What Would You Do?

WWYD is an organization that enables people and partners to collaborate and build. The central aim is to foster R&D across organizational boundaries. WWYD is community-led by industry and university partners working together in a polycentric governance model (distributed and shared decision-making).

A Community-Focused Institution

We want to create ways for people to participate in shaping the institution itself. That includes proposing ideas, developing projects, establishing processes, making decisions, and helping determine how collective work should proceed. Through contracts that create and sustain collaboration across multiple organizations, we aspire to make R&D more impactful. We aim for transparent ways of sharing, building, and working. The WWYD culture enables contributions, shared experiences, and trust to accrue naturally over time.

Guiding Principles

  • What Would You Do? is an autonomous organization with polycentric governance.

  • The community builds the institution, and its work, decisions, and evolution should be broadly understandable and transparent.

  • Work should be deliberate: data-driven, documented, understandable, reproducible, verifiable, and supported by evidence.

  • All practices and infrastructure should evolve so that future contributors can understand, maintain, improve, and steward the institution.

  • The infrastructure itself should illuminate how the institution works, including provenance, democratic processes, and clear organization.

  • Multi-agentic automation, governed with human oversight, should consistently ease and enable community participation, with safeguards proportional to risks, and with accountability throughout.

An Invitation and a Call To Action

WWYD is in its formative stages. It is not a finished institution. We need your input and participation. WWYD ideas, practices, and structures will develop through participation, discussion, and collective work.

What Would You Do if you could make anything possible?