Philosophy of the project#
History#
Helpbuttons has been in development since 2012, through several prototypes, design iterations, and changing teams. Two beta versions preceded the current release.
The 2021 COVID crisis served as a stress test for community cooperation tools and underlined a gap: most communities lacked the infrastructure to coordinate mutual aid in real time. This period accelerated development and sharpened the project's focus.
Following the crisis, part of the team behind Frenalacurva — a coordination platform built during the pandemic by the open-source studio Kaleidos — began collaborating with Helpbuttons. The shared goal was to build a tool that would work not only in emergency situations, but as general-purpose infrastructure for community coordination in everyday life.
The core problem the project identified is structural: collaborative apps require sustained technical and design effort that single-purpose projects rarely achieve. Many useful tools for food sharing, skill exchange, transport, or local services have been built in isolation — solving the same underlying coordination problem separately, and often failing for the same reasons. Helpbuttons was designed as shared infrastructure: a common base that any community can adapt to their specific purpose, without starting from scratch.
Where do we want to go?#
The ideal state of Helpbuttons is a network of networks — federated instances that allow communities to cooperate across neighborhoods, towns, regions, and associations without centralized control.
Beyond the software, Helpbuttons is a project for promoting collaboration. We build alliances with organizations and institutions that share our values, contributing technical infrastructure as part of a broader effort that includes digital literacy and open-source education programmes.
Core values#
Digital autonomy#
Each installation is self-hosted and self-governed. Communities control their data, moderation policies, and rules. No central platform extracts data, no algorithm decides what is visible. Your community, your server, your rules. The code is open, the data is portable, and no one holds a lock.
Cooperation over competition#
Platforms like Airbnb or Wallapop coordinate cooperation effectively but extract value from every interaction. Helpbuttons is built on the opposite premise: the infrastructure belongs to the community. The architecture is designed for content to flow between communities, not to be siloed for retention.
Inclusion and accessibility#
Helpbuttons aims to be usable by non-technical people, translatable into any language, and deployable on modest infrastructure. Moderation is distributed across multiple coordinators, invitations allow private networks to grow through trust, and location can be hidden to protect privacy.
Federation#
A Helpbuttons instance can share users and content with other instances, letting geographically or socially adjacent communities cooperate without merging. Each community retains full sovereignty over its data and governance.
Sustainability through openness#
The project has been built by voluntary programmers, translators, and community organizers. The current goal is to grow it into a sustainable platform. Helpbuttons never charges end users — what communities do with their network is their decision. For communities hosted on the team's server, a fixed fee covers accompaniment, maintenance, and assistance.
Human interaction first#
Moderation is human — network coordinators, not algorithms. Endorsements are peer-to-peer signals, not platform scores. The code has been developed by hand since 2012; AI assistance has been used only for tedious tasks, with every change reviewed and accepted by a human developer before inclusion.
Technology must serve people, not the other way around. Tools should expand what communities can do together — never quietly take over decisions that belong to them.
The problem we are solving#
Platforms like Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, and Wallapop coordinate cooperation effectively, but they own the data, optimize for profit, and cannot be adapted to specific community needs. Small communities cannot afford to build their own version.
Helpbuttons provides that infrastructure as a commons — any community can take it, adapt it, and run it for their own purposes.
How to make it spread#
Helpbuttons grows through the communities that use it and the developers who improve it. See Spreading Helpbuttons for practical strategies, or Contributing to help build it. The best contribution is to use it, improve it, and tell others about it.