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Poareg. no. 001
Start an organization

01The belief

The people who build a thing should own it

That is the whole idea behind Poa. When a group builds something together, the ownership should belong to the people who did the building, and it should be earned by the work, not handed out by whoever got there first. What you earn is yours, the group decides its own rules together, and no one can quietly take either away.

02The problem we saw

A group forms in a chat, and then it outgrows it

Most groups start the same way: a chat thread, a shared document, a running list of who owes whom. It works while everyone can hold the whole thing in their head. Then the group grows, the work piles up, and the informal shape starts to strain.

  1. 01

    The record lives in memory

    Who did what, who is owed what, what the group agreed last month. It is all real, and none of it is written down anywhere the whole group can see.

  2. 02

    The money runs through a person

    Funds sit in someone’s personal account because that was the fastest way to start. The split everyone assumed is fair was never actually agreed.

  3. 03

    The ownership ends up elsewhere

    The tools a group leans on to organize tend to own the audience, the data, and the relationship. The people doing the work build value that lands with the platform, not with them.

  4. The group was alive and working, and the people doing the most owned none of it.

03What Poa is

A place to turn a group into an organization it owns

  1. 01

    Poa gives your group one place to run itself: a shared treasury, tasks that pay for the work, votes that settle decisions, and roles with their powers written down.

  2. 02

    The work you do earns you real ownership, a share of the money and a say in what happens next, and that ownership is earned, never bought or sold.

  3. 03

    Everything is in the open and yours to take anywhere, and Poa charges nothing to use it.

A shared treasury header reading: transparent finances for all members, major spending requires a vote.
fig 01Argus · a shared treasury · transparent finances, major spending by vote

04How we hold ourselves to it

We run Poa the way we ask you to run yours

Poa itself runs as an organization on Poa. The people who build it earn ownership by the work, decisions are made by vote, and the record is public. If the product does not work for a real organization, we are the first to feel it.

  • Open-source, under the AGPL

    Every line of Poa is public and licensed so that anyone who runs it has to keep their version open too.

  • Yours to host yourself

    You can run your own copy of Poa on your own terms. Nothing about your organization depends on us staying in the picture.

  • No lock-in, including by us

    Your group holds its own rules, money, and record, and can take them elsewhere. Poa is built so no one can lock you in, including us.

Poa itself runs as an organization on Poa. Our books are public too.

05Where we are

Early, and out in the open

Poa is live today and real organizations are already running on it. We are still small, and that is the honest state of things. It also means the groups here now are shaping what Poa becomes.

See the organizations for yourself→