Why this exists
I asked Erlend Sogge Heggen about a post of his that stuck with me — his first million made, and a plan to spend the next stretch helping a thousand other people make theirs, not as charity but as
"a self-perpetuating cycle of support going with collaboratively owned business." — erlend.sh, 2026-07-18
I'd already been circling a version of this from a different direction. An earlier proposal of mine (AIDLE, unfunded — but the idea doesn't need the grant to be true) had a claim called the Intention Gap: today's training data was authored by and for humans, not to train probabilistic systems, and RLHF inherits the same flaw. Its proposed answer was community gardening — intentional data production as the data-layer twin of AI governance. Where something is governed and how it was grown turned out to be the same problem, at different layers of the stack. That claim stayed on paper. This site is the first step toward making it a place instead.
What "tending" means here
Nothing here gets acquired, absorbed, or centrally owned. A project that plants itself in this garden keeps its own roots — its own repo, its own governance, its own exit. What this garden offers is soil: shared infrastructure, shared visibility, and a standing invitation to grow alongside other things that are trying to be collaboratively owned rather than extracted from.
I don't have a finished answer for how a garden like this actually gets governed once more than one project lives in it — plenty of coops start as a benevolent dictatorship and never quite leave it. That's an open question here too.
Inhabitants
One so far. Space for more.