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I spent a morning with Vial in a conference room at Enspiral Dev Academy, a web-developer boot camp he opened in 2014. He gave me a tour of the network on his laptop. Enspiralites work at several co-working spaces across town—and, increasingly, outside Wellington—but the space that most unites them is a cluster of online tools. Some are commercial platforms like GitHub and Slack; the most important ones, though, had to be built from scratch. My.enspiral.com is home to a bookkeeping tool, and at Cobudget.co, contributors and members allocate funds for their projects and worthy causes. Inspired by the Occupy movement, Loomio.org serves as the network's decision-making platform, and now activists, schools, governments, and companies from all over the world use it.As Vial showed me the various tools and tasks, I asked questions about how they prevent bad actors. What if someone wanted to rig a decision on Cobudget to get money for his or her project? What if the project was a sham? He replied with a small shrug."It's a high-trust network," he said. "We don't try to optimize for low-trust situations."A short walk from the Dev Academy, at the closest thing to Enspiral's main office, I met Alanna Krause, a migrant from California who found Enspiral early in its transition to collectivity. She is now, among other things, the "bossless leadership geek" at Loomio and an Enspiral board member. She and some of her co-workers relayed the litany of ways the network differs from any other co-working space.Maybe, when equality is its premise, work need not be segregated from life, from the ambitions and needs of our actual selves.
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