The questions we hear most —
and the answers we keep refining out loud.

EcoHubs is a growing network of people building an open-source standard for regenerative communities — a way of life that puts belonging, ecology, and shared decision-making back at the centre. It is online today and place-based tomorrow — the RCOS Standard is already being piloted with the Fruit Haven community in Ecuador, and the first EcoHub is now being formed.

RCOS — Regenerative Community Operating System — is the open standard at the heart of EcoHubs. It writes down the things communities usually leave unsaid: how decisions get made, how people join and leave, how resources are managed, how conflict is repaired. Not an ideology. A shared language.

Real. The standard is being developed, the community is active, and RCOS is already being piloted with the Fruit Haven community in Ecuador. The project is structured in phases — community formation → standard development → pilot hubs — with the first two well underway and the first EcoHub now taking shape.

Three things. First, the standard is open-source — most communities run on undocumented systems; we write ours down so it can be replicated and improved. Second, it integrates ecology, governance, economy and culture as one design, not separate departments. Third, there is a digital coordination layer — shared tools like the RCOS Standard, the Community Suitability Index (CSI), and VoteCast — so dozens of communities can learn from each other instead of each starting from zero.

An alternative within it. We're not building a wall against the world. We're building small, working examples of a different way to live — and connecting them, so anyone who wants in has a real path.

Most members keep their existing income — remote work, services, freelance — and gradually shift toward local production and contribution-based work as the community matures. There's no purity test. The model is hybrid by design: external income today, more circular and local over time.

Both, in that order. The vision is ambitious, but the methods are tested: permaculture, water and energy systems, structured governance, conflict-repair patterns. Most past communities failed for lack of structure, not lack of vision. The standard is here to fix that.

Through a hybrid model: grants from foundations and impact ecosystems, private funding (currently covering hosting and core costs), member contributions of time and skill, partnerships, and — over time — small revenue streams from onboarding support, tools, and education. No extractive investors. No tokens for sale.

Yes. Donations help fund the open-source platform, RCOS standard development, pilot hubs, and day-to-day operations. As the project grows we're setting up clearer donation channels and public tracking. If money isn't an option, time and skills are equally welcome — the community runs on both.

No. Most members are online, in their current home base. The community meets, contributes, and co-creates the RCOS Standard together — from anywhere. Physical hubs come next, when communities are ready — the RCOS Standard is already being piloted with the Fruit Haven community in Ecuador, and the first EcoHub is now being formed.

The first hub — EcoHub One — is being formed now, and the waitlist is open. Joining is free and non-binding: you are saying "keep me posted," nothing more. From there it is a gradual path — conversations and community calls, a deliberately careful selection, then pioneer training — before anyone moves in. Join the waitlist →

That a community gives back more than it takes — to the land, to its people, and to the wider world. Regeneration is about building soil, trust, skill, and resilience over time. Not sustainability in the sense of "do less damage," but a way of life that actively leaves things healthier than it found them.

No. ECO is not a cryptocurrency or a tradable coin — there is nothing to buy, sell, or speculate on. It is purely an internal unit we use to make contribution visible, measurable and transparent: a shared ledger for the labour and care people put in. It is never traded, never promoted as an investment, and never the reason to join. The reason to join is the people and the work.

Very. Every community needs cooks, listeners, writers, organizers, carers, translators, builders, teachers. The question isn't what you already know — it's what you want to show up for.

Application is free and based on alignment, not payment. Members get access to the community platform, the full RCOS Standard, the voice to shape it, and — when you're ready — a path into the physical pilot hubs.

It depends on where you are. Drawn to the first physical hub, or just want to follow along? Join the waitlist — free and non-binding. Ready to contribute to the community and help shape the RCOS Standard? Apply for membership. Already part of an existing community? Start with the free Community Resilience Assessment. And if you are still just reading — that is a perfectly good place to be, too.

Modern life has fragmented belonging, work, and place. We're building a pattern where small communities can hold all three together — locally, regeneratively, and without rebuilding from scratch each time.

None of those. We borrow from all of them and refuse the parts that didn't work. Not a utopia — utopias are brittle. Not a co-living brand — we're not selling lifestyle. The closest honest description is a network of small communities sharing an open standard.

Many small hubs around the world running the RCOS Standard in their own way, with a living, well-maintained shared standard between them. Success is not size — it's resilience and honest replication.

