Don Templeman left a six-year finance career to build Aemula, a platform for independent journalism designed so that the company holds none of the writing on its own servers, cannot block a payment, cannot remove a writer, cannot tune the ranking, and cannot tilt what readers see toward one side of politics or the other. Each of those is a power he could have kept. He gave them away because a promise not to use them would never be believed, and because a system that cannot be abused needs no one’s word.

Don Templeman raised the objection before I could. An hour into our conversation, with the payments and the ranking still ahead of us, he stopped to say the thing a listener would already be thinking: “I do think it’s completely fair, especially on a podcast about trust. How do you trust this technology?” His platform runs on Ethereum. He knows how that lands for most people.

Take the technology out and the question is one every builder has faced: why should I trust you? Most of us answer it the same way. We publish principles. We point at a track record. We say, in one form or another, that we will not do the thing our position lets us do: sell the data, change the rules, put a thumb on the scale. The promise is sincere, and it is worth almost nothing, because the person hearing it has heard it before, from companies that kept it right up until the quarter they didn’t. A promise is a claim about the future, made by the one party with a stake in breaking it.

Don’s answer is not a promise. It is a list of the things he can no longer do.

He did not come to the problem from journalism. In 2016 he was at Wake Forest, studying finance and computer science and running the business side of the student newspaper, which meant paying a roster of independent contributors by the piece. Ethereum had launched the year before.1 He tried to build the thing then and found the network far too expensive to run, so he shelved it with a condition attached: “I told myself, if it ever becomes possible at some point in the future and no one else is doing it and this is still a major problem, then I’ll leave whatever I’m doing at that time and start to work on this again. I didn’t expect that to be six and a half years deep into a finance career.” When the roadmap for a cheaper network firmed up, he says, “I started every month or so checking to see if anyone else was working on something similar,” hoping each time to find someone. “Please someone else go do this so I don’t have to quit my job.” No one did. He left wealth management in February 2024, most recently at ICONIQ Capital, to build it on his own savings. By his account, the network update that arrived a month later made it roughly a million times cheaper to operate than it was in 2016, the number he had been waiting for.

The finance years shaped what he built more than the newspaper did. Investment management, as he describes it, is the daily work of separating what everyone collectively believes from what is true, being handed opposite convictions on the same afternoon, and arguing each caller back toward the consensus. It leaves you with no illusions about being unbiased and a strong interest in systems that do not require anyone to be. He brings that to media. A newsroom’s original product was being the trusted intermediary that made sense of the world for you, verifying what happened where you could not see and packaging it so you did not have to; that trust was the moat, and when distribution went free, the intermediary had to find something else to sell. What it found was the trust itself. Once the money came from advertisers and the metric was attention, the pull was toward whatever kept an audience engaged and agreeing, and a newsroom that once earned trust by standing between you and the world began spending it to hold onto you. Don’s phrase for this is that trust wasn't lost, it was sold. Either way, the fix cannot be a more trustworthy intermediary. His answer is to build trust into the network rather than the institution: “once you build trust into the network itself, you don’t really need to rely on those intermediaries that introduce all of those other centralization problems and audience capture problems.”

Which is where the list starts.

He does not hold the work. “We don’t want to be the ones hosting the information. We don’t want to be the ones holding the content. We don’t want to be the ones serving the content to people. We want the creator of it to actually own the content itself.” A writer’s articles are not on Aemula’s servers waiting for Aemula’s good behavior. They are the writer’s.

He cannot remove anyone. “We can’t go out and shadow ban someone. We can’t remove someone’s account.” Moderation exists, but he is not the moderator: “It’s up to people who have elected to become a moderator, who’ve been trusted as a moderator, have built credibility as making accurate judgment decisions on what should be removed, so that we’re not the ones centrally controlling that process.” The judges are elected; they carry a reputation that a bad call costs them, and the company is not on the bench.

He cannot touch the money. This is the part he came from finance to solve, and the part that took him a year. A subscriber pays ten dollars in ordinary dollars and never sees a wallet; his design test, he says, was “can I send this to my mom, who has definitely not set up a crypto wallet in the past?” Behind the checkout, the dollars become a dollar-backed token in a community-governed pool, and as readers read, the money flows to the writers they are reading. Dollars in, dollars out, with nobody holding them in the middle. As he puts it, “it falls back down directly to you without anyone having full control over that process in the middle of it.” And then, in one breath, most of the list: “We want people to have the confidence to know that when they publish, they independently own their content, when they get paid, it’s coming directly from a subscriber that has read and interacted with their work. We can’t step in and block the payment. We can’t turn people’s monetization off.”

He does not own the ranking. The algorithm that decides what a reader sees is, in his words, “fully open source and fully transparent and it’s community governed.” He draws a distinction here that most companies announcing an open-source algorithm skip. “I’ve always said our algorithm’s human-readable.” Open code that nobody but a specialist can follow is transparency in name; an algorithm that routes its decisions through a large language model is open and opaque at once. “Any transparency you build, if it’s kind of clouded by complexity, it’s not gonna be used.” Aemula’s ranking is a weighted combination of three factors, summarized in a sentence: how recent the piece is, the writer’s track record, and how the community has responded to it. The platform even presents the ranking as a map you can walk around, so you can see why you are being shown what you are being shown without reading a line of code.

Every entry on this list is an answer to the same question. Why should I trust you? You should not have to.

Then comes the entry that is of a different kind. The map is a real thing: readers and writers plotted in three dimensions by who supports whom, with communities of agreement forming as clusters, and the ranking rewarding a writer whose work draws support from clusters that don't usually agree over a writer who draws a thousand cheers from one corner. The obvious way to build such a map is to label it. This cluster leans left, that one right. Don refused, and nothing else he said in two hours cuts as cleanly. “We don’t want any ability to introduce bias.” A labeled map enables weighting, and once weighting is possible, somebody has to trust him not to. “If we say we don’t actually know which is which, then there’s no real way for us to be able to do it.” So the platform knows the shape of disagreement and declines to learn its content: “we know who agrees with whom, we don’t know what their ideologies are.” He calls it verified neutrality, and it is not a power he gave away. It is a power he refused to pick up by refusing to hold the information that would have handed it to him.

It is worth being precise about what the map is for, because a reader will assume it is meant to herd people to the middle. He heads that off. “We don’t want to try to pull everyone into the center. That’s not the end goal here.” What the ranking is built to prevent is drift: “We more just want to avoid pulling people closer to the fringes or pulling people further apart.” He pictures the whole enterprise as the bar room and the library. Social media is the bar, and he means that kindly; it is where you go to argue with your friends. His complaint is that it has also become where people go to find out what happened, and a bar is a poor library.

Now, this list raises a question for anyone who does not run a news platform, which is nearly everyone reading this. The question is not whether you would abuse the power you hold over the people who use what you built. It is the power you hold right now that you ask those people to trust you not to abuse: the admin override; the data you collect, because it might be useful someday; the pricing you can change unilaterally; the account you can suspend. Every one of them is an answer to “why should I trust you” that consists of your word. The harder question, the one Don’s map poses, is which of them you could give away, and which you could decline to know in the first place. That question has an answer for your product. I am not going to guess it.

And here the list runs out, because he has a last line he hasn't crossed off. “We are still in beta,” he says, and while it is, the governance of the decentralized pieces — the switches that control the rest of the list — still sits with the company. He says his intention is that “once everything’s working correctly, we will release the governance rights to the community.” So, honestly stated: the platform that removes the need to trust the company still asks, today, for one act of trust in the company, on the timing. He is a sole founder two and a half years into a plan built for two: “I need to safely be able to have two years of no income. We’re now two and a half years into it.” The first year was not about the product; “the first year was figuring out how to let people pay us, and then we could start to actually build the platform after that,” because the banks saw a media subscription as a financial product. He admits to “definitely underestimating cold start problems”: “no one is going to care about this when it’s an empty platform, an empty network.” Staying solo bought him time, and it has bought all it can. “I am becoming a productivity bottleneck.” He is hiring for three roles now: community, product design, engineering. And he has made one promise no design can retire: the ordinary founder’s promise that an audience will arrive. Writers are earning money on the platform, he says, and “we don’t want to do them a disservice of not actually giving them the audience that we said would be here.”

The numbers, by Don’s account as of the recording and ultimately verifiable through blockchain transactions: 41 publications, about 530 users, almost eight articles a day last month, and almost $14,000 earned by writers on the platform so far, two and a half years in. The economics, also his: Aemula keeps a 10 percent platform fee; running the decentralized infrastructure has come in around 20 cents on a $10 subscription after a further thousandfold drop in network costs; so a writer sees closer to $9, which he puts at “pushing eighty-nine percent,” against the roughly 87 percent he says a writer keeps on Substack once Stripe’s fees are out. He is careful to say he admires Substack and uses it himself. The point of the numbers is not that they are large. They are small and real, and the bill is attached.

The company’s name is a gift to the argument. It comes from a line in Lucan: “stimulos dedit aemula virtus” — rivalry in excellence spurs them on.2 A platform where writers compete on how broadly they can earn credibility rather than how sharply they can provoke is what that line looks like once it is written into a ranking function.

One thing to do this week, and it is Don’s, not mine. He observes that the country online and the country in person are two different places. He suggests “making a point of talking to someone in your daily life that you run into at the grocery store or something and just having a conversation,” and then noticing, on purpose, that “this is more like what the real world is like.” No app, no budget. Treat it as taking a reading. “The act of depolarization is not trying to get people not to care about politics. It’s trying to get what our politics are to actually reflect what real life is.” The reading you take at the grocery store is the baseline the feed keeps overwriting.

The conversation is in two parts, and this essay lives across both. Part I of A Spark With Don Templeman holds the origin, the eight years of checking, and the first half of the list: the content, the accounts, the money, the moderators.

Part II is the map that refuses to learn which side is which, the bill, and the governance he has not yet handed over. Near the end, I asked what gives him hope, and he answered with the thesis from the other direction. “We know what caused it. We can go back and review what got us to this point. So we know it’s just a design problem. It’s not a fundamental flaw of human nature, I don’t think.” If trust is a design problem, you do not repair it by promising to use the power you hold well. You repair it by designing the power out. Or, as he said a moment later, “If it is a solvable problem and we put enough effort into it, it will get solved. So it’s just a matter of time at this point.”

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

The idea for Aemula started in 2016, when Ethereum had just launched, but the network needed to be about a million times cheaper before it could work. Don explains audience capture, what he means when he says trust was sold to advertisers, and makes the case for a subscription model where payment is shared across many independent writers.

The paired essay, “Trust Follows the Power You Give Away”, can be found here: https://www.sparkoftrust.com/p/trust-follows-the-power-you-give-away

Disclosure: Keiron connected the Spark of Trust publication to Aemula, so the paired essay is also syndicated on Don's platform. He has been an informal advisor to Don, one founder to another.

Episode Timestamps:

00:00 - Audience Capture Explained

00:32 - Spark of Trust Introduction

00:55 - Meet Don Templeman

03:34 - 2016 Origins and Media Polarization

06:39 - Why Web3 Was Too Early

07:49 - Ethereum Breakthrough Timeline

11:13 - Quitting Finance for Aemula

15:34 - Finance Meets Information Bias

20:37 - How Media Trust Broke

26:20 - Web3 Reputation and Transparency

27:32 - Trust Sold to Advertisers

30:54 - From Cronkite to Algorithms

34:45 - Centralized vs Decentralized Future

35:58 - Trustworthy Journalism Reimagined

36:59 - What Aemula Is Building

37:58 - Newsroom Tools Without Owners

41:11 - Why Decentralization Matters

47:44 - Substack Limits and Aemula Model

52:43 - Reader Experience and Discovery

57:24 - Web3 Skepticism and Censorship

01:05:17 - Dollars In Dollars Out Payments

01:09:34 - Regulation and Building the Rails

01:12:05 - Sign off

Aemula: https://aemula.com/

Don Templeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donald-templeman/

Reach Keiron directly: keiron@sparkoftrust.com

Spark of Trust — Igniting the Trust Revolution.

