The three work streams — infrastructure, governance and federation, and cooperative design — each build a part of Grassroots. This is the stage where those parts are brought together into a single working system and put into the hands of real people. It is both the moment everything converges and the project’s main engine of improvement: what happens when the technology meets reality is fed straight back into the design.
Bringing the parts together
Building the pieces of a system separately is one thing; making them work together as a whole is another. The first task of this stage is integration — combining the infrastructure, the governance and federation systems, and the cooperative apps into one coherent stack, and ironing out the mismatches that always appear where independently built parts meet. The result is a complete working system rather than a set of promising components.
Testing in simulation first
Before anything is put in front of real people, the integrated system is tested through simulation — modelling how a cooperative would behave with many simulated members interacting, to check that the economics hold up, that the governance works as intended, and that the system performs well under realistic conditions. This is a way of catching problems early and cheaply, and of making sure each app is genuinely ready before real members are asked to rely on it.
Pilots with real members
The heart of this stage is a series of pilots run with real cooperative members and volunteer customers, organised together with the cooperative organisations themselves so that participants take part as members of their own movement rather than as subjects of an experiment. The pilots are deliberately run in short cycles, spaced apart, rather than as one long trial. Each cycle puts the apps to real use and gathers experience — how usable they are, how the cooperatives perform, how well the governance works in practice — and what is learned is fed back into the infrastructure, governance, and app designs before the next cycle begins. The pilots do not just test the system; they actively improve it, round by round.
From single cooperatives to a federation
The cycles build on one another. The first exercises the cooperatives on their own, making sure each works in its own right. The later cycles then join the pilot cooperatives together into a single federation — putting the federation system to the test with real members, and demonstrating the step that distinguishes Grassroots from a collection of separate apps: independent, self-governing cooperatives combining into something larger while each keeps control of its own affairs.
Where this work stands
This stage comes later in the project, once there is a stack to integrate and apps to test. The integration and simulation work prepares the ground; the pilot cycles then test and refine the whole system with real cooperatives; and the findings are consolidated into a final, improved release. It is the point at which Grassroots stops being a set of foundations and becomes a working demonstration of a worker-owned alternative to the platform economy.