributors.
There are so many ways to contribute to Hylo, and we’d be delighted for you to participate in whatever way is most exciting to you! Of course, as a software project, we are always welcoming volunteer coders. But you don’t have to contribute code to be helpful! Regardless of your technical chops, there’s plenty to do.
- Beta test new releases to ensure high quality functionality
- Create documentation, such as onboarding materials to help communities thrive on Hylo
- Submit feedback, bug reports, and feature requests
- Contribute code!
To get involved in beta testing, creating onboarding materials, or offering feedback on product ideas or designs, join Building Hylo.
We accept bug reports through Intercom within the Hylo web application, or by creating a ticket on our GitHub repo.
We accept feature requests here.
Have more ideas about how you’d like to contribute to Hylo? Please get in touch at hello@hylo.com and let us know how you’d like to help.
We are actively seeking developers to join our mission to amplify cooperation among people regenerating our communities and our planet. Our codebase is written in JavaScript and we use React/Redux/GraphQL on the front-end and Node + Postgres on the backend. To check out what we’re working on right now, head over to our project board on Github.
Hylo is stewarded by a team of engineers, designers, artists, and product managers from Terran Collective. We create project scopes in partnership with organizations who use Hylo and have resources to share to help improve the platform for everyone. These project scopes guide us to set a timeline and assemble a team to carry out the development in co-creation with our partners. Right now, we meet weekly for collaborative sprint planning and backlog generation. We also like to pair program, and have deep dive product conversations. If you’d like to be a part of it, here’s what to do:
The platform is currently sustained by several repos; hylo-evo, hylo-node, hylo-shared and hyloeReactNative. Evo covers the React-based web-app. Node is the node.js backend, relying on a redis cache and a postgres db. HyloReactNative is the mobile app (the repo is private right now, we just haven't had priority to open source it yet). Hylo-shared has a bunch of helper functions and other code shared between all the other repos. We are considering making the jump to a mono-repo, and would love help from those experienced with such a transition.
You will need to get at least EVO and NODE up and running in your local setup to contribute code. There are docker images several parts of the back-end as well, documented in the NODE repo. The .devcontainer README details some setup aspects, although its been some time since any of us have tried the direct vs code integration. Docker desktop now automatically runs images that were running on shutdown, so that has streamlined the process of using the docker images.
- Join the Building Hylo group, our open source community for people co-creating Hylo!
- Reach out to Hylo's tech lead Tibet Sprague to say hi: tibet [at] hylo [dot] com
- Set up your development environment: Follow the READMEs in hylo-evo and hylo-node
- Watch the developer onboarding recording (link coming soon!)
- Check out the Project board and look for tickets with Good First Ticket label
- If you get stuck, please reach out for support by sending Tibet a DM on Hylo
- If it's your first time contributing to Hylo, please make a fork and PR from that fork.
- For more contributions, let’s have a conversation and get to know each other if we haven’t already, and we can explore involving you more deeply in our team flow including inviting you to our organization on Github.