If this conversation named something you've been feeling, share it with someone who needs it. And follow the show wherever you listen. It helps the right people find it.

Connect with Spark of Trust

https://sparkoftrust.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@SparkofTrust

https://www.linkedin.com/company/sparkoftrust

https://www.instagram.com/sparkoftrust/

https://www.facebook.com/sparkoftrust

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/spark-of-trust/id6807994008

https://open.spotify.com/show/3XYhVqgSkTCGMpUYiRZDAQ?si=befe38707d834864

Our guests' views are their own, shared to encourage honest conversation. They don't necessarily reflect those of Spark of Trust or the host, and nothing here is legal, financial, medical, or professional advice.

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

Craig Nixon spent twenty-nine years in the Army, commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan and Iraq, and helped run the special-operations campaign that Stan McChrystal later turned into the book “Team of Teams.” The argument he carries out of that war is not about raids. It is about problems: the ones too big for any single organization don’t yield to a better hierarchy; they yield when someone links the people already working the pieces. The collapse of trust, he thinks, is one of those problems.

There is a sentence in this episode that most institutions never manage to say about themselves. Craig Nixon says it about the finest strike force his profession had ever produced: “we were operating as better than we had ever operated, and we still weren’t winning, which means we were losing.”

By the early 2000s, he says, the special-operations task force was “probably the best raid force that had ever been assembled at that point,” built over ten or fifteen years. Every input was maxed. The needle wasn’t moving. The enemy was a network; the task force was a hierarchy; and no amount of excellence within the hierarchy could close the gap.

If you are building something serious against a problem that doesn’t care how good you are, you have felt this without the war attached. The numbers inside your walls look fine. The problem outside them isn’t shrinking. More effort produces more output, and no more progress. The task force hit that wall with the best resources on earth behind it: “To use Stan’s line, we couldn’t shoot straighter, we couldn’t fly faster, we couldn’t work any harder. So we just had to do things differently than we had been doing.”

He is a retired Army brigadier general: Panama; Task Force Ranger operations in Somalia and Bosnia; seven deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq; command of the 75th Ranger Regiment in the middle of both wars; and a stretch as Director of Operations at JSOC, during the campaign McChrystal ran and later wrote about. After retiring in 2011, he became a founding partner of McChrystal Group, then the CEO of ACADEMI and Constellis Group, carrying the same argument into rooms full of executives rather than operators. So when he describes what “differently” meant, he is describing something he helped build multiple times1.

Differently meant this: keep doing the work, but change what the work is for. “We still continued to do the kill and capture raids, and that was part of what brought everybody to the table. But the table became more important in a lot of ways than the raids.”

That sentence is the whole thesis in miniature. The raids, the visible output, the thing the organization was built to produce, became the reason the intelligence agencies, the coalition partners, and the interagency showed up. The table is what won: the shared picture, assembled from organizations that had been working the same problem in separate silos. By Craig’s count, the tempo went “from seventeen raids a month to three hundred.” McChrystal’s published version of the same arc runs from roughly eighteen a month in 2004 to three hundred by 20062. Seventeenfold is not what a hierarchy gets from working harder. It is what a network gets when the same people share one picture of the fight and are trusted to act on it.

Craig has a name for the class of problem this applies to. A wicked problem has no clean edges: every piece touches another, no single owner, no finish line. “If you wanna solve a wicked problem, I think the approach of bringing a network against a wicked problem may be the only way to do it.” And then the harder half of the claim: “I don’t think there’s a single organization that’s going to solve the kind of problems that we have. The real art becomes how you link all the disparate organizations that are already doing things at pieces of the problem together in a way that enables what they’re doing, enables what you’re doing, and ultimately has a cumulative effect of getting to the tipping point of solving the problem.”

Read that a second time with the war stripped out. The art is not building the winning organization. The art is the linking.

Which is exactly how he reads the collapse of trust. After three years of looking at the people trying to repair it, in our work at The Trust Foundation, the assessment is generous and brutal in the same breath: “There are lots of people doing lots of great things. Individually, I’m not convinced any of them will be successful. In fact, I’m pretty well convinced individually none of them will be.” Not because the work is bad. Because the problem is wicked, and each effort is a raid force: excellent, and alone.

If you build things, this is where the essay turns toward you. Maybe you walked away from a model you stopped believing in, an attention machine, an extraction machine, and you are building something people can trust instead. The uncomfortable arithmetic is that the problem you picked is almost certainly bigger than the organization you are building to meet it. Craig’s evidence says that is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to change what winning means: from being the answer to being linkable. Someone is already working the piece of your problem you can’t reach. Your output, like the raids, may matter most as the thing that earns you a seat at their table.

What holds a linked thing together has names, and Craig borrows them honestly from the book before adding his own word. “Shared consciousness and purpose at the higher level, empowered execution at the lower level,” he says, quoting the “Team of Teams” frame, and then: “and I would add, and trust.”3 His definition of it is operational, not sentimental: “people do what they say they’re gonna do, regardless of the danger involved.” (In his old world it came with a tolerance: a pilot who commits to 0300 arrives “plus or minus 15 seconds.”)

And it has to run both ways to work. Downward, as underwriting. Craig speaks both sides of that deal in one breath: the operator trusting that “my boss at the other end of that will understand I am in the intent of trying to accomplish the mission,” and the boss whose answer is “I will underwrite those type of mistakes.” Upward, as confidence: “If I don’t trust that you’re gonna be there when I look over my shoulder… then I’m going to half step or hedge my bets at the lower level. So the speed of execution is always gonna slow down.” The half step is what a network dies of. Nobody quits. Everybody hedges.

Now the awkward part, because Craig puts it on the table himself. Networks are not assembled on neutral ground. “It’s not a blank sheet of paper.” The field is already occupied by industrial-era hierarchies “mainly fighting for their survival,” and some of them will read your network as a threat, correctly: “there are organizations out there that not only won’t help you, but are actively fighting against you because you are now threatening their organization or institution.”

And even the people who should join don’t arrive humble. “The old line is if you wanna get a message out to special operators, just write it on a mirror.” The network that turned the war was not built by people free of ego. It worked because three specific things were true, and Craig lists them without romance. There was a strategic leader with the vision and the drive, and “Stan was that guy.” There was a core of prior trust decades in the making: “the Delta commander and the SEAL Team Six commander and myself were all good friends, and all served together over a long period of time.” And there was success as a convening force, the pull of “they’re doing something over there that we want to be part of.”

That is the bill, itemized: a leader, a trusted core, and visible results. Most people starting on a wicked problem have none of the three, and the early years of building them look like loss. You keep doing your raids, you give away your picture of the problem, and you sit at tables where the credit is dispersed. The trust numbers say how long the road is. In Gallup’s June 2026 poll, two American institutions still hold majority confidence: small business at 67 percent and the military at 61, one point above the low it touched in 2023, its worst reading since 1997. Everything else is underwater, and average confidence across the fourteen core institutions has now sat below 30 percent for five straight years4.

One spark, then, and it is a link, not a plan. Somewhere, someone is already working on a piece of the problem you care about, probably in a domain you don’t read. This week, send one of them one message: what you are seeing from your piece, and what you could carry for theirs. No pitch, no ask, no tool, no budget. Extend first, the way Craig does: “I will extend trust to you until you show me that you don’t deserve trust.” Then do the one thing that keeps a network alive once it exists, which is also his floor for the whole project: “do the things that you say you’re gonna do… if you say you’re gonna do it, do it.”

The full conversation holds more than this essay can carry: Sarajevo going from Olympic host to chaos within a decade, how he rebuilt the Rangers’ whole way of operating mid-war, and the rule he now uses to decide which work he will join. And near the end, he offers the closest thing to hope the hour contains. Inside a network, the gains compound where you can see them. Outside it, they compound where you can’t: “geometric improvement external to the network that you may never know about. It may be the silver bullet that solves trust.”

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

Craig spent twenty-nine years in the Army, commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan and Iraq, and helped run the special-operations campaign that Stan McChrystal later turned into Team of Teams. His argument: progress comes from linking the people already working on different pieces of the problem.

Disclosure: Craig and Keiron co-founded the Trust Foundation together, the nonprofit where this show's work began.

The paired essay, Bring a Network to a Wicked Problem, is at https://www.sparkoftrust.com/p/bring-a-network-to-a-wicked-problem

Reach Keiron directly: keiron@sparkoftrust.com

Spark of Trust — Igniting the Trust Revolution.

Episode Timestamps:

00:00 A promise kept to the second, and work no one finishes alone

00:33 Spark Of Trust - A Spark With Craig Nixon

01:03 Meeting Brigadier General Craig Nixon: the Rangers, JSOC, and the trust apocalypse

02:35 What trust actually means, learned in the Rangers, and the tax a society pays without it

08:20 From Sarajevo's Olympics to chaos, and why AI is speeding up the fall

14:50 The crisis inside our institutions, and where public trust still holds

27:06 The best raid force ever built, and why it still wasn't winning

34:45 Why a wicked problem needs a network, not a better hierarchy

38:57 Inside the room: egos, inherited trust, and the raids that went from seventeen a month to three hundred

46:19 The boss who covers your mistakes, and the trust that has to flow both directions

50:06 Why Craig came back for another fight, and the three-question rule behind it

57:25 Building the Trust Foundation, and why success is a lagging indicator

1:04:10 The Talmud line behind the show, and what everyday people can do this week

If this conversation named something you've been feeling, share it with someone who needs it. And follow the show wherever you listen. It helps the right people find it.

Connect with Spark of Trust

https://sparkoftrust.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@SparkofTrust

https://www.linkedin.com/company/sparkoftrust https://www.instagram.com/sparkoftrust/

https://www.facebook.com/sparkoftrust

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/spark-of-trust/id6807994008

https://open.spotify.com/show/3XYhVqgSkTCGMpUYiRZDAQ?si=befe38707d834864

Our guests' views are their own, shared to encourage honest conversation. They don't necessarily reflect those of Spark of Trust or the host, and nothing here is legal, financial, medical, or professional advice.

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

The paired essay, Show Me the Incentives and I'll Show You the Outcome, is at https://www.sparkoftrust.com/p/show-me-the-incentives-and-ill-show-you-the-outcome

$1 Billion for Trust: https://www.1billionfortrust.org · hello@1billionfortrust.org

Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattabrams

Disclosure: Matt is a friend of Keiron's, and his $1 Billion for Trust organization and this show are fellow travelers. Keiron has sat in on their working calls; they often compare notes.

Reach Keiron directly: keiron@sparkoftrust.com

Spark of Trust — Igniting the Trust Revolution.

