Experimental lab
Running live experiments around gathering and creating, using local, community-run AI infrastructure.
Experimental lab for joyful gathering
Joyful gatherings for extraction-proof creator communities.
GatherRhiza Labs leverages small and local AI to help creators and fans organize in-person gatherings, circulate resources, and build durable networks outside extractive platforms.
Mycelial logic
Decentralized networks that move knowing and resources across communities.
Revenue intent
Create artist income from gatherings beyond the reach of extractive middlemen.
Our goal
A blueprint for creator and community resilience.
“Rhiza” means roots. Mycorrhizal fungi form underground mycelium networks that make forests thrive. The mycelium model here is treated as infrastructure.
Create new futures together
Support creative co-generation through spaces where people make, test, and imagine together.
Flow resources and knowing
Design community-to-community sharing loops so lessons and support travel laterally, not upward.
Defend against extraction
Build structures that protect creators and communities from outside capture of value, labor, and attention.
Why gathering IRL matters
In-person gathering is social infrastructure, not a side effect.
The lab treats gathering as essential to staying human, making art, sharing information without gatekeepers, and building resilient communities that can hold when systems fail.
Essential to staying human
Face-to-face presence helps people remain alive, grounded, and deeply connected to one another.
How we co-create
New art and new worlds are born in rooms together, without extractors taking the fruits of shared labor.
Joyful and deeply yearned for
Gathering is one of the deepest pleasures people still long for. It's critical for promoting mental health and fending off loneliness.
The key to movement work
Lasting movements grow from people showing up for each other, face to face, again and again.
Information without gatekeepers
Communities can share knowing directly, reducing dependence on algorithms and publications controlled by the powerful.
Community brings resilience
Community acts as the infrastructure that can keep people held when larger systems break down.
What the lab builds
Three ways GatherRhiza Labs makes gatherings easier to start and stronger to sustain.
Different approaches and tools
Prototype lightweight agentic workflows for outreach, logistics, reminders, hosting support, and knowledge capture. Sovereign, local AI enables the community to keep the value of its relationships.
Empower fan-created gatherings
Give supporters templates and trust-building structures so gathering does not bottleneck around one central organizer.
Artist revenue from gatherings
Design revenue flows tied to live community energy, with creators benefiting from the value their networks generate.
Repeatable playbook
A research loop that keeps the network learning.
Each experiment can become a reusable toolkit: gather, observe, notice what worked, and circulate insights back into the wider network.
Run local experiments
Test formats for creator-hosted and fan-hosted gatherings in specific communities and places.
Notice practical patterns
Construct playbooks, approaches, and technical supports that reduce friction and preserve joy.
Share across the network
Move lessons laterally so each node can adapt the infrastructure to local conditions instead of copying a one-size-fits-all model.
About
Built by people thinking about power, tools, and cultural infrastructure.
GatherRhiza Labs sits at the intersection of community design, AI product strategy, media arts, and anti-extraction market thinking.
Sally Hubbard
Expert on antimonopoly and structuring markets to deconcentrate economic and political power and an evangelist for middle-aged women starting rock bands.
Carolyn Duncan
Product and GTM specialist in AI and a development leader in Media Arts.