Introducing Potluck

Ask for What You Need. Share What You Have.

A free, open-source coordination tool for communities that already trust each other.

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Last weekend at Funding the Commons in San Francisco, a conversation with Jeremy Akers (aka Papa Pita) and Jeff Emmett sparked an idea that had been rattling in my head for a while. Anyone who’s been to a potluck, at least in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado, likely knows the problem: you show up and there are four Whole Foods rotisserie chickens on the table, no salad, no dessert, no drinks. It’s a coordination failure hiding in plain sight.

So I built Potluck, a simple tool where you create a gathering, list what’s needed, share a link, and people claim what they’ll bring. That’s it.

Why Not Just Use a Spreadsheet?

You could. But Potluck is designed to do one thing well and to feel good doing it. It’s part of a broader philosophy of hyperlocal cozy tech: small, modular tools that help communities self-organize, that we’ve been exploring at the Regen Hub with Aaron Gabriel Neyer and Jon Bo. The premise is simple: not every coordination problem needs a platform or even a protocol. Sometimes it just needs the right free open source tool at the right scale.

The Needs-and-Offers Trap

For years, people in the civic tech and Web3 space have talked about building needs-and-offers boards, marketplaces where communities can match resources to requirements. The vision is compelling. We could collectively inhabit a moneyless society if everyone shared what they had and made visible what they needed. Mechanisms like commitment pools take an important step towards making this a reality, but the engineering reality is daunting: permissions, trust thresholds, reputation systems, identity verification. You end up needing to build an entire trust infrastructure before you can ship anything useful.

These tools haven’t been built at scale not because they’re impossible, but because they require a whole suite of other primitives and network effects to actually work. And so the vision keeps getting deferred.

Potluck takes a different approach. Trust is assumed. People aren’t sharing what they have to get something in return, they’re sharing because they’re already part of a community. We can socially engineer the behaviors we want to see without engineering a trust protocol first.

Beyond Dinner

The name comes from the deeper tradition of the potlatch. I don’t claim to speak to what a potlatch truly is, because it’s deeply nuanced, culturally specific, and far more than resource-sharing. But the underlying insight resonates: when we pool what we have, we don’t always need money. We need community and coordination.

I envision Potluck being used not just for dinners, but for any gathering where the potluck mentality applies: events, projects, community builds, mutual aid. Anywhere people are pooling resources and need a simple way to make needs visible and let others step up.

Free Forever, Open Source

Potluck is free. It will be free forever. The code is open source. If it grows to the point where server costs become real, I may ask for donations. But the commitment is to keep this as an open-source public good, a small piece of infrastructure for communities that are already doing the work of being communities.

→ Try it: potluck.exchange

→ Source: github.com/omniharmonic/potluck

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