Episode Timestamps:

00:00 Nobody gets to be the hero

00:24 Spark Of Trust - A Spark With Matt Abrams, Part II

01:06 How One Billion for Trust began, from a failed venture fund to a shared conviction

02:44 The civic assembly that cost more than anyone expected, and why trust has no funding ecosystem

09:32 Why "show me the incentives" explains everything, and why a billion still isn't enough

15:53 Watch Duty, USAFacts, and the proof the work is real

23:26 Why "social impact" is the wrong frame, and the economic case for trust

30:16 Why Matt won't touch politics with a ten-foot pole

34:55 Letting go of the need to get the credit

40:19 How do you measure something as slow-moving as trust

44:13 Ten years from now, and what gives Matt hope right now

53:26 Where to find One Billion for Trust

If this conversation named something you've been feeling, share it with someone who needs it. And follow the show wherever you listen. It helps the right people find it.

Connect with Spark of Trust

https://sparkoftrust.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@SparkofTrust

https://www.linkedin.com/company/sparkoftrust https://www.instagram.com/sparkoftrust/

https://www.facebook.com/sparkoftrust

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/spark-of-trust/id6807994008

https://open.spotify.com/show/3XYhVqgSkTCGMpUYiRZDAQ?si=befe38707d834864

Our guests' views are their own, shared to encourage honest conversation. They don't necessarily reflect those of Spark of Trust or the host, and nothing here is legal, financial, medical, or professional advice.

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

Matt Abrams grew up in an Oregon lumber town watching loggers and environmentalists get pitted against each other while the real story went untold. He became a technologist, a founder, and a venture investor, and he came out the other side convinced that the trust crisis is not a mystery or a moral failing. It is a funding model. And a funding model, unlike a moral failing, can be redesigned: by the people who build, by the people who back them, and by anyone deciding where their attention and dollars go.

In the fall of 2024, in a Central Oregon county that sits on the dividing line of the Greater Idaho movement, with a militia not far up the road, thirty strangers spent two weekends deciding what their community should do about youth homelessness.1 They had been chosen by lottery from close to 13,000 invitations sent out by local civic organizers, with written commitments from the city council and county commission to consider whatever came back.2 The thirty were a statistically representative slice of the county, paid properly, travel and childcare covered, so that “representative” meant something. Matt Abrams calls the format “jury duty for civic issues.” He watched people who walked in afraid of one another come together to produce 22 supermajority recommendations.3 Six months later, the organizers brought the members back and measured the changes that had occurred between them. “The trust between the assembly members was way up there.”

Assemblies are slow, human, and hard to shortcut. “They’re not efficient,” Matt concedes. “But holy hell are they effective.”

During the assembly, visitors came up from Silicon Valley. That is Matt’s own world; he has spent his career in tech and venture capital, as a founder and a fund partner. One of them surveyed the thing and said, “This is great. This is awesome. How do we get this cheaper?”

Matt’s reaction, on the record and repeated for emphasis: “Fuck you.” Then the sentence that explains the response: “We will put $4 million into a pre-seed stage startup for charlatan X, for promise Y, and yet for a solution that we know solves for trust and provides that core infrastructure that we need for strong economic returns, oh, sorry.”

Here’s some additional context: The assembly took a year of groundwork, led by Josh Burgess, a retired Air Force special-operations colonel who would have earned several times as much doing comparable work at a big tech company.4 The whole thing cost roughly $300,000.5 Local fundraisers in a wealthy county produced about $40,000 of it; the rest had to come from funders and foundations far outside the city and state, because nothing closer existed. The facilitator effectively lives out of his car for half the year; the other half he volunteers in a fire lookout tower. That is the funding reality for a solution that measurably rebuilt trust inside a representative group drawn from a polarized county, in the same economy that will wire millions to a pitch deck by Friday.

That room has a quieter version, and it convenes wherever trustworthy work goes looking for money. You made the product without the dark patterns, the one that charges honestly instead of harvesting attention, and the money across the table was warm and final: impressive, principled, and somehow not a deal. What Matt offers is a way to read that moment correctly. You were not being told your work was weak. You were watching an incentive structure do exactly what it was built to do.

His diagnosis borrows a line you may already use about the attention economy, Charlie Munger’s: “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.”6 On the breaking side, everyone can follow it. Social platforms optimize for monthly and daily active users, and, as Matt puts it, “if that’s all you’re optimizing for, then the most provocative, the most extreme things… are gonna be the things which are increasing that engagement.” Nothing about that outcome is surprising. The objective function did what objective functions do.

The move that earns this essay is pointing the same line at the repair side. If trust-building work is starved, erratic, and invisible, that is not because the work is weak. It is because the incentive structure around it optimizes for the wrong thing. “If we get the objective function or functions wrong for what is being optimized for,” Matt says, “then the outcomes are going to be crap.” Read that way, the trust crisis ceases to be a mystery and becomes a failure of resource allocation. And resource-allocation failures are fixable.

Look at what the current allocation actually rewards. Matt calls the money available to trust builders “Oliver Twist funding”: “More porridge, sir, please.” There is no ladder. “We don’t have a rich funding ecosystem like we do across the venture domains… angel, super angel, pre-seed, seed, and on up.” What exists instead is a small number of foundations making project-based grants, gatekeeping included. At the assembly, one organization presented a service for which a grant had paid them to build it but had forbidden them from marketing it. “They couldn’t tell anyone about it, so no one knew about them.” No TechCrunch for the field, no Techstars, no shared playbook. And on the other side of the ledger, for scale: Matt cites Reuters reporting that Meta itself projected roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue, about $16 billion, would come from ads for scams and banned goods.7 Ten percent of one company’s revenue, from fraud, against porridge.

What he refuses, flatly, is the consolation prize of calling any of this charity. Tell a room of investors you run a “social impact” venture and, in his experience, “you get a pat on the head. That’s nice. That’s good of you.” His frame is colder and better: “If you are a blood-sucking capitalist and all you care about is the dollar, then these should be some of the most important investments that you make,” because trust is the infrastructure on which everything else runs, returns included. He points to GPS: taxpayer-built, free at the point of use, and load-bearing for trillions of dollars in private activity. He points to Boeing, a company that optimized shareholder value quarter-to-quarter rather than investing in safety and trust. Had it invested, “they wouldn’t have killed people. Their stock would’ve been cranking.” And he warns that software companies are building their own Boeings.

So he set about building the missing structure. $1 Billion for Trust did not start out as itself. Matt’s first attempt was a conventional venture fund, Democracy Capital, built to pour capital into solutions that build trust across the information environment. It stalled twice over: conversation after conversation went “great idea, but will you change the name?” because the word “democracy” had become polarized; and the fund model itself was, in his words, a “square peg, round hole.” He stopped forcing it. $1 Billion for Trust is what coalesced instead, with others who had arrived at the same conclusion by their own routes, and it is more interesting: a community assembling the three things venture gave software (the capital, the entrepreneurs, and the connective infrastructure between them) for the people rebuilding trust in information, in institutions, and in each other. The number in the name is doing deliberate work. “A billion is still a gnat’s ass in the big scheme of things,” Matt says, against what flows to the solutions that break trust. But a big number announces an investment thesis. A small one announces a cause.

The near-term work, as of our conversation, is almost embarrassingly simple: making the builders visible to each other and to capital. Monthly “trust talks” put working entrepreneurs in front of the community, like Watch Duty, the nonprofit wildfire app that has become core emergency infrastructure in the American West.8 And the visibility gap holds even when the name behind the work is famous. USAFacts, Steve Ballmer’s (of Microsoft fame) nonprofit, turns government data into plain, opinion-free storytelling; when Matt spoke at an intelligence-community summit of about 300 people and asked who knew it, maybe 5 hands went up.9 That gap, between how load-bearing the work is and how few people have heard of it, is the cheapest part of the whole problem to fix.

None of this comes with proof yet, and Matt does not pretend otherwise. His working thesis on measurement is that trust solutions are anti-VUCA: they reduce volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in people’s lives, and that reduction can be tracked. The assembly’s own follow-up data shows the limits as plainly as the promise. Trust among the members soared. Trust between the members and their government rose slightly, then plateaued. And the risk he names first is not in the market but in the mirror. “It’s a human instinct that people want to get credit,” he says. “It will fail if anyone around is saying, ‘Hey, I’m gonna be the one that’s gonna come in and solve trust.’” A capital thesis whose first covenant is that nobody gets to be the hero: either the most naive idea in venture or the most disciplined. I don’t think it’s naive.

Matt’s own version of what to do this week is much smaller than his capital thesis, and cheaper than anything in it. He wears it on a hat that reads Leave It Better. The instruction underneath is a maxim he borrows and keeps plain: “Just be a decent human being.”10 Not a program, not a pledge, no tool and no budget. One decent act, aimed at one person outside your own bubble, this week. It sounds too small to matter against sixteen billion dollars of fraud ads. That gap between the size of the act and the size of the problem is the whole wager: that decency, unlike outrage, compounds in a direction no objective function is currently paying anyone to build toward.

An essay can hold the thesis; the conversation holds the life around it. The childhood between the loggers and the environmentalists. The criminal court that traded prosecution for twenty minutes of life story. The ten-year picture where civic bonds sit next to municipal ones. Part I of A Spark With Matt Abrams is out now:

Part II, next week, follows the capital thesis all the way down to where Matt lands it. We are living through our own version of the Roaring ‘20s, he says; everything is disrupted at once, and like every S-curve, it will eventually settle. The work is deciding what it settles around: trust “front and center in terms of how it levels out. And that’s our job.”

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

Disclosure: Matt is a friend of Keiron's, and his $1 Billion for Trust organization and this show are fellow travelers. Keiron has sat in on their working calls; they often compare notes.

Reach Keiron directly: keiron@sparkoftrust.com

Spark of Trust — Igniting the Trust Revolution.

Episode Timestamps:

00:00 Fear of not being heard opens the show

00:28 A Spark With Matt Abrams, Part I

01:00 Welcoming Matt Abrams, the venture capitalist turned trust builder

02:43 The fake 9/11 Quran emails that started Matt's hunt for trustworthy information, and the humility it took him decades to learn

08:06 Growing up in a divided Oregon logging town

10:20 The Decency Project, and how one courtroom experiment scaled into civic assemblies

19:32 What a civic assembly actually is

21:32 How Central Oregon used one to tackle youth homelessness

27:13 Why trust, not truth, is democracy's real foundation

31:10 Loving the rock: Sisyphus and the price of caring about trust

32:28 Is distrust ever healthy?

40:06 What most people get wrong about how divided we are

44:34 A segue into Part II

If this conversation named something you've been feeling, share it with someone who needs it. And follow the show wherever you listen. It helps the right people find it.

Connect with Spark of Trust

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https://www.youtube.com/@SparkofTrust

https://www.linkedin.com/company/sparkoftrust

https://www.instagram.com/sparkoftrust/

https://www.facebook.com/sparkoftrust

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/spark-of-trust/id6807994008

https://open.spotify.com/show/3XYhVqgSkTCGMpUYiRZDAQ?si=befe38707d834864

Our guests' views are their own, shared to encourage honest conversation. They don't necessarily reflect those of Spark of Trust or the host, and nothing here is legal, financial, medical, or professional advice.

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

Disclosure: Keiron is an investor in Neya.

