Working documents for collaborators and potential partners. Access requires a password.
WhatIfWe is a structured experiment in collective intelligence — bringing people formed at the frontier of genuinely different traditions into sustained encounter, with the ambition of generating a form of shared understanding that could only emerge from the full range of what humanity carries.
The serious challenges humanity faces — ecological, political, existential — exceed what any single tradition, discipline, or culture can resolve on its own. Every serious tradition carries genuine depth. None carries all of it. The question WhatIfWe is asking is whether that depth can become collective: whether enough of those forms of knowing, brought into genuine sustained encounter at real scale, can generate something new — a form of intelligence adequate to the problems humanity now faces. The larger the eventual participation, the closer the experiment comes to its real purpose.
The Lab is the infrastructure this experiment runs on. It is designed to hold sustained encounters with persistent memory, AI-assisted facilitation, and the specific conditions genuine collective intelligence requires — and to scale as the experiment matures. The first encounter groups test and refine the architecture. What they are testing for is planetary participation: the conditions under which genuine collective intelligence can emerge not just in a room, but across the full diversity of humanity's knowledge traditions. The documents below are the working materials for building it.
Each document is complete on its own. Select your focus below, or read all four for the full picture.
The complete investment reference for WhatIfWe. Covers the Phase 0 production budget (equipment, per-interview costs, team, and technology infrastructure), the two-track architecture that runs the content programme and technology build simultaneously, the proposed Foundation / For-Profit governance structure, and the full funding landscape from philanthropic foundations through to European deep-tech and social innovation research programmes.
WhatIfWe proposes operating through two legally distinct entities — a non-profit Foundation holding the mission and a For-Profit company building the platform. For investors who want to understand this governance model in depth, this document examines six organisations that have used the same structure at real scale: Mozilla, Wikimedia, Creative Commons, Plurality/vTaiwan, The Guardian, and Patagonia. For each: what the structure achieved, where it required correction, and what it implies specifically for WhatIfWe. The document concludes with a design checklist drawn from the cross-case analysis.
Building the Lab provides the complete investment picture. The Hybrid Structure document is recommended for investors who want to understand the governance model before a formal conversation — it answers the most common structural questions through organisations that have already solved them.
Phase 0 is a professional production operation: 20 filmed conversations with serious thinkers, produced at the quality the experiment requires. This document is the working brief for anyone considering a production partnership role. It profiles each of the 20 candidates in depth — who they are, the tradition or discipline they represent, and what each conversation needs to explore — so a production partner can understand the human and logistical demands of the programme before committing. It also sets out the interview approach, the conversation arc across the 20 sessions, and the sequencing logic including age-urgent priorities.
The production quality of Phase 0 is not a detail — it is what determines whether the world's most serious thinkers take the experiment seriously. This document gives a production partner everything needed to assess the scope, sequencing, and human demands of the programme before a formal conversation.
A rigorous map of the existing collective intelligence technology ecosystem. Eight major initiatives — Polis/vTaiwan, the Habermas Machine, AI4CI, Warm Data, Plurality, Contemplative AI, Abundant Intelligences, and leading commercial platforms — are each examined in depth: what they achieve and precisely where their ceiling is. The document identifies the ceiling all eight approach from different directions, and states WhatIfWe's specific position on that map.
WhatIfWe's technology choices are deliberate responses to the ceilings identified in this analysis — not defaults. The Building the Lab document provides the full infrastructure and investment detail once you understand where WhatIfWe is positioned.
Budget, team, governance, and three-phase funding strategy. The primary document for anyone evaluating WhatIfWe as an investment or partnership.
Working brief for production partners: 20 candidate thinkers profiled in depth, conversation arc, sequencing logic, and age-urgent priorities.
Eight existing collective intelligence platforms mapped against the ceiling they all share — and the specific gap WhatIfWe is designed to address.
Six organisations that have used the Foundation / For-Profit structure at scale — Mozilla, Wikimedia, Creative Commons, Plurality/vTaiwan, The Guardian, Patagonia — examined for what worked, what required correction, and what each implies for WhatIfWe. Includes a design checklist.
WhatIfWe is in the pre-incorporation stage and actively seeking founding collaborators and Phase 0 funders. A direct conversation is always the right next step.