The Community Systems Working Group

The Community Systems Working Group (cswg.infrastructures.org) is focused on building open-source infrastructure for decentralized organizations & communities, including makerspaces, non-profits, open-source projects, and others who are looking for better ways of managing shared resources.  Our goal is to reduce the workload and increase the resiliency of community and organizational infrastructure so the people involved can focus on the work they’re passionate about.

CSWG is the steward of the Maker Community Practices document series (mcp.infrastructures.org), chronicling the history of Nation of Makers from its inception in 2016.

Our primary project is PromiseGrid, a consensus-based computing, communications, and governance system. PromiseGrid is designed specifically to address the problems of collaborative work and leadership that plague organizations and communities, including non-profits, businesses, and governments.  For makerspaces, this means more resilient & integrated infrastructure to support membership management, tools & access controls, accounting, and decision-making systems. Work in progress can be found in the repositories at github.com/promisegrid.