Time Stamps:

00:00 - What makes Neya feel different

00:22 – Spark Of Trust - A Spark With Rob Chapman & Harry Hobson, Part II

00:54 - Welcome back to part two: what Neya is, and why the founders chose AI

04:00 - The AI super neighbor: hosting, moderating, and purposeful orchestration

09:31 - The founders' biggest risk, and a day in the life of Neya

13:41 - Building community at the pace of trust, and the latent demand to help

15:50 - Faint needs, conditional preferences, and the marketplace behind them

19:57 - Why local requests go unanswered today, and building a business model around trust instead of attention

27:57 - Where AI erodes trust, and rebuilding it through people and place

32:36 - What success looks like, legacy, and measuring impact without gaming the metric

40:12 - Early evidence, scaling partnerships, and the vision of a new institution

44:56 - One spark for listeners, and closing thoughts

Find your people nearby. Neya helps you find local groups, events and neighbours who share your interests, so you can feel more at home where you live.

https://www.joinneya.com/

The paired essay, "You Don't Build Trust by Telling Someone to Trust You", is at https://www.sparkoftrust.com/p/you-dont-build-trust-by-telling-someone-to-trust-you

Connect with Spark of Trust

https://sparkoftrust.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@SparkofTrust

https://www.linkedin.com/company/sparkoftrust

https://www.instagram.com/sparkoftrust/

https://www.facebook.com/sparkoftrust

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/spark-of-trust/id6807994008

https://open.spotify.com/show/3XYhVqgSkTCGMpUYiRZDAQ?si=befe38707d834864

Our guests' views are their own, shared to encourage honest conversation. They don't necessarily reflect those of Spark of Trust or the host, and nothing here is legal, financial, medical, or professional advice.

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution

Two of Neya’s founders spent years studying why neighborhoods lose trust, then built a company on the one thing the research kept telling them: you cannot rebuild trust by trying to rebuild trust. You smuggle it in with something else. Make an ordinary, useful thing easy, and let trust accrue as the residue. Here is what that means for anyone trying to build trust, and especially for anyone building technology people are supposed to trust.

Somewhere along the way, you have said the words “trust me” and felt them fall flat in the air. Not because you were untrustworthy, but because trust cannot supply its own evidence. So you take the long way around: the track record, the credentials, the principles published where anyone can read them. But from the outside, the work of being trustworthy and the work of appearing trustworthy can look identical. The person across the table still hesitates.

The hesitation is not a failure of your work. It is a property of trust itself. Trust is the one asset that retreats when you reach for it. Rob Chapman and Harry Hobson have spent years watching this at close range: Harry through Neighbourly Lab, the nonprofit he founded in 2019 to study how neighborhoods connect, after a piece of loneliness ethnography for Facebook moved him enough to quit consulting for big tech altogether; Rob as a serial founder (who sat on Neighbourly Lab’s board while building his own companies) who sold his last company to Accenture1 and then went looking for the problem underneath the problem. Rob’s conclusion is blunt. “To be trusted, you have to start by being trustworthy.” And its uncomfortable corollary: “I don’t think it’s possible to build trust in someone by telling them to trust you.”

If you build technology for a living, you have felt the truth of that sentence: in a pitch meeting, in a customer conversation, in the second a user hovers over a permissions prompt and decides. The question is what to do instead.

Start by lowering the bar. Most conversations about trust set it high: do I trust my bank, do I trust the government, do I trust this platform with my data? Harry is interested in a lower, quieter layer, which he calls “an adequacy of trust… enough trust for other good things to come through.” His plainer phrase for it is the “presumption of good intent”: the unexamined assumption that if you knock on a stranger’s door, you will be met with help. Nobody audits this assumption. Everyday life simply runs on it, the way software runs on an operating system nobody thinks about until it fails.

And it behaves like a threshold, not a dial. Above the line, small cooperation snowballs; people lend things, ask things, notice each other, and each exchange makes the next one cheaper. Below it, everything inverts. “If you live in a place which has got no trust,” Harry says, “life is costly. Everything’s more difficult…You live in a much narrower, more expensive way, a bit like being a tourist in a city you don’t know.” He means costly literally: you buy what you could have borrowed, you pay the market for what neighbors once did for each other, and the isolation compounds into a health cost that longevity startups spend fortunes trying to buy back.2 The summer 2024 riots in a dozen towns across the UK are what the far end of the same slope looks like: a place dipping below the presumption of good intent, under pressure, all at once.

The threshold also explains why local trust is not a small subject. “If you don’t trust people who live outside your door,” Rob asks, “how can you trust anyone who’s on telly or running the government?” Institutional trust is built on a foundation it did not pour.

So how do you raise a thing that recoils from direct attention? Harry’s answer, from years of interventions that worked and interventions that didn’t: “It’s best when it’s smuggled in with something else.” Rob completes the thought: “You build trust through it being smuggled in by doing things you need to do anyway.” Ask people what would make their lives easier, and nobody says trust. Nobody says cohesion. They say childcare, a borrowed drill, help moving a sofa, advice about schools. The method is to meet those stated needs obliquely and let trust arrive as a by-product.

The clearest picture of this involves no technology at all. It is a garden. Neighbourly Lab evaluated a horticulture program for military veterans carrying trauma, people whose trust in the world around them had genuinely broken. Nobody there runs trust exercises. The rebuilding happens “very slowly, very gently, but by doing something oblique”: two people digging, “shoulder to shoulder,” and “just kind of slowly, gradually just noticing each other, realizing that they’re okay.” The urbanist Jane Jacobs3 saw the same mechanism on city sidewalks sixty years earlier, trust formed from “many, many little public sidewalk contacts,” each one done for some other reason, trivial alone, decisive in sum.

If you left the attention economy to build something better, you already know half of this. You know the refusals: no dark patterns, no engagement bait, no surveillance monetization. The oblique method is the other half, the constructive half. It says the path to being trusted is not a louder statement of your values but a quieter product: find the thing people already want done, make it genuinely easy, and accept that trust compounds on its own schedule. Or as Rob puts it, “you can only build community at the pace of trust.”

Which brings us to the awkward part. Rob and Harry’s company, Neya, uses AI to rebuild neighborhood connection, at a moment when the prevailing story is that AI will finish off whatever human connection the feed left standing. “One of the biggest risks for us as a company,” Rob says, “is that we get too excited about AI and what AI can do.” They are candid that the technology does not automatically earn trust: “Where people lose trust is where there’s like an uncanny valley where the AI has done something you didn’t expect or before you were ready.” An introduction made too early destroys the thing it was meant to create.

The discipline runs through the business model. “If the business model is about attention,” Rob says, “then you have to do the things that maximize attention. You need more shocking content, and you need to try and get people hooked into the platform.” Neya charges a local business a fee only when the connection the user requested is successfully made. The incentive is usefulness, not time on the app. And the cost of that choice is on the table too: “we’d rather build more slowly, grow more slowly where people really trust it... than go really fast.” That is a founder, out loud, declining short-term growth his more extractive peers treat as the be-all and end-all.

The early evidence is modest and real: around 450 people testing the product pre-launch, by the founders’ count; a 2025 William Sutton Prize win; and a pilot with Clarion, the UK’s biggest social landlord, which provides homes for around 360,000 people.4 Not a triumph story. A build story, with the bill attached.

The whole argument scales down to something you can do before Friday, no tool or budget required. Rob’s version: “Smiling’s a good start.” In Paris, a former journalist named Patrick Bernard set himself the task of saying hello to everyone he passed; it grew into the Replique Des Hyper Voisins, thousands of neighbors remaking their corner of the 14th arrondissement, starting from a greeting.5 So this week, say hello first. To a neighbor. Or to the one user you have been treating as a metric. Do it for its own sake, and let it be trivial. The “seemingly trivial interactions,” to paraphrase Jacobs, are the mechanism that underwrites our ability to depend on one another in times of need.6

If this named something you have felt, the full conversation goes further: the research behind the threshold, the numbers behind the build, and the failures the founders put on the table unprompted. It starts with Part I of A Spark With Rob Chapman & Harry Hobson, where this essay began:

Part II, available next week, discusses their ambition for the work, a phrase worth ending on, because it captures the whole field in a single sentence: “the ability to live a good common local life together.”

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

Disclosure: Keiron is an investor in Neya.

Time Stamps:

0:00 - Trust as the foundation of healthy communities

0:29 - Spark Of Trust - A Spark With Rob Chapman & Harry Hobson, Part I

1:01 - Welcome to the show: how Rob and Harry met, and the ten-year path to founding Neya

6:31 - Why trust became personal for each of them, and the "adequacy of trust" tipping point

13:02 - What's at stake when trust breaks down: war, riots, and the cost of low trust

19:59 - Inside Neighborly Lab: the loneliness hub and the Newham deaf community project

25:55 - From local wins to systemic change, and the biggest lesson on contact theory

31:40 - Why digital infrastructure matters as much as physical spaces

38:08 - Why trust can't be tackled head-on, and how it's rebuilt after being lost

44:38 - Jane Jacobs on small interactions, and closing thoughts

46:36 - Outro and preview of part two

The paired essay, "You Don't Build Trust by Telling Someone to Trust You", is at https://www.sparkoftrust.com/p/you-dont-build-trust-by-telling-someone-to-trust-you

Find your people nearby. Neya helps you find local groups, events and neighbours who share your interests, so you can feel more at home where you live https://www.joinneya.com/

Thanks for listening to and watching Spark of Trust. If this conversation named something you've been feeling, share it with someone who needs it. And follow the show wherever you listen. It helps the right people find it.

Connect with Spark of Trust

https://sparkoftrust.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@SparkofTrust

https://www.linkedin.com/company/sparkoftrust

https://www.instagram.com/sparkoftrust/

https://www.facebook.com/sparkoftrust

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/spark-of-trust/id6807994008

https://open.spotify.com/show/3XYhVqgSkTCGMpUYiRZDAQ?si=befe38707d834864

Our guests' views are their own, shared to encourage honest conversation. They don't necessarily reflect those of Spark of Trust or the host, and nothing here is legal, financial, medical, or professional advice.

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

This publication has a new name. What was Trust Apocalypse is now Spark of Trust. The name changed; the work hasn’t. The white papers are still here, everything is still free to read, the model is still reader-funded, and there are still no ads. If you subscribed for the writing on trust, you’re in the right place.

Why change it? Not because the analysis changed. This publication took its old name from the white paper it was built to serialize. That paper still holds; nothing in it needs revising.

What changed is emphasis. Trust Apocalypse names the problem. And naming the problem is where almost all trust work stops. There is a report every year saying trust is down, and there will be another next year. Spark of Trust names what was always the intent: what is being done about it, and who is doing it. A retired brigadier general I’m lucky to call a mentor, Craig Nixon, put it in a sentence I have kept close since: “We’re not here to admire the problem.” The new name is the original intent, finally spoken aloud.

The diagnosis stands, and it is short to state. Trust broke in three acts over six decades, each stacking on the one before: first in our communities, then in our institutions, then in our information environment. Trust in Washington to do the right thing has fallen from 77 percent in 1964 to 17 percent in 20251, and fewer than three in ten Americans now say most people can be trusted2. The three breaks feed each other, which is why fixing any one of them is necessary but insufficient on its own. The full argument lives here on this site, in the two white papers; this publication is now about what comes after.

After that is the honest part. I don’t have the solution. If I did, I’d be building it. Building things is what I have done my whole working life. What I can do is put out the bat signal. There are people giving this a damn good try, mostly invisible to each other, most of them half-convinced they are the only ones working on it. Making them visible to each other is something I do know how to do.

And the name is not the only thing that’s new. Accompanying this newsletter is a new show:

It starts with an odd episode: I asked a friend to interview me, so that I would have to say out loud, on tape, why any of this exists. Dwayne Kerrigan — entrepreneur, host of The Dwayne Kerrigan Podcast, and one of my dearest friends — turned the chair around and asked better questions than I would have asked myself.

