Open Labor Foundation
A community-built platform that gives every worker access to specialist expertise, organizational infrastructure, and the power to run their own operations — without depending on a platform that takes a cut of everything they earn.
Every field has deep expertise built up over years of real work. That knowledge currently lives in people's heads, locked to a single employer or trapped behind a platform fee. labor-commons changes that.
When a worker contributes what they know — a trade, a profession, a specialized skill — it becomes available to every other worker on the platform, across every context. A home health aide's knowledge helps a property manager. An electrician's knowledge helps a contractor. The knowledge belongs to the community that built it.
Why this exists
A vendor solves a business's scheduling problem, or its quoting problem, or its dispatch problem — then charges for that solution every month, indefinitely, because nothing forces the price back down. Open the governance layer and the orchestration engine underneath, self-host both, and whatever one business builds to solve its own version of the problem can be handed to the next business for free — and the one after that. Function by function, the software stack an industry currently rents becomes optional.
The realistic path there is small businesses first — operators opting out of fees they already resent paying. The further destination is workers organizing regionally into collectives that own this layer together instead of individually.
What it enables
The platform isn't built for one profession. It's built for every worker who has ever needed expertise they didn't have — or infrastructure they couldn't afford.
The independent worker
Ask commons-crew anything — legal, financial, technical, operational. It assembles the right specialists from the community catalog, works through it visibly, and gives you a real answer. No retainer. No billable hour.
The small business owner
commons-board gives any business a complete organizational structure — legal, accounting, HR, IT, marketing, operations — staffed by specialists from the catalog. You set the policy. You stay in control.
The worker collective
A delivery cooperative, a trades collective, a care worker organization — any group of workers can run their full operations with governed AI infrastructure they own. No platform fee. No middleman. No extraction.
Anyone with an idea
commons-idea turns a plain-language description into a spec, and often a working local app — describe what you want and confirm it understood you. No terminal or technical background needed to take part.
The platform
Every component is open source, freely available, and built to be run by workers — not for them.
Where things stand
The honest state, so you know what you're looking at.
labor-commons is live and growing — see the count above. commons-keeper runs continuously against it, validating and scoring the catalog. commons-board's design is finished and its core implementation is underway. commons-devloop, the autonomous engine that builds and maintains these repos, is functional and self-hostable by anyone.
None of that adds up to something an everyday person can pick up yet. Running any of it today requires Docker and a terminal, which rules out most of the people it's ultimately meant for. It also requires inference — either a paid API key (Featherless.ai is this project's preferred provider) or your own hardware to self-host models. That's no longer a blocker, but it's a real cost, not a hidden one. The remaining barriers are packaging and tuning. Getting from a working stack to something a small business owner or a worker with no technical background can actually use is most of the work still ahead.
Every profession, trade, and domain of expertise has a place in labor-commons. If you know a field well enough to say what good work in it looks like, that knowledge belongs here.
The contribution path is still being finalized — check labor-commons' current status before submitting anything. An easier way in is on the roadmap.
commons-board, commons-keeper, and commons-devloop are public and self-hostable today, AGPL-3.0. Clone any of them, read how they work, run them on your own hardware.
None of the three are open to outside pull requests yet — issues are disabled while the core build is still underway. Watch the repos or this site for when that changes.
Every contribution to labor-commons makes the platform more useful for every other worker on it — in ways you can't predict and don't need to. That's the commons.
Add your expertise →