We have stances — on ecology, dignity, transparency, non-extraction — and they're written into the RCOS Standard. We don't have a doctrine you must agree with. We expect disagreement; we ask for honest disagreement.

We start from an open, versioned standard — not a charismatic founder. Decisions are logged, governance is explicit, and conflict-repair is a chapter, not a private conversation. Past projects often failed where these were missing.

The RCOS Standard could ossify; the founder phase could overstay its welcome; pilots could underdeliver. We name these risks in the open and write them into the working notes — being honest about failure modes is part of how we keep them survivable.

They are the same thing. RCOS (Regenerative Community Operating System) is the formal name. RCOS Standard is the friendly, human-facing name we use during the transition phase. You’ll see both — they always refer to the same standard.

No. The RCOS is designed for partial adoption. Most communities start with one or two layers — usually the one that’s currently broken — and grow into the others over time. Modules are optional on top of that.

None of those. RCOS is a written standard — a set of patterns, layer boundaries, and stress tests. Tools (governance software, contribution ledgers, even a DAO) can sit on top of it, but the standard itself is non-speculative, non-tradeable, and non-technical. You can run it on paper.

Honestly: we don’t promise it won’t. What we do is treat each community as a learning system, document failures and adaptations openly, and iterate the standard rather than assuming the first version is the right one. The RCOS Standard is built around known failure modes — not around someone’s belief that they’ve solved community.

Yes. The RCOS Standard is open-source and structurally agnostic. A co-op, a co-living house, a research collective, a neighborhood association — any group that needs to make membership, governance, conflict, or resources explicit can adopt parts of it.

The current version lives at rcos.ecohubs.community. It’s a public draft, evolving in the open — read it, fork it, argue with it.

Four, for now — and they are all open to explore. The RCOS Standard is the shared document at the centre: the patterns a community runs on. The Community Suitability Index (CSI) maps where a regenerative community has room to begin. VoteCast handles transparent, consent-based decisions. And the Community Resilience Assessment is a free self-check for any community. You will find them all in the Ecosystem menu.

CSI, the Community Suitability Index, is a working map of where a regenerative, sovereign community has room to begin — read against the law, the land, the water and the welcome of a place, and honest about what we don't yet know (csi.ecohubs.community). VoteCast is our transparent, consent-based decision-making platform: proposals, deliberation and votes everyone can see and trust (votecast.ecohubs.community).

Yes. The Community Resilience Assessment is a free, five-minute self-check for any intentional community, new or long-established. It maps how clearly your key agreements are written down — how decisions get made, how people join and leave, how conflict is repaired. There is no score and no pass/fail, just an honest picture of what is explicit and what is still unsaid, followed by a human-written gap report. Take the assessment →

A set of distinct tools that each serve the wider EcoHubs purpose: making regenerative communities more accessible, resilient, replicable, and normal. They don’t depend on one another — each fulfils its own job. Seeking.Community helps people find aligned, existing communities; CSI (https://csi.ecohubs.community) helps founders find the best place in the world to start a new one; VoteCast (https://votecast.ecohubs.community) aims to make community governance easier; and RCOS is a standard for the human structures inside a community. The Community Resilience Assessment complements them as a way for a group to see where it’s strong and where it’s fragile.

RCOS — the Regenerative Community Operating System — is an open standard for the human structures inside a community: a living set of patterns that makes the invisible explicit, from how decisions get made to how conflict gets repaired and how care is shared. It’s our best outcome so far, though it stands on its own rather than driving the other tools. You can read it at https://rcos.ecohubs.community.

CSI is a working map of where a regenerative, sovereign community has room to begin — read against the law, the land, the water and the welcome of each place. It is honest about what we don’t yet know, and lives at https://csi.ecohubs.community.

VoteCast is the decision-making tool: transparent, consent-based governance with proposals, deliberation and votes that everyone can see and trust. It puts the governance patterns in RCOS into practice, and lives at https://votecast.ecohubs.community.

Seeking.Community is a soft landing for people stepping off the track. Tell it what you’re leaving and what you’re seeking, and a real person hand-picks a few genuinely active, aligned communities — honest notes and all — within 24 hours. Free, no account, at https://seeking.community.

A short, self-guided assessment that helps a group see where it is strong and where it is fragile across the dimensions RCOS cares about — governance, ecology, economy, and culture. It’s a starting point for a conversation, not a score to chase. You can take it at https://ecohubs.community/community-resilience-assessment.