Listen to episode 1 here on Substack, or on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

Behind it on the 23rd: the founders of Neya, on rebuilding trust where people actually live (I liked their work enough to put a small amount of my own money in, full disclosure), then an investor, then a general.

There is a line from a two-thousand-year-old text that I did not go looking for. Someone put it on a screen at an event in 2022, and it landed as a kick up the backside:

I’m one spark. The show and this newsletter exist to find the others.

Time stamps

00:00 – Trust is awaiting a spark

02:57 - Where this started: a 2022 realization

04:58 - Two wrong diagnoses before the real one

05:46 - The root cause: a breakdown of trust

06:08 - Three acts: community, institutions, information

07:59 - It didn't start with Facebook

08:21 - Why this is a wicked problem, not a hard one

09:08 - No one institution or person can fix this

09:26 - The show's premise: the bat signal and reigniting trust

10:17 - The builders nobody's funding

11:44 - The honest starting point

14:41 - Up next: Neya and rebuilding community

16:55 - Trust rebuilt through small useful acts

18:28 - Why the show is called Spark of Trust

19:22 - Trust is a stacking event

23:03 - Community decline since the '60s, institutions since the '70s

25:37 - Trust in institutions, now under 30%

29:48 - Maybe we're right not to trust them

31:17 - How institutions get captured

34:22 - What trustworthy education, healthcare, and news could look like

37:45 - Technology's long history of speeding up information

47:07 - You're not alone

52:45 - The return on collisions

54:10 - The Team of Teams model

57:35 - From information network to action network

1:05:45 - The stakes when trust breaks down

1:06:58 - Building companies that protect the mission

1:13:09 - The one spark: choose who you do business with

1:15:25 - The close: I'm one spark, looking for others

If this conversation named something you've been feeling, share it with someone who needs it. And follow the show wherever you listen. It helps the right people find it.

Connect with Spark of Trust

https://sparkoftrust.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@SparkofTrust

https://www.linkedin.com/company/sparkoftrust

https://www.instagram.com/sparkoftrust/

https://www.facebook.com/sparkoftrust

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/spark-of-trust/id6807994008

https://open.spotify.com/show/3XYhVqgSkTCGMpUYiRZDAQ?si=befe38707d834864

Our guests' views are their own, shared to encourage honest conversation. They don't necessarily reflect those of Spark of Trust or the host, and nothing here is legal, financial, medical, or professional advice.

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

Spark of Trust is an interview show about the people rebuilding trust in our communities, in the institutions we depend on, and in the information we share. One long, honest conversation with someone doing the work: what they’re building, what it’s costing them, and one thing you can do this week.

Not a panel on how bad things are. The numbers are real, the failures get named, and nobody is selling a playbook. No ads, no sponsors.

Host Keiron McCammon sits with the people who chose the harder road on principle — founders, researchers, reformers, organizers, technologists — most of them invisible to each other. If that’s your work, this is where you find out how much company you have.

Proof the work is happening. Language for what you’ve been feeling. Company for the road.

New episodes weekly. Most conversations unfold over two parts, with a companion essay at sparkoftrust.com.

Our guests’ views are their own and are shared to encourage honest conversation. They don’t necessarily reflect those of Spark of Trust or the host, and nothing here is legal, financial, medical, or professional advice.

Until next time, keep being the spark that ignites the Trust Revolution.

The first paper diagnosed what broke. This one is about how it gets rebuilt.

The short version: not by an organization. The collapse of trust is a wicked problem — no policy, technology, or charismatic leader resolves it, because every part of it is entangled with every other part, and it shifts when you push on it. What can address a problem like that is a network that learns faster than the problem moves.

Building a Catalytic Community sets out what such a network is, how it forms, and what it would take for one to matter.

It is a network of networks. The model draws on General Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams, in which autonomous teams bound by a common purpose outperform rigid command in fast-moving conditions, and David Ehrlichman’s Impact Networks, whose first principle is trust. Leaders are gardeners, not chess masters. Three kinds of people have to be in it, and the paper is insistent that all three are load-bearing: thinkers who bring evidence, doers who build and test, and resource allocators who move relationships, expertise, and capital toward what works.

The people are already at work. Bridging groups, civic technologists, local-news experiments, the funders behind them — the paper names them, and its claim is that they are the constituency of a catalytic community, not its competition. What they lack is connection across the three fronts trust fell on, and across the three kinds of people. That is the whole of what this network would add.

It grows in three stages, and they cannot be skipped. First, an information network: people connect, build a common language, and come to share a picture of the problem. Then an action network: small empowered teams take on concrete work under the lightest structure that will hold. Then an impact network: coherence at scale, where the thing behaves like an ecosystem rather than an organization. The paper is honest about which of these it can vouch for. Its argument has three links — that the network can be formed, that it will produce work, that the work will move trust — and it claims only the first, tests it in public, and says the other two are what the later stages exist to find out.

It moves at the speed of trust. This is the constraint everything else obeys. You cannot rush the first stage, and attempting to is the most common way these efforts fail — an action network built on relationships that were never formed is an org chart with nobody behind it. Front Porch Forum spent years as an unremarkable neighborly bulletin board before a flood turned it into the community’s lifeline. Taiwan’s g0v was volunteers self-organizing into project teams until, after the Sunflower Movement, the government came to them.

It says how it would fail. Stage one, as this publication is conducting it, begins with every connection running through a single host (me). The paper sets a test anyone can watch — the network is working when connections form that don’t run through us — and closes with the seven ways a community like this goes wrong, from becoming a cult to becoming a salon, and what guards against each.

Near its end, it turns to a line from Pirkei Avot, two thousand years old and still the honest version of what any of this asks:

Read it in order:

1. Part I: Why a Catalytic Community — the definition, the foundations it rests on, and what transfers from a military network to an open society and what does not.

2. Part II: The People Already at Work, and the Three Stages — who is doing this now and why they are not yet a network; then the three stages and what marks each.

3. Part III: Stage 1 — Making the Builders Visible — the podcast and newsletter as the first stage, conducted in public, and the test we will be held to.

4. Part IV: What Stages 2 and 3 Will Require, and How This Fails — the principles the later stages will have to hold, four task forces the network might run, and seven ways it could all go wrong.

5. Part V: Where We Are, and What We Ask — what exists today, what comes next, and the smallest ask a venture with these stakes could make.

Written by Keiron McCammon.

This is the thesis this publication and its accompanying podcast put into practice: stage one, conducted in public — thinkers, doers, and the people who can move resources — encountering each other one conversation at a time.

Igniting the Trust Revolution

This is part V of a series exploring how we can address the Trust Apocalypse by building a catalytic community:

• Part I: Why a Catalytic Community

• Part II: Catalytic Community Evolution — From Connection to Impact

• Part III: Stage 1 — Making the Builders Visible

• Part IV: What Stages 2 and 3 Will Require, and How This Fails

We have laid out what a catalytic community is, who is already at work, and what it would take for a network of them to matter. The path forward begins where every catalytic community begins: with an information network, formed at the speed of trust. This final section says where Spark of Trust actually is, what comes next, and what we are asking of you — which is deliberately small.

We are at Stage 1, and it is running. The Spark of Trust podcast and newsletter bring forward one builder a week — one conversation and one essay, in public — and the archive is accumulating as the shared record described in the earlier section. Every episode closes on one thing you can do this week, so the catalysis starts with the listener rather than waiting on an organization. That is all that exists. The network — the connections among the people the show makes visible that do not run through us — is what we are watching for, by the test we set ourselves earlier, and we will say in public whether we are seeing it.

What comes next follows from the model rather than from a calendar. As the network becomes visible to itself — guests encountering one another’s work, listeners writing to each other, the first small gatherings among people who met through the show — the steward roles and the community charter take shape with the people who have found each other. The first coordinated efforts follow from that, and Stage 2 follows with them. We will not put dates on it. The lesson from every network we have looked at is that an action network built on relationships that were never formed is an organization chart with no one behind it. The speed of trust is the method. Holding to it is the discipline.

What We Ask

The ask is the smallest one a venture with these stakes could make, and the earlier sections have explained why anything larger would be dishonest. There are four parts to it.

Subscribe and listen. The newsletter and the podcast are free, and the more people who can see the builders, the faster the network learns what it has in common.

Tell us about a builder we should know about. The people this paper is about are largely invisible, and the ones we do not already know are the ones who matter most: every guest who had to be found is evidence that this is a network, not a room. If you know someone rebuilding trust in what is true, in an institution, or between neighbors — anywhere on the political spectrum — that is the most useful thing you can send us.

If you want to support the work, become a paid subscriber. You get nothing a free reader doesn’t; you are funding the work. The publication takes no advertising, no sponsors, and no platform money, which is what keeps it answerable to its readers and to no one else.

And hold us to it. This paper has set out a test for Stage 1, a set of principles for what comes after, and a list of the ways this could fail. Readers who notice us drifting from any of them are doing the work the paper describes.

If the mission resonates with you, you are already part of this. We are not an exclusive club; we are a growing commons. Whether you are an academic researching social trust, an entrepreneur building trust technology, a public servant, or a citizen who has watched trust drain out of your own community, there is a place for you here, and it begins with paying attention to people who are already doing the work.

None of us can finish this. That is not a reason to wait. Rabbi Tarfon reminds us:

“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”1

We all share responsibility for healing our society, and in a catalytic community we carry that responsibility together.

This is part IV of a series exploring how we can address the Trust Apocalypse by building a catalytic community:

• Part I: Why a Catalytic Community

• Part II: Catalytic Community Evolution — From Connection to Impact

• Part III: Stage 1 — Making the Builders Visible

What follows is deliberately less specific than the sections before it. Stages 2 and 3 do not exist yet, and a mechanism designed before the people who will use it exist is an org chart with nobody behind it. What we can say now is which principles a network will have to hold as it moves from connection to action and from action to impact, what each could look like in practice, and what would prove the model wrong. The members will design the rest when they are there.

Stage 2: From Connection to Action

The first principle is that ideas come from anywhere and the path from idea to work is short. In an action network, any member or group of members should be able to propose a project — a local experiment, a shared piece of research, a national campaign — and have it looked at quickly by peers against a few plain criteria: does it serve the mission, could it matter, and does anyone want to do it? Promising ideas become task forces. The proposer usually leads, recruits across sectors, and chooses the method — design sprints, policy research, a pilot in one town. What the network asks in return is small and non-negotiable: a clear objective and timeframe, updates the rest of the network can see, and the community’s values.

The second is empowered execution. Spark of Trust’s role in this stage is to provide enabling support, not oversight: a backbone that convenes, connects teams with experts and partners, and helps secure seed money for research, experiments, or events — without telling teams how to do their work. Once the mission and boundaries are clear, the people on the front line are best placed to decide, which is McChrystal’s1 principle and Ehrlichman’s2, and it is the only principle on which a voluntary network can actually run. Accountability without command comes from radical transparency. Task forces share their goals and progress openly; peers, not a boss, notice when something stalls; and when a team falters, the network can swarm to help or agree to stop. Mutual accountability replaces centralized control because nothing else is available, and because it is better.

The third is that priorities follow where trust is most broken. A network that can see across the fronts can point its energy at the places and questions where the deficit is sharpest — and it should expect those to change. If local news is collapsing in a region, a task force on community-supported models forms there; if one generation’s trust in institutions is far below the rest, a task force forms around that. When conditions change, task forces are rescoped or retired. The precedent is the volunteer technologists who organized during the pandemic through open calls and built vaccine-appointment finders in days3; a catalytic community has the advantage of being connected before the need arrives.

