The HUman Giving Graph (HUGG) Project

A systems framework for building communities where giving is valued

Disclosure: AI was my research assistant. All prompts, analysis, synthesis, context, and final content are my own. I am biased to a practical & applied systems thinking approach

Mind Lumen is a 501c3 non-profit. We are building the TRUST infrastructure with Ethics as the anchor, for the Psychedelic and Mental Health ecosystem. Check out our resources and contact me if you need help with implementation.

Building a Community is HARD

In the psychedelic world, we have seen a lot of hype and use the word “psychedelic” a little too loosely. There is a lot of ethics washing, just like there was a lot of “green washing” with regard to climate change.

There are a lot of for-profit operating structures that throw around the phrase “building community,” where the value provided by the HUMANS is not accruing to those same HUMANS who are providing their intellectual, spiritual, and financial capital, their ideas, their knowledge, their time, and their energy as contributions to what they feel is a community, only to find it is not valued.

Most humans are well-intentioned. It’s the system under which we operate that causes drift and misalignment.

Invest in Contributors, not Extractors

A lot of communities that do not take a lot of time still take a lot of mental energy to keep the coherence of the community. These are run by volunteers. I steward two such communities, and they are not easy.

If I am spending all my time stewarding communities, or I am contributing to communities stewarded by others, then I want to feel that my time and energy is valued. I suspect this is the same for everyone who is contributing. Time is the only scarce resource. Once it is gone, it is gone. We do not get it back.

For the early stewards and founders, it becomes even more challenging to start and shepherd communities, where the benefits accrue to extractors and the costs are transferred to the community or to the early founders. The feeling of burnout and frustration is understandable when people feel that they are giving and someone else, with no connection to the community, is the only one benefiting. This is known as extraction.

While we cannot control what others do, we can control what we do and how we react to it. We can decide that we no longer wish to contribute for someone else’s extractive benefit, someone who has no interest in being part of and contributing to a community where benefits and costs are collectively shared.

None of this is an argument against volunteering. Volunteerism has a long and honorable history. People give to things they believe in without expecting to be paid, and most small organizations and nonprofits run on exactly that generosity. I am not asking for a paycheck, and rewards do not have to be monetary.

What matters is not whether giving is paid, but where its value goes. Giving freely into a commons that returns its value to the people who built it is one of the best things a person can do. Giving freely into something that quietly routes that value to someone outside the community is how generosity gets strip-mined. The difference is direction. The danger is not that people give too much. It is that what they give accrues to extractors rather than to the community and the contributors themselves. So the question is not how to pay volunteers. It is how to build communities where giving is honored, where what people create is held in common by those who created it, and where no one is asked to pour themselves into something that will only ever belong to someone else.

So, how do we build communities?

Building a community that does not quietly extract from the people inside it is one of the hardest things to do well. It doesn’t matter the mission and purpose of the community - whether that is a psychedelic one, or in the technology and AI sector. People refer to this as the “Commons”.

It is getting harder, not easier. The pattern is familiar enough to feel like a law of nature. A group forms around a shared purpose. People give their time, their code, their ideas, and their attention. For a while it feels like a commons, something owned by everyone who shows up for it. Then the value those people created gets captured somewhere above them or outside of the community. The few who gave the most burn out, and the community either fades or hardens into a smaller version of the systems it set out to replace. The cost of this is not abstract. In open source, which is the closest thing we have to a working commons at scale, the people who maintain critical software are disproportionately unpaid, overextended, and one bad week away from walking.

Extraction is one way communities fail. Structurelessness is the other. Enthusiasm and a shared space, a room or an online group, feel like enough at the start, but a group with no structure is not sustainable. It either organizes itself around whoever has the most time and information, or it stalls and the work collapses onto the few who keep showing up.

Jo Freeman named this decades ago: there is no such thing as a structureless group, only one whose structure has gone invisible and unaccountable[9]. Someone has to start a community, but what sustains it is a little structure put in place early, that can be revised.

The same survey work that documents their importance also documents how many of them have seriously considered quitting[14] . Communities of builders run on a renewable resource, human generosity, and they tend to treat it as if it were infinite. It is not!.