No. Each tool stands on its own — you can read RCOS, take the resilience assessment, or use Seeking.Community without touching the rest. They share a common language so they work well together, but there’s no all-or-nothing requirement.

The RCOS Standard is open-source by design, and the public tools above are free to use. The goal is shared infrastructure that any community can adopt, fork, and improve — not a walled product.

No. A high score means a region has fewer structural obstacles than most — nothing more. CSI reads public data from a desk; it cannot read the neighbours, the local mayor, the road in March, or how you feel on the third morning. Treat the map as a way to build a shortlist, then go and stand on the ground.

Because it is the only layer that can make the others irrelevant. Soil can be rebuilt and water can be caught, but if the law forbids you from living on your own land, saving your own seed, or moving your own money, the best terrain in the world does not help. So the law is read first, and a hard legal block can exclude a region outright rather than being averaged away.

Every number traces back to a public dataset — SoilGrids for soil, WRI Aqueduct for water, World Bank WGI for governance, CHELSA and GAEZ for climate and growing conditions, ThinkHazard for hazard exposure, among others. Each source is cited on the map, and the full list is published at csi.ecohubs.community. Update cadences differ by source; where we are working from an older release or a stand-in indicator, the value is marked as a proxy.

Each signal carries A, B or C. A is measured — observed data for that region. B is modelled — derived or interpolated from nearby observations. C is a proxy — usually a national figure standing in for a region until something better exists. A region scoring well on mostly C-grade signals is a lead, not a finding, and the map says so rather than hiding it in the average.

Not yet. CSI works at administrative-region resolution, which is coarse enough that two valleys inside the same score can be genuinely different places. It is built to eliminate regions, not to choose parcels. Parcel-level questions — this slope, this well, this title — are exactly what the site visit and a local lawyer are for.

No. There is nothing for sale, no brokers involved, no affiliate arrangements, and no relationship with anyone selling property in any region on the map. CSI is free to use and free to argue with. If that ever changes, it will be stated plainly on the page before it does.

They answer different halves of the same question. CSI reads the ground: whether a place can lawfully and physically hold a community. The RCOS Standard reads the structure: how the people on that ground make decisions, share resources, and repair conflict. Communities rarely fracture over soil — they fracture over rules nobody wrote down. You want both.

Please do. The gating logic, the lenses and the sources are all visible precisely so they can be disputed, and a specific objection with a dataset attached is the most useful thing you can send us. Get in touch, or bring it into the community as a member.

No — and it should not. Communities decide in conversation: around a table, in a circle, on a call. VoteCast is the step after that. It takes what the group worked out and makes it a decision on the record, with the rules it was made under attached, so that in six months nobody has to reconstruct it from memory. Plenty of groups use it purely to confirm what a circle already reached, which is a perfectly good use of it. If it ever replaced a conversation you needed to have, it was used wrongly.

No, and that is close to the whole design brief. You start a community, invite people with a link, write what is being decided, and set when voting opens and closes. There are no wallets to install and no tokens to hold — signing up takes an email address and a password. Where the platform does use a precise word, such as quorum or objection window, it defines it on the spot and again in a public glossary you can read before signing up for anything.

Yes for small groups. A community that has not been verified yet can hold up to 10 members and 50 proposals, which is enough to run real decisions for a while and work out whether the tool suits you. Verification is a manual review that lifts both caps — it exists to stop the platform being used as free spam infrastructure, not as a paywall in disguise.

Start with the simplest one that fits the question. A Poll for choices with no pass or fail. Ranked when you are picking one thing from several. Approval for ordinary motions, at a majority or at two-thirds for agreements that should be harder to change than to make. Consensus or Consent for the decisions the whole group has to carry. The honest advice is to pick a default for each kind of decision now, while nothing is at stake, rather than during the argument.

Both, and they are separate settings. When the tally becomes visible — live, on close, or only to facilitators — is one choice; whether other members can see how a particular person voted is another. You can run open votes with hidden totals, or a secret ballot with a live count. Hiding the running tally is the usual guard against people voting with the trend rather than with their judgement.

It depends on the method, which is why the method is chosen per decision. Under Consensus, a reasoned objection blocks the proposal and a stand-aside does not. Under Consent, an objection has to be upheld by a facilitator to stand. Either way the objection is recorded with its reason, and the outcome reads blocked rather than failed — a distinction that matters, because a blocked proposal usually comes back rewritten and a failed one usually does not come back at all.