The fourth is the least coordination that keeps the parts coherent. Enough for task forces to learn what each other is doing — so two teams discover they can share work, and nobody duplicates it — and no more. A periodic forum where leads report wins, needs, and problems in a few minutes each is probably sufficient. What the network should resist is the apparatus that grows around coordination: the layer of goals-about-goals that turns a movement into a program office. If the shared purpose is clear and the work is visible, teams row roughly in the same direction without being told to.

These examples of what task forces might do are speculative, but they show the breadth of arenas where catalytic action is possible:

• Community Cohesion — bridging divides in one place: regular gatherings where residents of different backgrounds meet for facilitated dialogue and joint service, continued online in the manner of Vermont’s Front Porch Forum. Progress would show up as neighbors helping neighbors more and as interpersonal trust in that town, as measured by the people who live there.

• Trustworthy Media — journalists, librarians, educators, and technologists working to rebuild trust in information: a “community editorship” pilot in which residents take part in story selection or fact-checking for a local outlet, or media-literacy work. Taiwan’s civic hackers showed, with tools like Polis, that involving the public in how information is gathered can raise trust in it.

• Institutional Innovation — civic technologists, policy analysts, and reformers making an institution more responsive: adapting a platform like Decidim for a city council or school board so residents can propose and decide on initiatives, as Barcelona did for part of its budget, in partnership with a government willing to try.

• AI and Misinformation — AI researchers, ethicists, and community representatives developing standards for trustworthy AI in information systems: an open toolkit or a set of policy recommendations on transparency that platforms or governments could adopt.

The common thread is that each is multidisciplinary, rooted in a place or a problem, and a prototype that the network can replicate if it works. Rather than betting on a single program, a catalytic community seeds a portfolio of experiments under a single purpose. Some will bear fruit and some will not; the network learns from all of them, and because it is connected, what one learns the rest can use.

Stage 3: Coherent Impact

As projects multiply, the question becomes whether they add up to anything. Coherence at scale comes from a strong core — shared purpose and trust — and flexible edges, and from a way of leading that we take from a source outside the usual management canon. The Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh closed a Day of Mindfulness at Spirit Rock in October 1993 with a thought that has traveled far beyond that room:

“It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living.”4

We take this to mean that the community, not any individual in it, is the change agent. No single hero, organization, or task-force leader is the Buddha here; the network — the sangha of diverse members working in unison — is what does the work. That has practical implications. Victories belong to everyone and so do setbacks. Each member is a co-owner of the mission, not a participant in someone else’s. And the community achieves catalytic impact only when many people within it act as catalysts, not just the core organizers — which means the core’s job is to keep handing off.

The principles that hold a network together at this stage are few. New opportunities are tied back to the purpose — rebuilding trust — or declined; the question “does this address a root cause of distrust, or is it something we could do?” is asked of everything. Every project is asked how it connects to the larger system and to others’ work: a local civic forum might shape state policy if it scales; a media-literacy project might need a policy change to survive. The network looks for leverage and linkage. And leadership is the gardener’s, in McChrystal’s image: leaders create the conditions for solutions to emerge, which means listening, synthesizing, and guiding the group’s decisions. It is what keeps leadership from becoming the bottleneck.

Three more principles address failure modes named later in this paper. A network needs to know whether trust is moving in the communities where it works and in the policies it touches, but the measure belongs to the people being measured: it is a tool they hold, never a score published about them from the center, and any indicator has to answer, before it exists, how it would be gamed and who would be hurt. Trust has been broken worst for the people with the least of it, and a community that does not include them reproduces the fracture it means to heal; as the network grows, the standing question is who is not yet in the room, across political, racial, economic, and generational lines. And a trust-building network has to practice what it preaches: major decisions about strategy and money are communicated and, where possible, deliberated with members; money in and money out will be disclosed, and any outside funding will be named; mistakes are acknowledged openly and corrected.

By Stage 3 the community should be looking outward: publishing what it has learned, telling the stories of trust rebuilt, and arguing for the policies that make trust easier — open data, participatory governance. Its influence would be felt in how platforms moderate, how local governments engage residents, how schools teach. The signs of success at this stage are cultural more than numerical: communities adopting collaborative approaches without being asked, and people beginning to expect transparency from institutions by default. And if the network loses its way, the remedy is the one the whole model rests on: regroup, reflect, and course-correct together.

How This Fails

A community built to rebuild trust has to be honest about how it could betray it. We keep a working catalog of the ways this could go wrong; these are the ones a reader should watch for, and what we intend to do about each. One rule sits under all of them, and it is a constraint on format, not a wish. A practice or system may be named in writing with evidence. A person may not be campaigned against, no ledger of the untrusted is kept, and no seal is granted or revoked. Our first draft of this rule was a slogan — judge behavior and systems, never people, always leave a road back — and it did not hold. Behavior-talk is how modern cancellation already works; “never people” can be used to spare every institution that has a face; a road back with no mechanism is amnesty as a mood. The format is what remains when the slogan is tested, and the moment this community judges people rather than naming practices, every failure below opens up at once.

It becomes a cult. The founder becomes the product; members’ identity runs through one voice. Every trait that makes a community cohere at the start — a spark, a purpose stated by one person weekly — points this way. What guards against it is structural: the handoff test in the previous section, a format built on guests who disagree with the host, and a preference for anything where the community is the hero over anything where the convener is. We do not yet have an outside body with authority over the convener; that is a gap, and it is named here so it can be closed.

It becomes color-coded. “Trust” is read as a partisan position, and a community meant to bridge becomes one more side. Trust in institutions is already a polarized measure, so the risk is live from the first episode. What guards against it is a booking discipline rather than a hope — voices that cannot be sorted onto one team, refusal of fights that only sort people, and never adopting the vocabulary of either tribe, including the vocabulary that signals which one you are not in.

It is captured by the attention economy. The show learns what travels — outrage, collapse, the diagnosis told again with feeling — and starts making that. The trust apocalypse is already a content genre, so the pull is real from the first episode. What guards against it is the format itself: four beats, ending every time on one thing a listener can do this week; no doom pacing; the diagnosis assumed, never relitigated. If what travels is the collapse, not the work, the show has failed this test, whatever its numbers say.

It becomes a weapon, or it becomes toothless. These are the same failure from opposite sides. In one, “not worthy of trust” becomes a label to hang on a person; in the other, the standard costs nothing because nobody is ever named. The rule above is the answer, and it is why the rule is a format and not a slogan: naming a practice with evidence is the teeth, and refusing to campaign against a person is the road back. What does not yet exist is a slow, named, reversible process for the case where the community itself fails its own standard. That process has to be built before it is needed.

It is captured by money. A sponsor, an investor, or a future capital line buys the halo — or the halo itself becomes something people can purchase by appearing on the show or joining the room. A trust brand with a capital ambition is exactly where this happens. The guards are disclosure of who funds what, material relationships stated on every episode, and a structural separation between the standard and the money. The separation and the governance to enforce it do not yet exist; the transparency commitments above are their down payment.

It becomes measurement theater. A trust score or dashboard is gamed within a year and sends the community chasing the number. The guard is the measurement principle above — participant-owned, never a ranking from the center — held even when a ranking would be easy to publish and would travel.

It stays a salon. The archive fills with the convener’s existing network, the connections that form all run through one room, and Stage 1 is declared complete because the episodes shipped. The handoff test exists to make this one visible; the booking mix across sectors and the political spectrum has to be a constraint that can refuse a booking, not a preference. And the dullest failure is the most probable one: it stays an idea. The only guard against that is shipping, in public, where the failures above can be seen.

Up Next — Part V: Where We Are, and What We Ask

This is part III of a series exploring how we can address the Trust Apocalypse by building a catalytic community:

• Part I: Why a Catalytic Community

• Part II: Catalytic Community Evolution — From Connection to Impact

Every catalytic community begins intentionally — with clear objectives, careful choices about who is in the room first, and deliberate steps toward building trusted relationships. Catalytic communities do not spring into existence fully formed. They cannot be decreed from the top down, and they rarely emerge unbidden from the bottom up. They need a spark — an instigator to call together a small cadre of committed people bound by a shared higher purpose — and then the patience to let an information network form before asking it to act.

Spark of Trust’s immediate focus is that first stage, conducted in public. The Spark of Trust podcast and its accompanying newsletter are the instrument: a weekly, long-form conversation with someone already at work rebuilding trust, paired with a written essay, and published to an audience of people who share the problem. A broadcast does the first half of Stage 1. It makes the builders visible — to the public and to one another — and gives a scattered field a common vocabulary and a purpose stated out loud every week. What it does not do by itself is the second half: connect the people it has made visible to each other. Listeners do not meet listeners. Guests do not meet guests unless someone introduces them. The show is how the network becomes visible to itself; the network is what forms among the people who can now see each other, and that is a different thing, which we will not claim before it exists.

The people we are bringing forward are the three groups the first paper named as essential to a catalytic community. Thinkers: the scholars and framework-builders who study how trust breaks and how societies change. Doers: community organizers on the front lines, technologists building trustworthy systems, public servants open to new approaches, and the people building new forms of media. Resource allocators: the people who channel relationships, expertise, and capital — the funders and investors who decide what gets backed, and the connectors and experts who decide who gets introduced to whom. Every guest sits on at least one of the three fronts the first paper described — trust in what is true, in our institutions, and in each other — and the paper’s analysis of that front is the background to their conversation.

The unifying element is our shared higher purpose: to preserve for our children and grandchildren communities and institutions worthy of their trust. Making that purpose explicit is the first step, and stating it publicly, every week, is how a scattered network learns what it has in common. It also clarifies what this community is not, which helps manage scope: we are convening people who build across sectors and the political spectrum, and we are doing it at the pace relationships can bear.

Borrowing a term from the military, the community needs a “battle rhythm” — a regular cadence of interaction that keeps information flowing. As General McChrystal found, a frequent shared forum (in his case, a daily Operations and Intelligence briefing) can align thousands of distributed operators and “pump information and context” throughout the organization. Our forum consists of the weekly episode and the essay that accompanies it. Each one adds a person, a piece of the picture, and a common language to a shared body of knowledge that anyone can join at any point. The archive is a shared record, open and accumulating — the precondition for the shared consciousness McChrystal described, not yet the thing itself, which needs the same picture in many heads and traffic in both directions.

Equally important in this phase is building trust among members, many of whom are strangers to each other or wary of one another due to their different backgrounds. The interview format is designed for it. There are no speeches and no panels; a conversation runs long enough for candor to replace performance, and it asks about the work as it actually went, including numbers and failures. Guests arrive by introduction, through someone who already trusts them, so the network grows along existing relationships. Listeners meet each guest as a person before they meet the work, which is the order in which trust forms.

That last point contains the test we will be held to. At the start, every connection runs through the convener: guest to host, listener to host, guest to guest by way of the host. That is a hub, and it is how JSOC started too — but the book’s lesson is that the network only worked once the hub handed off. Stage 1 is working when connections form that do not run through us: when two guests find each other’s work without an introduction, when the person on the tape is someone who had to be found, when listeners start writing to each other, not only to us. Those are things anyone can watch for. If a year from now every thread still passes through one host, Stage 1 has not happened, whatever the download numbers say.

