Seed Commons is mostly people—the team that works in our national backend office, and the much larger team of local member organizations, who govern Seed Commons cooperatively and who source and steward all our non-extractive investment in worker and community-owned businesses on the ground.

But helping all of these people work together effectively takes some digital infrastructure, too. How do you effectively manage what’s grown into a portfolio of over $100 million deployed investments, across a membership of 39 local organizations? What about when those investments are all non-extractive, demanding both a different approach to the math underlying repayment schedules as well as a fundamentally different process for assessing risk?  And how do you do all this in a way which supports transparent, member-led governance, and builds local, distributed capacity for loan stewardship? 

This kind of democratic and equitable financial infrastructure needs a corresponding technical infrastructure to operate at scale. And the design of that software system is important, because it encodes more than just accounts and balances—it encodes, reinforces, and reproduces the sets of values we hold and the shapes of our relationships to each other. A hierarchical technical system built around a unidirectional flow of information, for instance, might be appropriate for a socioeconomic system that runs on similarly hierarchical and centralizing principles. At Seed Commons, however, our goal is to distribute economic and financial power to communities, and so we need a software system that mirrors that social logic in code. There’s no off the shelf software project we could have used for this, because there has never been something that works the way Seed Commons does. So we built it.

The system is called Madeline, and it gives us a single database of loans across a vast network of lending, including not just Seed Commons, but our sister networks across Latin America. The code is designed to support a distributed process of loan origination and management—our project stewards at local member organizations can log in to track potential and actual loans across their entire lifecycle, interacting with a system that’s been designed and refined alongside our loan management curriculum. That makes it possible to easily record and track answers to the key questions at the heart of our financial diligence and values alignment process, and to feed those answers up to our credit committee (composed of representatives from full voting member organizations of the cooperative) for evaluation, feedback, and hopefully approval. Meanwhile, this structured data process helps keep our national backend staff lean and working more effectively—we can, for instance, easily pull reporting across our entire network of lending work when we renew things like our CDFI certification. Without Madeline, our team would have to work harder, to accomplish less, probably by an order of magnitude.

There’s no off the shelf software project we could have used for this, because there has never been something that works the way Seed Commons does. So we built it.

This platform is open source, nearly 70,000 lines of code, with nearly 9,000 commits just since 2016. Originally built in-house over a number of years, the code has been battle-tested, refined, and rebuilt with the help of tech cooperatives Sassafras and more lately Los Vagos in Argentina. And it helps Seed Commons be open and transparent about our loan making as well. You can’t, for instance, go to a Wall St. bank’s website and get a report on all their loan-making. But Madeline’s public interface allows anyone to see where we invest—check out this report, for instance on Co-op Cincy’s lending. And recently we’ve hooked Madeline up directly to our seedcommons.org website as well, providing a real time running total view of the investments we’ve made to date.

Big ideas and expansion visions about the broad strokes of a cooperative economy are essential. But we’ve found that the devil is in the details, and the details are all about building infrastructure, trying it out, and rebuilding it so that it actually works in the real world and begins to transform it. Iterating on experiments like Madeline, with an investment in over a decade of open source software development aligned with the on-the-ground experience of our members, is part of this work. Our hope is that as Seed Commons itself continues to scale at a rapid pace, we will also be able to build on this solid foundation to rapidly expand the capabilities Madeline offers to the members of Seed Commons, and beyond.

So much of contemporary fintech and workplace apps are built around making exploitation and extraction more frictionless, setting more traps for workers and consumers. When capital, ravenous for returns, gets to call the shots around software development, the result is an accelerating tendency to what Cory Doctorow has memorably called “enshittification,” the digital parallel to venture capital and private equity’s economic race to the bottom. If we want a different future, we need to invest in projects like Madeline.