No. There are no tokens, no treasury and nothing on-chain, and voting power is one person, one vote — every member counts the same. You sign up with an email address and a password. A wallet can optionally be connected as a way to sign in, for groups that already use one, but it is never required and it changes nothing about how a vote is counted.

No. VoteCast is built for any community that has decisions to make — intentional communities, cooperatives, non-profits, online collectives, networks with local chapters. EcoHubs built it and uses it, and nothing about it assumes you have read a word of the RCOS Standard.

They are the two halves of one thing. The RCOS Standard is where a community writes down what its rules are — which decisions need which method, who is eligible, how conflict gets repaired. VoteCast is where those rules actually run. A rule nobody runs is a document; a vote with no rule behind it is a headcount. You want both.

Yes — always, for the person seeking. There is no fee, no account to pay for, and nothing waiting to be upsold at the end. EcoHubs funds it because a person who lands well in a community is the whole point of the project; charging the people least able to pay would defeat it.

A person, not a matching engine. Someone who knows this world reads every intake by hand and then searches for communities that fit what you actually wrote — not whatever ranks highest or pays most. You hear back personally, normally within 24 hours.

No, and that matters more than it might sound. The great majority of places people are pointed toward have no connection to EcoHubs at all. The service works for the person seeking — if the best fit for you is a fifty-year-old community on the other side of the world that has never heard of us, that is the one you should hear about.

Then we say so. Every match lists what we could not confirm alongside what we could — whether a detail is current, whether they still have room, whether something on their page is five years old. You are deciding whether to change your life. Guessing at you would be the least useful thing we could do.

Ten questions, answered in prose rather than checkboxes — the land, an ordinary day, money, conflict, what is non-negotiable, and what worries you. Most people take twenty minutes or so. Your answers are kept in your browser as you write, so you can stop halfway and come back.

Yes — that is the normal case, not the exception. Very few people arrive with a clear specification; most arrive with a feeling and a lot of uncertainty. The questions are built to help you find the words, and "I do not know yet" is a perfectly good answer to several of them.

No. Ecovillages are one shape among many — cooperative housing, land projects, co-living, spiritual communities, farms with a shared table. What the matches have in common is that people live there together on purpose, and that the place is real and open.

It is the one part built for people who want to arrive rather than build. CSI maps where a new community could begin, the RCOS Standard describes what holds one together, and VoteCast runs its decisions. Seeking.Community is for the much larger number of people who do not want to start anything — they want to find somewhere that already works.

Membership is participation in an online community — contributing to the RCOS Standard, joining discussions, voting on proposals, and collaborating on shared tools. It is not a physical community membership, and not a place to move to.

No. Membership is free and contribution-based. You earn recognition and access through participation, not payment.

No. We have permaculturists, parents, facilitators, designers, educators, builders, listeners. The technology is meant to support coordination, not gatekeep it. Participation is based on contribution, not technical fluency.

No. Most members are online, in their current home base. The community meets, contributes, and co-creates the RCOS Standard together — from anywhere.

About 20 minutes to fill in. After that, your application goes through a 3-day community review and vote on ecohubsOS. You will hear back by email — yes, no, or with follow-up questions.

Honestly: today, the way in is to show up. Join the regular community calls, or message us directly. We are still growing the buddy system, so for now the path is human contact — calls, forum threads, and direct outreach to active members.

Research, writing, facilitation, coordination, design, development, translation, listening, hosting, stewardship of shared knowledge. There is no single expected skill set. The question is not what you already know — it is what you want to show up for.

EcoHubs is not a speculative crypto project. ECO is an internal value unit used to recognize contribution — like a transparent ledger for labor and care. It is non-transferable, never traded, and never the reason to join.

Yes — early carries uncertainty. Systems are still evolving. In return, you get to shape the RCOS Standard, hold real influence, form deeper relationships, and unlock access to roles before they are formally defined. This is a co-creation phase, not a finished product.

We are in an early founder-led phase, transitioning toward community governance. Full decentralization is a process, not a switch. Every step is being made in the open, written into the RCOS Standard, and reviewable.

Yes. Membership is voluntary. Step back, exit, return — the RCOS Standard includes clear, dignified paths for all of those.

ecohubsOS as the home base — including its internal voting system for applications and decisions. Discord and a forum for discussion. Collaborative documents for the RCOS Standard. The smallest set of tools that lets the community see itself.