The HUman Giving Graph, which I call HUGG, is my attempt to write down a structure that offers an alternative approach. It is not a manifesto and it is not a piece of software. It is a working model for building communities where giving is the thing that is valued and rewarded, where the benefits and the costs are shared rather than pushed onto whoever is most willing, and where the people who build the thing keep a real stake in what they built.

What follows is the premise, the commitments that follow from it, why each one is hard, and what decades of research on commons, cooperatives, and online communities suggest about making it work.

The premise:

Most communities measure the wrong thing. They measure attention, or output, or who is loudest in the channel. HUGG measures GIVING. The premise is simple to state and demanding to live by: the behavior most worth rewarding is contribution to the collective, and the value a community produces should accrue to the community that produced it.

That means a member earns standing and reward by giving, in the form of time, labor, knowledge, and data that is consumable in the easiest way possible by the members of the community. It means that anything electronic the community produces, whether an idea, a line of code, a dataset, a comment, or a suggestion, is treated as a shared asset. People are free to draw on that commons, but what they build on top of it flows back to it. The community BUILDS these assets. The point is not to forbid individual benefit. It is to make sure that benefit comes from giving to the commons rather than from quietly enclosing it.

The commitments that follow

A premise is only as good as the commitments it asks of us. HUGG rests on a handful of them, and each is written to be specific enough to argue about.

• Giving is the unit of value: Members contribute and earn by giving. Benefits, both money and assets, accrue to the community. Costs are shared by the community rather than carried alone by whoever volunteers first.

• Everything electronic becomes a shared asset: Ideas, code, intellectual property, datasets, and even discussion are owned by the community as a shared resource. Members use the commons freely, and what they build on it returns to it. The creation and upkeep of these assets, including their eventual monetary value, is grounded in human contribution.

• Governance starts small and rotates: In the first year, leaders are elected to shepherd the community for a three-month trial, then evaluated and either confirmed for the rest of a one-year term or replaced. The trial exists so a young community can vet leaders it does not yet know. After the first year the trial is dropped, because a full year of shared history is enough to elect leaders directly to an annual term. Expectations around conflict resolution and conduct guidelines must be set early on - this is the primary and first responsibility for any steward forming the community. The members can of course change and modify it later.

• Active participation is the basis for standing: Both the right to lead and the community’s sense of who is fit to lead rest on a defined record of participation. That record combines what a member contributes in writing with how they show up in person. It is deliberately built on peer-affirmed contribution rather than raw volume, so that the measure rewards giving others found valuable rather than activity for its own sake.

• The community is member-owned and independent of its space: Leadership is unpaid and held only by members, never by salaried staff or by the owners of any for-profit company that hosts the community. A host can provide space, but it does not govern, and its staff and owners take no part in the community’s decisions. The space doesn’t own the community, the community can own/lease a space.

• Contribution is scored, and debate is time-boxed: Contributions and participation earn points. Proposals are decided by a yay or nay vote inside a fixed two-week window, after which leaders enable execution on community priorities that passed. The scoring exists to make giving legible, and the clock exists so that shared ownership does not collapse into endless discussion. Decision-making needs to occur at speed and scale for the community to grow without fracturing.

• The whole design is anti-extractive: Every rule above points at one goal - that giving is rewarded, that benefits and costs are shared fairly, and that sharing is favored over the extractive, individualistic behavior most platforms quietly encourage.

Why this is hard, and why it is worth it

Most communities concentrate value in the wrong place. The people who supply the labor, the writing, the code, and the data are rarely the people who own the result. Platform owners capture the upside, contributors absorb the risk, and the shared knowledge the group produces is enclosed and sold back to it.

HUGG inverts that arrangement, and the inversion creates hard problems that have each been studied for decades.

The first is ownership. If a community is going to hold its own assets, it needs a way to keep them held in common over time, so that no single cohort, founder, or buyer can quietly enclose what the group built. The research on commons governance, cooperatives, and steward-ownership speaks directly to this.

