And Other Stuff (AOS) is an experiment in building freedom tech differently.

Most technology incubators, accelerators, and innovation labs are built around venture capital, extractive incentives, or institutional gatekeeping. AOS took a different path. We have built a non-VC, non-charity innovation center for freedom tech: a hub for ideation, professional services matchmaking, project development, and hands-on support that does not take equity, does not charge fees, and is designed to help people build in the open across very different ecosystems.

This session will share how that model works in practice. We will walk through how AOS was structured, why we chose to open source our operating model, and what it means to create governance, process, and collaboration infrastructure that others can fork and adapt. We will also talk about the real challenge of building across communities that may share a vision of decentralization and freedom, but often differ sharply in culture, values, priorities, and technical assumptions. What does it take to work in public with people you may not fully agree with, while still building toward a common outcome?

The session will also explore the principles behind our work. At AOS, we describe our mission as technology for human thriving. That means recognizing that people cannot thrive without freedom, and that freedom tech has to be more than a set of tools. It also requires the social, organizational, and governance conditions that allow communities to imagine, build, use, and maintain those tools themselves.

A core part of this approach is anti-colonial development. Too often, Western technologists approach communities with the mindset that they will “build the solution” on others’ behalf. We are interested in a different model: helping activists, journalists, organizers, and other frontline communities develop the capacity to shape and finish the tools they need themselves. In practice, that means building the harness for participation, lowering technical and organizational barriers, and creating fertile ground for innovation that is responsive to real-world needs rather than imposed from the outside.

We will ground this conversation in concrete examples of what has emerged from the AOS model, including projects like BitChat, Divine, Numo, and Agora. These examples help illustrate the relationship between organizational design and technical outcomes: the kinds of infrastructure you build, the kinds of collaboration you enable, and the kinds of tools that become possible when people are empowered to work across layers of the stack.

This session is for people thinking about the long-term health of decentralized ecosystems: organizers, technologists, funders, governance designers, and anyone asking not just how to build alternative technologies, but how to build alternative institutions for creating them. It will offer an honest look at what we have learned about openness, coordination, ownership, interoperability, and support structures for freedom tech.

Rather than presenting a single template, this session offers a practical case study in how a collective can create the conditions for resilient, values-aligned innovation. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how to design collaboration infrastructure, how to support builders without reproducing extractive models, and how organizational choices shape the future of the technologies we hope to see in the world.