Digital Life Collective

an early membership graph made with our social ledger tool

In 2017, myself and a ragtag bunch of friends, technologists, and curious collaborators, catalyzed by Philip Sheldrake, co-founded a co-operative we fondly call DigLife, or 'The Collective'. Through calls, shared open infrastructure tools, learning cohorts, and more, we bring people together around the questions of how we recognize, support the creation of, and use 'tech we trust for a world we want'. Our curiousities lie at the intersection of the social and technical stacks and we aim to help catalyze the kind of collaboration we think is needed to address challenges of today's world.

A wild experiment in radical, open collaboration, DigLife - like many other community learning communities - saw a drop in participation at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, some of our co-founders, with decades of co-operative experience among them, are transforming the legal entity of the original co-op into the Innovation Co-operative. This 'multiplex' co-operative aims to serve as a project incubator, among other aspirations. As a project of the Innovation Cooperative, The Digital Life Collective will continue to be our wild experiement, with our own membership, but without the overhead of a legal organization for our volunteers and learners. This frees us up, as we adapt to the pandemic, to continue catalyzing conversations around trustworthy technology and co-operation at scale.

Stay tuned to hear when DigLife calls begin again.

Christina Bowen

Christina Bowen

knowledge ecologist