Networks bond when members acknowledge their differences and find early common ground, and the conversations surface both. A technology executive and a community activist will diverge on tactics and agree, without prompting, on a statement like “everyone deserves a voice and respect.” Those points of agreement, spoken aloud by people who would not otherwise share a platform, are the raw material of a shared narrative — and they are on the record, where anyone joining later can find them.

Beyond the show itself, a Stage 1 network needs three things, and they are principles: The first is a steady flow of information across the fronts, so that a policymaker learns about a tool being piloted against disinformation, or a funder sees what a grassroots effort actually costs to run. When people can see problems being solved, they gain the confidence and context to act on their own; we intend to recreate that effect by sharing failures as readily as successes. The second is a common language. Different sectors frame the same thing differently — one person’s “social capital” is another’s “community trust” — and a network that cannot hear itself cannot learn. The third is a culture of real listening: empathy and respect for perspectives from across the divide. An open, respectful culture prevents the misunderstandings that fracture trust, and the interview is where that culture is modeled before it is expected of anyone.

Trust-building does not stop when the network exists; it is what the network runs on. Relationships have to move from transactional to personal — McChrystal’s embedding program, which swapped people between units for months at a time, served exactly that end — and how a civilian network does it is for the people in it to design when they are in it. Two principles will govern whatever they design. Reciprocity: people need to see that when they contribute, others respond in good faith, which is why one of our guiding values from Ehrlichman is “giving credit rather than hoarding glory.” And the speed of trust: we will not extend the network faster than relationships can support it, and when friction arises, we will address it before charging ahead. The practical form of that principle is critical connections over critical mass — strengthen the ties among the people who are here before enrolling numbers who are not. Each strong connection adds resilience; over time they become enough to hold ambitious projects. Whether trust is actually growing is a question we will put to the people in the network, and we will believe their answer.

Finally, the community is decentralized and co-owned from the outset. Steward roles — facilitators, connectors, the “network weavers” who introduce people with common interests — and a simple community charter of guiding principles (trust, transparency, inclusion, action-orientation) are how that ownership becomes visible. Both follow the relationships. They are drafted with the people who have already found each other through this stage, which is what makes them a charter and a set of roles.

In summary, the initial phase seeds the network with purpose, people, and practices. If we get this right, we will have a core group united by trust and visible to one another, an agreed purpose stated in public, early momentum from a body of shared knowledge that grows every week — and the first connections that do not pass through us. That foundation is non-negotiable. As Stephen Covey’s work suggests, when trust is high, cooperation and innovation leap ahead; when trust is low, every interaction is friction. “Growing the network at the speed of trust,” as we like to say, is both the aim and the challenge. We will not rush it, and we will be intentional about it.

Up Next — Part IV: What Stages 2 and 3 Will Require, and How This Fails

This is part II of a series exploring how we can address the Trust Apocalypse by building a catalytic community:

• Part I: Why a Catalytic Community

The people this paper is about are already at work, and most of them have been for years. On trust in what is true, local-news experiments and community-supported models are being tested in dozens of towns, and researchers are mapping how information travels and where it fails. On trust in institutions, civic technologists from Taiwan’s g0v to Barcelona’s Decidim have built new forms for public participation, and public servants inside old institutions are trying new ones. On trust between people, Braver Angels has run red-blue workshops since 2016, Weave has mapped the local “weavers” since 2018, and Front Porch Forum has quietly connected Vermont’s neighbors for two decades. Behind them are funders: New Pluralists, a collaborative that has granted more than $33 million to over a hundred organizations since 2021 toward a ten-year goal of $100 million, and the foundations that stand behind it1. This is the constituency of a catalytic community. It does not need to be invented.

What it needs is to be connected, and here the shape of the existing field matters. Most of this work is on one front, and most of it does not know the other two exist. The connective tissue that exists connects like to like: the Bridge Alliance links a hundred bridging organizations to one another2; New Pluralists links funders to the pluralism field they fund. Nobody connects the person rebuilding local news to the person redesigning a public institution to the person running a red-blue workshop. That matters because the three fronts are not separate problems. Our earlier paper argued that trust fell in sequence — first between neighbors, then in institutions, then in what we could believe — and that each collapse made the next one easier. A repair on one front that ignores the other two rests on the same broken ground. The work has to be connected across the fronts because the damage was. And nobody connects the three kinds of people the work needs — the thinkers who understand how trust breaks, the doers who repair it, and the allocators who decide what gets backed — across those fronts. That is what a network of networks would do that the existing networks do not, and it is the whole of our claim to be adding something.

The harder question is why one more layer of connection would change anything, when fields have been convening, networking, and funding for a decade, yet the national numbers kept falling. The honest answer starts with what the record shows. Collaboration works at what it aims at: the most rigorous cross-site study of collective impact, covering twenty-five initiatives, found population-level change at twenty of them — in the services, practices, and policies of the institutions involved — while conceding that the initiatives contributed to those changes alongside other forces, and that most struggled to include the communities they served3. Its critics say the model underweights power, community ownership, and policy change4. What nobody has shown, anywhere, is a network moving generalized trust — the number that asks whether most people can be trusted. So we do not claim that. We claim something smaller and prior: the people repairing trust are invisible to one another; visibility is the precondition for everything the record says collaboration can do; and no one has tried building the visibility first and the collaboration second, as far as we can find. That is why the stages come in the order they do, and why we will not claim more than the first until it has been shown to work.

Catalytic Community Evolution: From Connection to Impact

Building a catalytic community capable of reversing the widespread breakdown of trust in society is not a one-time event but an evolving, iterative process. Following Ehrlichman’s5 distinction between learning networks, action networks, and movement networks — the last being his term for a network of networks — we describe three stages we expect such a community to move through. The labels are ours:

• Stage 1: Information Network — establishing foundational trust through shared understanding.

• Stage 2: Action Network — leveraging this trust to coordinate specific, impactful initiatives.

• Stage 3: Impact Network — achieving systemic influence through self-organizing, widespread collaboration.

Each stage builds intentionally on the previous one, setting clear milestones, addressing predictable challenges, and strategically progressing toward coherent societal impact. In the following sections, we describe each stage, what it asks of the community, and how we would know it had been reached.

Stage 1: Information Network — Connecting and Learning

The catalytic community journey begins with forming a robust information network — laying a foundation of trust through mutual learning, shared language, and alignment around a shared higher purpose. Success at this stage involves explicitly articulating and embracing a higher purpose that motivates and guides all subsequent efforts. From there, an open flow of information builds shared situational awareness of the trust crisis, enables the development of a common vocabulary for discussing trust-related challenges, and establishes the first personal relationships on which sustained collaboration depends.

Key Objectives:

• Establish a shared higher purpose that unites people across sectors and inspires commitment beyond individual interests.

• Create a shared situational awareness around the state of trust in society and a common language.

• Build initial interpersonal trust and credibility among diverse actors.

• Identify shared values and initial points of consensus.

In this first phase, the emphasis is on connecting people and sharing knowledge. The community forms an information network that builds a shared situational awareness and rapport among members. People who might never have interacted — for example, a data scientist, a journalist, and a philanthropist — begin to exchange perspectives and information. This creates a shared context and language.

Such preparation lays the groundwork for an initial reservoir of trust. Members see that others are listening and that knowledge flows freely without an agenda. The network at this stage is loose but growing “at the speed of trust” — trust-building cannot be rushed. Early wins here might simply be learning together: mapping the problem, identifying where effort would count, and feeling part of a larger whole. For example, in Vermont, an online bulletin board called Front Porch Forum was started to connect neighbors and swap news and tips. Over time, these exchanges of information built a baseline of familiarity and goodwill. When a crisis hit — a major flood — that simple network suddenly became the community’s lifeline, the go-to place for sharing emergency information and resources6. This illustrates the power of networks of information and empathy as the precondition for collective action.

Anticipated Challenges:

• Participants often bring distinct personal or institutional objectives — clarifying the community’s shared higher purpose explicitly at the outset helps transcend individual agendas and align diverse interests.

• Building genuine trust takes time — embracing incremental progress and celebrating small successes reinforces commitment.

Articulating and aligning around a shared higher purpose isn’t merely beneficial — it’s foundational. Everything else rests on it. Only once members are united under a shared vision can the community effectively transition to coordinated collective actions, the hallmark of Stage 2.

Stage 2: Action Network — Coordinating Decentralized Action

With a clearly articulated shared higher purpose, trusted relationships, and shared understanding established, the community transitions from foundational learning into active collaboration. In Stage 2, the community becomes an Action Network, mobilizing small, empowered task forces to deliver concrete, tangible outcomes aligned with the overarching goal of trust restoration.

Capital is part of what Stage 2 will require. Ideas that emerge from the network will need funding to become anything, and the members best placed to judge them are the ones who have watched them form. Spark of Trust intends to convene that capacity in some form: a way for the resource allocators in the community to direct investment toward ventures and innovations that transform our information ecosystem, reinvent institutions, and rebuild social cohesion. It does not exist yet, and it should not. An investment vehicle assembled before there is a network to source from is just another fund; assembled after, it is the community’s own judgment applied to its own pipeline. That is the sequence we are holding to.

Key Objectives:

• Mobilize cross-sector, empowered task forces to address specific trust-related challenges.

• Translate trust, knowledge, and shared purpose from Stage 1 into practical, impactful initiatives.

• Maintain decentralized autonomy while ensuring alignment with community goals and values.

Readiness Criteria:

• Clearly articulated and embraced shared higher purpose and community values.

• Demonstrated initial trust and interpersonal bonds across diverse members.

• The means to keep talking, coordinate, and pool resources, in whatever form the network has settled on.

With trust and shared understanding established, the community can graduate to an action network. In Stage 2, members mobilize and collaborate on specific initiatives. This often involves forming cross-functional task forces or working groups focused on tangible projects or policy changes that align with the community’s mission.

Converting talk into action is the theme of this phase. The transition typically involves clarifying a common agenda (e.g., agreeing on priority areas to tackle) and then empowering smaller teams to execute. It’s analogous to moving from a talk shop to a workshop: the community discusses problems and starts building solutions together.

Effective action networks maintain the open, decentralized ethos of Stage 1 while introducing a layer of coordination that ensures efforts align rather than conflict. A useful concept here is “minimum viable bureaucracy” — just enough structure to organize work without stifling creativity or ownership.

Action networks still rely on decentralized decision-making — no central authority micromanages the teams. The community runs on a culture of “empowered execution,” as McChrystal terms it. Because everyone in the network has context and trusts one another (thanks to Stage 1), task forces can make informed decisions quickly and effectively. For example, during the growth of the civic tech collective g0v (Gov Zero) in Taiwan, volunteers self-organized into project teams to address issues of government transparency and public participation. This grassroots network, which began as a loose group of hackers sharing ideas, soon spawned tools such as a budget visualization website (to make government spending data more accessible) and facilitated the famous vTaiwan online consultation process for citizens7. These were not top-down assignments — they arose organically from the community. Government officials even came to g0v asking for help after seeing its success in the 2014 Sunflower Movement, leading to unprecedented collaborations (one g0v member, Audrey Tang, served as Digital Minister from 2016 to 2024). The g0v community demonstrates Stage 2 dynamics: empowered teams working on concrete solutions (from open-source software to new public forums) under a unifying mission of “radical transparency” and civic empowerment.

Anticipated Challenges:

• Task force redundancy or conflict — visible work and a light leads’ forum that enable early identification and resolution of potential overlaps or conflicts help avoid duplication.