The second is speed of decision-making. Shared ownership is usually slow. The more people who have a say, the longer decisions take, and the easier it is for a good project to die in discussion. HUGG’s two-week window and its yay or nay voting are a direct answer to that risk, and as I will show, the fastest and most durable commons we have already solved this with time-boxed consent rather than open-ended consensus.

The third is HUMAN. We have the ability to context switch. However, humans can switch between only two things and keep context coherent. A UC Berkeley study showed that productivity drops precipitously if a third thing is added to the individual human’s activity at any given time. Related to this is group decision-making. A group is useful to delegate decision-making to, with clear boundaries, responsibilities, and trust. However, the group needs to be as small as possible, in single digits, and an odd number (think: Amazon’s two-pizza teams)

The older root: dana, and the inner work that makes giving possible

There is a deeper reason giving is hard, and it is not structural. It is personal. A system can reward generosity and still fail if the people in it cannot give without first calculating what they will get back. The reflex to withhold until the return is guaranteed is the quiet engine of extraction, and no points system removes it on its own.

The ethic HUGG borrows here is older than any platform. In the Buddhist tradition, dana is the practice of giving, and for roughly 2,500 years the monastic community has sustained itself on freely offered teaching and voluntary support rather than priced exchange. It is arguably the longest-running giving-based commons in human history, and it rests on the same axiom HUGG does: giving returns to the giver because the giver belongs to the collective that the giving builds. What is worth noticing is that the tradition never sold the practice as a standalone technique. Generosity sat on an ethical base, including non-harming and not taking what is not given, and that base is already anti-extractive. Strip the ethics and keep only the technique and you get the hollow, productivity-flavored version that critics have called McMindfulness, a practice that adjusts people to an extractive system rather than questioning it[24]. Keep the ethics and you find they point the same direction HUGG does.

This is why HUGG treats inner development as part of the design rather than decoration.

The outer system removes the reason to hoard. The inner work removes the wish to.

The danger to avoid is what the psychologist John Welwood named spiritual bypassing, using practice to avoid difficulty rather than face it[25]. A community that adopts the language of generosity without the structure to back it has simply found a gentler way to extract. HUGG asks for both at once: a structure that makes giving safe rather than naive, and a culture that develops people to the point where they can give because it benefits the whole and receive because they are part of it, rather than negotiating their worth one transaction at a time.

What the research says

The case for HUGG is not that it is novel. It is that nearly every load-bearing piece has been proven somewhere, and HUGG points them at a single purpose. Four bodies of evidence matter most.

1. You can govern shared assets without losing speed

The strongest evidence in this whole field concerns HUGG’s central tension. Successful commons rarely run on full consensus. They run on time-boxed consent, where silence counts as agreement and only a reasoned objection stops the clock. The most battle-tested version is the Apache Software Foundation’s lazy consensus, in which a contributor may assume agreement and proceed, subject to a fixed window during which others may object, and where a negative vote must come with a technical justification or an alternative[2]. That last detail turns a veto into a proposal rather than a wall, and it is the single highest-value adjustment HUGG can borrow: require that a nay carry a reason. Rust governs language changes through a public comment process that ends in a Final Comment Period during which the burden shifts onto anyone still objecting[3]. Amazon’s “disagree and commit” preserves dissent as an input while refusing to require unanimity as an output[4], and sociocracy replaces “does everyone agree?” with “does anyone have a reasoned, paramount objection?”[5].

Rotating, term-limited leadership is also well-precedented, which matters because HUGG’s three-month trial is unusually short. Debian elects its leader every year and limits that leader’s authority to acting in line with developer consensus[6]. Debian’s history also carries the warning: one year the election opened with no candidates at all, a reminder that frequent terms can exhaust a small community[7]. Underneath all of it sits Elinor Ostrom’s eight design principles for governing shared resources, distilled from hundreds of case studies and recognized with a Nobel Prize[1]. The principle HUGG most needs to absorb is graduated sanctions, penalties that escalate in steps rather than jumping to expulsion. And Jo Freeman’s classic warning still holds: there is no such thing as a structureless group, only groups whose structure has gone invisible and unaccountable[9]. HUGG’s written terms and clear removal procedures are already on the right side of that line.

