This is one of the hardest articles to write. Not because its content is complex, but because it talks about money, and talking about money in the context of a project that criticizes the excesses of a civilization built on accumulation calls for a particular kind of honesty.
Sageocracy needs financial support to exist and grow. This is not a contradiction with its principles: it is a reality that its very principles require it to name clearly, without embarrassment and without artifice. A project that defends consistency between what is said and what is done cannot claim to operate without resources while quietly seeking funds.
What support is used for
The sums go to maintaining the platform, gradually repaying the costs advanced for its creation, translations and spreading the project. The association is committed to documenting this use transparently; it falls into three parts.
The first is the platform itself: its maintenance and the gradual repayment of the costs advanced for its creation, the details of which will be published on the Transparency page. The Reliances application, for its part, remains a project for the future: it will not be able to run on a central database controlled by a single authority, and will rely on a DApp (decentralized application) built on a shared register, very sparing in energy. This undertaking is not what support pays for today.
The second is the operation of the site and the registry. Maintaining sageocracy.org in seventeen languages, securing the global registry of Sageocrats, developing the site’s features: all of this carries a real technical cost, which grows with the number of registrants and the ambition of the project.
The third is the dissemination of the project. Translating additional content, producing presentation materials, organizing public events, developing academic and media partnerships: these activities are essential for the project to reach the visibility threshold that will make the shift possible.
The association receives nothing from sales of the book, and no donation is used to promote it or to pay its author.
Why support this project rather than another
This is the legitimate question asked by anyone considering contributing to a project they do not yet fully know. It deserves a direct answer.
Sageocracy does not propose to solve one sectoral problem among others: education, health, the environment, poverty. It proposes to tackle the structural cause that makes these problems persist despite decades of effort: a mode of collective governance that is no longer suited to the challenges our societies face.
Supporting Sageocracy means supporting a project that works upstream, on the conditions that make solutions possible, rather than on the solutions themselves. It is a long-term bet, which assumes that changing the way societies decide together is the precondition for everything else.
This bet is not for everyone. It requires a certain patience, a certain confidence in the power of ideas, and a vision long enough to invest in what will not produce visible results by the next election. For those who share this vision, Sageocracy may be one of the projects most consistent with what they are seeking to support.
The forms of support
Support for the project can take several forms, which are not limited to financial support.
Support through dissemination is perhaps the most precious at this stage. Sharing this site’s articles, recommending the project to people likely to find resonance in it, talking about it in one’s professional or associative networks: every conversation that introduces Sageocracy to a new person contributes directly to building the movement.
Support through skills is also welcome, and particularly precious for the technological undertaking. Skills in blockchain and DApp development, in decentralized systems architecture, in translation, in communication, in association law, in editorial relations or in event organization can be brought directly to the project.
Financial support, finally, allows the association to operate autonomously and to plan its activities over the medium term. It takes the form of a donation, or of the Sageocrat Card, your personal supporter card, optional, from 12 to 100 €: the card is the same for everyone, only the amount of your support changes, and it grants no particular rights.
What support is not
Supporting Sageocracy is not buying influence over its content or its orientations. The project’s principles are not negotiable in exchange for funding. The association is committed to refusing any support conditioned on a bending of the ideas it defends: whatever the size of the contribution.
Nor is it an investment in the financial sense of the term. There is no expected economic return, no market share to capture, no valuation to anticipate. It is a contribution to a common good, with everything that implies in terms of uncertainty, patience and trust.
« To support this project is to bet that the ideas that change the world deserve to be supported before they have changed it. »
To support the project (through dissemination, skills or a financial contribution) use the contact form available on this site or join the Sageocracy International association.