A couple of years ago I sat in a room with eight people — a foundation director, two nonprofit leaders, a technologist, a pastor, a funder, two community organizers. We all saw the same problem. We agreed on what needed to happen.
Then nothing happened.
Not because anyone was lazy, and not because we disagreed. We left aligned. Six months later we still hadn't moved. There was clarity. There was will. There was no mechanism. For most of my adult life I'd have told you the bottleneck was ideas. It took running several organizations at once to teach me how wrong that was.
The gap is almost never intelligence or goodwill. The gap is infrastructure — the follow-up that keeps a thread alive, the shared map, the person who remembers what was decided three weeks ago and won't let it die. Honeybee colonies solve this. Healthy churches solve this. Most of our organizations haven't.
That's my work: the glue. I also make mochi, and run a very small bakery where the treats are sold in pairs — so you keep one and give one away. Which is the same idea at the smallest scale I could find.
I'm a Christian, a technologist by training and temperament, and a Korean American who grew up translating between rooms. On a résumé those look unrelated. They aren't — they're one question wearing different clothes: how do people move toward something good together without becoming the same thing? Most of what I work on serves churches and mission organizations, and that isn't incidental to why I do it. I don't think you have to share any of that for any of this to be useful to you.
You don't have to pick. The whole page is below either way. But one of these is probably you, and it's the fastest way in.
- 01You fund things — and you've watched aligned people stall anyway.
- 02You're sitting on an archive nobody can ask questions of.
- 03You hold a network together and can't tell if it's healthy or just busy.
- 04You build systems, and you suspect coordination is a protocol problem.
- 05You're nearby — or you just want a cookie.
None of those? Read the essay instead. It's the long version of everything above. Or see every project on one sheet.
You fund things — and you've watched aligned people stall anyway.
You've been in the room where everyone agreed. You funded the program; the program worked; the field around it didn't move. That isn't a strategy failure and it isn't a goodwill failure.
It's that nobody is paid to hold the space between organizations — the follow-up, the shared map, the person who remembers what was decided three weeks ago and won't let it die. It's the most expensive problem I know of that almost nobody funds directly. Foundations fund programs. Companies fund products. Almost no one funds the connective tissue that lets independent groups act as one without flattening into one.
Collective Impact Labs is where I do that work. Right now it looks like a working map of the faith-and-technology field — who is doing what, and who overlaps with whom — and a network-health diagnostic that returns a six-dimension profile and deliberately refuses to give you a single score, because one number lets everyone skip the conversation that actually matters.
Honest limitWhat I don't have is proof at scale. The method has held inside my own network. It hasn't been tested outside it.
I'm looking for the first few places to test it outside my own network.
If that's interesting, reply and I'll send the one-page brief. If it's a no, I'd still take twenty minutes on what general operating support for coordination work would have to look like to be fundable.
Ask for the briefYou're sitting on an archive nobody can ask questions of.
Decades of careful work — commentaries, research, reference material, teaching. People used it when they knew where to look. Now most of them ask a chatbot instead, and the answer it gives about your own subject is worse than what's already in your basement.
The obvious fix is to hand the corpus to someone with a large model. That's the wrong fix, and you already know why: you lose the thing, the attribution, and eventually the reason anyone needs you.
OpenBook is the other way — make the archive answerable while the people who made it keep it, keep the credit, and keep the ability to say no. There's a working demo running end to end on a real reference work, not a mockup.
Honest limitIt's a prototype. I'm not going to tell you it's a product, and the commercial model is genuinely unsettled.
Send me one document you already publish — nothing confidential. I'll load it into the demo and show you your own material answering questions. Thirty minutes, no commitment, and you keep the file.
Send a documentYou hold a network together and can't tell if it's healthy or just busy.
Attendance is fine. The calendar is full. People say nice things in the survey. And you still can't answer the only question that matters — is this thing actually working, or does it just look like it is?
Most network measurement counts activity because activity is countable. It tells you the room was full. It doesn't tell you whether trust moved, whether resources actually flowed, or whether anything would survive you leaving.
So I built a diagnostic: six dimensions, thirty-one indicators, each anchored to a written rubric designed so two people scoring the same network should land in roughly the same place. It returns a profile, not a grade. There is deliberately no composite score — one number would let everyone skip the conversation the profile is for.
Honest limitThe rubric is version 0.9 and hasn't been validated yet — including whether two raters actually agree. You'd be helping me test it as much as the other way around, and I'd rather say that up front.
I'll read your network against the six dimensions and send you back a one-page profile. Forty-five minutes, free, no pitch at the end. I can hold two of these at a time — if the queue is full I'll tell you when it isn't.
Take one of the twoYou build systems, and you suspect coordination is a protocol problem.
You've read the org-design literature and found it unfalsifiable. You look at a network of autonomous parties trying to act together and see something closer to a distributed-systems problem: consent, delegation, revocation, and who is allowed to speak for whom.
That's roughly where I've ended up too. As more coordination gets executed by software agents rather than people, the question of what any given party actually consented to stops being a footnote in the terms and becomes the whole design problem.
What exists is a working, self-tested agent-based model of the signal layer — a mechanism study. It's deterministic, it runs in about twelve seconds, and it shows an honest residual risk I haven't designed my way out of.
Honest limitEmpirical field validation is future work. I want to be exact about that: this is a mechanism study, not a validated result, and anyone telling you otherwise about work like this is rounding up.
Read it and tell me where it breaks. A paragraph is more useful to me than a call — and if you find the flaw I've been walking past, that's the most valuable thing anyone reading this page could give me.
Ask for the write-upYou're nearby — or you just want a cookie.
Everything else on this page is infrastructure, which is invisible by design. This part you can hold.
Love Your Neighbor Baking Co. is very small and mostly runs out of my kitchen. The motto is be good to one another, and when you can — be sweet. Everything is sold in pairs: you keep one, and you give one to somebody with something worth saying attached to it. I appreciate you. You are loved. The pastry is the excuse; the sentence is the product.
I started bringing a tin of mochi to meetings and noticed something shift. A transaction becomes a relationship. A meeting becomes a table. None of that is in the strategy deck and all of it is load-bearing — the best coordination I've ever seen was preceded by trust, and trust was preceded by somebody actually caring whether the other person was okay.
The longer plan is workforce development: baking is a real trade, and a kitchen is a good place to come back to work in after a transitional or rehab program.
Honest limitFair warning — it's a cottage-food operation, not a storefront. Capacity is my actual kitchen.
Say hello and I'll tell you what I'm baking. And if you run a community hub, a rehab, or a transitional program and you've ever thought a bakery could anchor it — that's a conversation I'm actively looking for.
Say hello