2. The tools already exist

A community that wants to build this does not start from nothing. Peer-allocation tools such as Coordinape give every member a fixed budget of recognition to distribute to others, which reframes the question from “what do I deserve?” to “who helped me?”[10]. Reciprocity licenses such as the Peer Production License let cooperatives and nonprofits use a commons freely while requiring for-profit firms to negotiate separately[11], and the Open Database License is the right instrument for a shared dataset such as a member directory[12]. For money, fiscal hosting through Open Collective lets an unincorporated group hold and spend funds in the open, with every expense visible[13]. The building blocks are proven. The work is assembling them with intent.

3. Communities have already proven the model

This is not theoretical. Open-source foundations have run contribution-based commons for decades, with status earned rather than bought and all material discussion held in public[8]. Platform cooperatives prove the economic case, paying their members far better than the extractive incumbents they compete with[15], even as they show how hard it is to raise capital without selling equity. Decentralized organizations offer the densest catalogue of what to avoid, from voter apathy to plutocracy, and the most credible counter-design is one-person, one-vote authority granted by non-transferable badges rather than by wealth^[16][17]. Data cooperatives such as Switzerland’s MIDATA are the youngest precedent and the most relevant to HUGG’s shared-dataset idea, notably paying no financial dividend so as not to create an incentive to over-share personal data[26]. And steward-ownership answers the longest-horizon question, how shared assets stay shared over decades, through structures like Patagonia’s transfer to a purpose trust[18] and Nathan Schneider’s “exit to community,” in which a company hands ownership to its users and workers rather than selling to investors[19].

4. A points system can reward genuine giving, if it is designed against gaming

HUGG’s scoring is its most powerful and most dangerous feature. The governing warning is Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure[20]. A literal one-point-per-contribution rule is the most gameable design possible, because it rewards volume over value, and studies of reputation systems document exactly how voting rings and coordinated voting inflate scores[21]. A subtler risk is that rewards can crowd out the very generosity they are meant to encourage, pushing voluntary contribution below where it stood before any reward existed[22]. The strongest takeaway is to keep points expressive, tied to standing, eligibility, and voting weight, and to keep them decoupled from direct cash for as long as possible. There is also encouraging evidence: humans sustain cooperation partly because some members will pay a personal cost to sanction those who take without giving back[23]. HUGG’s nay-votes are exactly this kind of cheap, distributed sanction, and they work best when applied by peers through deliberation rather than automatically by an algorithm.

We must be careful in how we design incentive, recognition, and reward systems where the value growth accrues to the community, as a whole first. Individuals benefits because we choose to be part of that collective value growth. This can in turn be offered to people, institutions, organizations, outside the community, in return for monetary returns or value exchanges that flow back to the community.

Where to Begin

So if you are starting a community, ask what you would write first, and let the honest answer be its governing structure, drafted as the community's first proposal and put to a vote. This is not a manifesto but the structure for major decisions for and by the community.

License

The HUman Giving Graph (HUGG) by Mind Lumen is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt this work, in whole or in part and for any purpose, as long as you give appropriate credit, link to the license, indicate any changes, and release your adaptations under the same license so the work stays open.

Suggested attribution: “The HUman Giving Graph (HUGG) by Mind Lumen (Author: Neil Gehani), licensed under CC BY 4.0, https://mindlumen.substack.com/p/the-human-giving-graph-hugg-project”

References

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19. PitchBook. “Q&A: MEDLab’s Nathan Schneider on startups exiting to community.” https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/exit-to-community-startups

20. PubMed Central. “When a Measure Becomes a Target, It Ceases to be a Good Measure” (Goodhart’s Law, Strathern). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7901608/

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23. Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. “The Evolution of Strong Reciprocity: Cooperation in Heterogeneous Populations.” Theoretical Population Biology (2004). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0040580903001163

24. Purser, Ronald E. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater Books, 2019. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600158/mcmindfulness-by-ronald-purser/

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