We are building options for the next economies.
At Dark Matter Labs, we view the interconnected crises of our time as symptoms of a deeper, structural miscoding of our economic systems. We understand these codes to be physical (biodiversity, energy, labour, materials), structural (money creation, embedded inequality, private property rights) and psychological (failure of the imagination).
We are exploring alternative pathways for organising society and stewarding the shared planetary commons — framing this transformation as a shift towards Life-Ennobling Economies.
This GitHub organisation hosts the open-source tools, civic technology prototypes, and research infrastructure developed across the Dark Matter Labs ecosystem. Our Civic Tech Studio builds the technological tools and knowledge for prototypes tested across real-world city and governance contexts.
Some of our active and recent projects include:
| Project | Description |
|---|---|
| circulaw | Unlocking regulatory innovation for the circular economy transition |
| permissioning-city-engine | Infrastructure for dynamic, data-augmented civic permissioning |
| treesai_website | Platform for urban tree canopy investment and ecosystem services |
| civic-tech-studio | Studio-level tooling and shared infrastructure |
| property-and-beyond | Exploring alternative models of ownership and stewardship |
Our work is structured across Labs, Arcs, and Studios — a three-dimensional matrix that represents the dynamic interplay of systemic goals, collaborations, and context-specific initiatives.
- Labs focus on specific areas of the socio-economic system, from civic technology to capital systems, property and beyond.
- Arcs are directional workflows with clear goals — Net Zero Cities, Radicle Civics, Bioregional Economics, and others.
- Studios are the connective tissue: the Civic Tech Studio develops the tools; the Conversational Design Studio shapes how we communicate; Org Dev provides the infrastructure.
Much of what lives in this GitHub reflects the Civic Tech Studio's mandate: building tangible, open civic infrastructure that can be tested, iterated, and adopted across cities.
"These pathways must be rooted in a radical reframing of our relationship to everything — from technology and money to land and the other-than-human world."
We are prototyping structural shifts: beyond property, beyond extraction, beyond private contracts, beyond governance as enforcement. The code in this organisation is part of that prototyping.
- 🌐 darkmatterlabs.org
- ✍️ Provocations — our writing and research publication
- 📬 [email protected]
- 🐦 @DarkMatter_Labs
We are based across the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada, South Korea, and Sweden.
Dark Matter Labs is a registered organisation operating across multiple jurisdictions. All repositories are open source unless otherwise noted.