• Resource competition between task forces — encouraging collaborative resource pooling and explicit alignment with the overarching purpose ensures that resources support collective priorities rather than isolated agendas.

• Loss of alignment by task forces — reinforcing the shared higher purpose through consistent messaging and periodic reviews of task force objectives against the shared purpose.

Stage 2 puts to work the trust, cohesion, and alignment built in Stage 1. By forming empowered, decentralized task forces with clear alignment and structured autonomy, the community translates intention into impactful, practical results, building momentum toward the systemic impact characteristic of Stage 3.

Stage 3: Impact Network — Achieving Coherence at Scale

In Stage 3, the catalytic community evolves into an Impact Network, achieving systemic and widespread influence through sustained, coherent collective action. At this mature stage, the community behaves like a dynamic ecosystem — capable of rapidly organizing responses to emergent trust challenges without relying on central coordination. The collective stewardship, distributed leadership, and self-organizing capabilities nurtured in earlier stages come fully into play, generating sustainable and scalable societal impacts.

Key Objectives:

• Self-sustaining engagement with a critical mass of diverse participants actively involved and organic expansion into new areas or regions.

• Emergent responsiveness as the community spontaneously identifies and responds to new issues, quickly mobilizing task forces or initiatives without centralized direction.

• Collective stewardship through shared ownership and accountability ensures coherent governance and persistent alignment with the overarching higher purpose.

In the final stage, the network achieves the status of a true catalytic community. Separate actions begin to add up to sustained, coherent impact at a systemic scale. A Stage 3 network runs projects and, beyond them, influences systems — whether social norms, public policies, or industry practices — and continues to do so over time. Several markers signal that a community has reached this level of maturity:

• Widespread engagement and scale — the network has reached critical mass.

• Emergent, self-organizing activity — at this stage, the community operates with a high degree of self-generativity.

• Collective stewardship and culture (despite further decentralization of the community) — maintain cohesion through shared values and accountability.

When a community reaches this level, it can truly tackle system-wide challenges. It behaves like a movement or ecosystem, not a single organization. Our vision is that the catalytic community will become a sustaining platform for innovation and action on trust issues long after its initial projects. In the long run, success means changing societal patterns — e.g., making participatory governance, community forums, and cross-sector partnerships the new norm in decision-making, thereby embedding trust into the fabric of daily life.

Anticipated Challenges:

• Governance complexity — using modular, lightweight governance frameworks helps to accommodate growth without bureaucratic burdens.

• The risk of fragmentation — gatherings that return the community to its shared purpose.

• Ensuring alignment — stewardship dialogues can continually reinforce the community’s shared higher purpose.

Reaching Stage 3 is a continuous process. Even as we strive for systemic impact, we expect to cycle through the earlier stages to continually address new challenges — connecting with new people, launching new actions, and scaling further. The process is iterative and dynamic. Yet, each iteration strengthens the community’s capacity and credibility.

This is why Stage 1 comes first and cannot be rushed: connection and network-building (Stage 1) leads to collaborative innovation and solutions (Stage 2), which, if successful, can evolve into large-scale systemic changes (Stage 3). Others have reached it. Taiwan’s g0v community has influenced national digital policy, and Front Porch Forum now covers every town in Vermont and is being eyed as a model for use beyond. By learning from these cases and intentionally guiding our community through the stages, we can create a catalytic network of networks that answers the trust apocalypse.

Up Next — Part III: Stage 1 — Making the Builders Visible

Editor’s note, September 2026: This paper has been revised since it was first published. The organization it described has become Spark of Trust, and the first stage of the community it proposes is now underway in public, as a weekly podcast and newsletter, in place of the inaugural convening the paper first called for. The paper has been reworked from seven parts to five and now clearly states which of its claims are being tested and which remain unproven. The argument — that trust is rebuilt by a catalytic community, grown at the speed of trust — is unchanged.

“In our era of political polarization, ‘fake news,’ and tribal politics, trust in the media, government officials, and even science is fading. This can be catastrophic if an influenza or another type of pandemic arises. Under such circumstances, the public’s failure to trust the guidance offered by public health officials may well make a bad situation worse.”

— Wendy E. Parmet and Mark A. Rothstein, 20181

During the COVID-19 pandemic, trust — or rather, its erosion — made all the difference between an effective collective response and public confusion. The failure ran in both directions. The institutions charged with the response asked for more trust than they had earned. They stated as settled what they did not yet know, treated contested policy as science, and suppressed questions they did not want asked; when the gaps showed, their credibility was spent. A public that had watched this happen stopped listening, and some of it stopped listening to everything, including the guidance that would have helped. Trust, once lost, could not be regained by either side. The pandemic showed how quickly a society fractures when that reserve of goodwill and trust is gone. Our earlier analysis in The Trust Apocalypse: How We Lost Faith in What Is True, Our Institutions and Each Other described how this crisis, decades in the making, threatens societal cohesion and democracy itself. We see warning signs in the rise of factionalism, public health responses hampered by suspicion, and citizens doubting the legitimacy of elections and scientific facts. Without trust, cooperation gets harder at every scale: governance, public health, the ordinary business of living alongside people you disagree with.

Reversing this trend requires more than isolated solutions; it necessitates interconnected strategies to transform our information ecosystem, reinvent institutions for the digital age, and rebuild trust between people. The trust apocalypse is a quintessential wicked problem — complex, systemic, and defying any single solution. No lone government policy, tech innovation, or charismatic leader can restore trust at scale.

Recognizing the limitations of traditional hierarchical models and isolated interventions, we previously introduced the concept of a “catalytic community” — a living network that continuously learns, collaborates, and takes collective action toward systemic change. In practice, such networks evolve through stages: from initial connection and relationship-building to co-creating shared goals and strategies, and then into sustained, widespread collective action for impact. At that mature stage, the network itself becomes catalytic — it can self-organize responses to emerging problems and drive change on multiple fronts simultaneously. A catalytic community is greater than the sum of its parts: it actively aligns the talents and resources of independent players toward a common mission (here, restoring trust). It creates the conditions for new initiatives to emerge and grow quickly. It is a purpose-driven network of networks that connects people, ignites collaboration, and catalyzes systemic change.

Drawing on insights from leaders such as General Stanley McChrystal and network theorists like David Ehrlichman, we outline how a catalytic community forms and what it would take for one to produce systemic change. Our goal here is practical. Building on our earlier conclusion — that there is “no silver bullet to restore widespread trust” — this is an account of how Spark of Trust is approaching it, and of what we do not yet know.

What is a Catalytic Community?

A catalytic community is a self-organizing, purpose-driven network of networks that collectively generate sustained societal change through trust-based relationships, decentralized coordination, and coherent action.

The approach is grounded in real-world insights from leaders and network practitioners across sectors. Retired General Stanley McChrystal learned in Iraq after 2003 that traditional hierarchies fail against fast-moving, networked threats. In Iraq, he found that to dismantle a decentralized insurgent network, his forces “would have to become a team of teams, faster, flatter and more flexible than ever.” This meant breaking down silos and empowering small teams to trust one another and act autonomously. As McChrystal writes in Team of Teams2, success depended on “trust, shared consciousness, and empowered execution” rather than top-down control. A culture of familiarity and trust had to replace rigid command, so JSOC’s (Joint Special Operations Command) thousands of personnel began sharing information during daily cross-team briefings, building a “shared consciousness” of the battle in real time. This sharing dramatically increased agility: frontline officers gained “the confidence to solve their own similar problems without the need for further guidance,” instead of waiting for orders. The military’s “team of teams” experience showed that trusted networks can outpace and outperform centralized organizations in complex environments. We apply the same principle: to confront society’s widespread breakdown of trust, we must forge a network of teams (across sectors and communities) that share information openly and act in a coordinated but decentralized way.

Business and social innovators echo this approach. David Ehrlichman, in Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change3, distills the five key practices for effective collaborative networks:

• Clarify purpose;

• Convene the right people;

• Cultivate trust;

• Coordinate actions;

• Collaborate generously.

Notably, “trust, not control” is the first guiding principle — no single authority can command a network, so trust and mutual commitment are the glue. Impact networks distribute leadership and information flow so that each member (node) can connect and contribute directly. This decentralization makes the whole more resilient and creative by leveraging each member’s strengths rather than funneling everything through a single hub. Ehrlichman also emphasizes the importance of continuous communication and learning — regular convenings, shared dashboards, and transparent updates — to maintain alignment and build collective intelligence. Impact networks aim for coordinated action: members synchronize their initiatives or pool resources toward a shared goal while maintaining the autonomy to adapt quickly as conditions change. All these traits — trust-based relationships, distributed structure, open communication, and adaptive coordination — are design pillars of a catalytic community. They enable a loose collection of individuals to evolve into a high-functioning, catalytic community over time.

A third insight comes from the practice of convening itself: how we bring people together matters. The formats that reliably produce candor among leaders are small, off-the-record, and unstaged — no speeches and no panels. To solve complex problems, we need protocols that encourage honest dialogue and relationship-building rather than stage-managed conferences, and we carry that principle into the interview format described below.

In short, catalytic communities are about trust, empowerment, and the ability to act together. They draw on principles proven in military leadership, social impact networks, and the practice of convening alike: push decision-making to the edges, replace control with trust and mutual accountability, and create environments where diverse actors can learn and act together. Our goal is to build such a community as the answer to the trust apocalypse — a “Team of Teams” for society that can respond to challenges with the agility of a network and the unity of a shared purpose. The following sections outline how this community forms, what it will need as it grows, and how it could fail, serving as both an argument and an honest account of where that work stands.

What Transfers, and What Does Not

The analogy to a team of teams is useful and imperfect. McChrystal’s task force became a network to fight another network: an adversary with a shape, one that could be found, mapped, and hit, and against which a hierarchy was losing. The trust apocalypse has no such shape. Nobody is on the other side to out-organize. What our earlier paper described is a condition, produced over sixty years by forces — suburbs and screens, captured institutions, an attention economy that rewards contempt — that a network cannot target, because they are not targets. The mechanism transfers; the opponent does not.

The conditions do not transfer either. By his own account, McChrystal began as the hub. He set the conditions for the network, and it only worked once he gave up the command that had been the norm and let the network share what it knew and act on it. But he had command to build with. He could mandate the daily briefing, order embeds, fund teams, and remove people, and everyone in the room shared an enemy and a clearance. A convener in an open society has to make the same handoff from hub to network without any of those tools. What replaces them is what this paper is mostly about: a purpose people chose rather than were assigned; transparency where there is no command; the freedom to leave where there is no discipline. These are weaker than orders. They are also the only instruments a free society allows, and the only ones that build the kind of trust worth having.

So the claim we are making has three links, and we argue only the first here. First, that a network of the people already rebuilding trust can be formed — that they can be made visible to one another, given a shared language and purpose, and connected in ways that do not run through us. This paper argues that, and the podcast and newsletter are its test. Second, that such a network, once it exists, produces work that would not have happened otherwise: collaborations, experiments, institutions. That is what Stage 2 is for, and we will not claim it before it happens. Third, that work of that kind moves trust in society — not by reversing sixty years of structural force, which no network can do, but by making the repairs visible, connected, and copyable, so that the many small restorations already under way add up to something a country can notice. That is what Stage 3 is for, and it is the link furthest from proven. A reader who has watched a dozen initiatives promise to fix trust is entitled to know which promises this one is making. It is making the first, testing it in public, and holding the other two until the first has been earned.

Up Next — Part II: The People Already at Work, and the Three Stages