Digital innovations are largely built for society rather than with it, leaving individuals and industries without a meaningful way to shape the technologies they engage with and form a reliance on. TechnoEthos exists to close the gap between the speed of code-centric and capital-driven development and the important but slower, more deliberative processes used to support human dignity and collective agency. If you want more detail, you can explore our article "What is TechnoEthos concerned about and how are we trying to solve this concern?"
Many software companies signal their values through non-binding website mission statements, marketing campaigns, and advisory groups. Our mission is baked into our legal DNA through our incorporation status: a Community Contribution Company (C3) under British Columbia law. This status legally restricts us: we can only distribute 40% of annual profits as dividends. Furthermore, if we ever dissolve 60% of our assets must go to qualified non-profits. We must also publish and report to the B.C. government proof that we are meeting community contribution standards, which includes full transparency on renumeration, dividends recipients, and amount of dividends disbursed. If you want to read more about this incorporation status, you can check it out on the B.C. government website here.
A Community Contribution Provision is a required and legally binding community commitment in the articles of incorporation of C3's. Our Provision starts as follows: "The Company exists to advance human flourishing, dignity, and collective capacity in the design, development, governance, and use of digital technologies. Its community purposes include supporting individuals and communities to understand, shape, and benefit from the digital systems that affect their lives." You can read our entire Community Contribution Provision here.
We anchor what we do by leaning in on our community, which starts in our home base of Vancouver. We are banking with Vancity, a member-owned credit union that reinvests profits locally and has been a pioneer in community-focused finance practices. We also default to open-source and transparent tools, using Proton for privacy-first infrastructure and Open Collective for a financially transparent structure that facilitates supporting our local community. If you want more details, you can check our article "Our operational choices."
TEED is an agentic AI tool that translates laws, industry best practices, and ethics frameworks into actionable workflows. It evaluates configurations, deployments, and public-facing legal policies to surface misalignments between a software product's existing practices, and standards developed by governing bodies and subject-matter ethics experts. The actionable suggestions for realignment range from remediation artifacts for engineers to clear directions on who to contact in an organization and what document to ask for to resolve compliance issues.
TEED is built for anyone building digital technologies who need or want to become more aligned with legal and ethics standards. This includes software development teams of all sizes, contractors hired to ensure products meet compliance and ethics standards like AI ethics consultants, and students developing their first software tools. TEED is made to educate, empower, and support people in going beyond compliance.
Each assessment TEED performs produces a score that concretely shows what laws, industry best practices, and ethics frameworks a product aligns with. Software teams can publish their TEED score on a public registry, allowing people to find products that align with their values or organizational needs. We also empower the public by providing the legal and ethical frameworks integrated into TEED as a searchable public repository. If you want more detail, you can check out this article.
Our first focus area is education technology (EdTech) because education exists in dense regulatory landscapes with high-stakes compliance needs. By choosing EdTech, we prioritize supporting and empowering vulnerable populations and communities by helping developers provide high-quality, compliant, and human-centered knowledge-sharing products. Our initial jurisdictional coverage includes Canada and the United States, with the European Union as a planned expansion.
You can watch our prototype video to see the concept in action and sign up for our interest list to become an early beta tester or pilot partner.
Our current team is composed of six working alongside full-time roles. For this reason, individual team members remain unnamed for privacy reasons as we operate part-time. Our one named team member is McKim Jean-Pierre, the person who conceptualized both TechnoEthos and TEED and recruited the volunteer team. She is joined by two co-founders who bring over 20 years in technology policy leadership and 15+ years building distributed, human-centered systems respectively. The team also includes two ML engineers: one with recent NeurIPS 2025 publications where they were the senior or sole author, and an MPP graduate focused on U.S. education policy.
The team is currently working on a volunteer, free-time basis while we launch a $4.5M Founding Community round to transition to full-time operations. This capital will fund identified roles needed to get TechnoEthos rolling, allowing us to build in a deliberately community centric way without compromising our technical or ethical architecture for capital-maximizing market and investor pressure. You can learn more about our Founding Community round and our justifications around it on our Open Collective project page.
Our C3 incorporation legally commits us to prioritize community over capital returns and mandates transparent financial reporting to the B.C. government. This structure conflicts with the exponential growth expectations and opacity of traditional venture funding, as well as the capital-chasing pressures of bootstrapping. These traditional modes of fundraising can compromise work quality and create negative externalities like data monetization, weak security practices, and engagement-driven design. By launching with total transparency from day zero, we ensure accountability to the public and create the financial stability needed to build a high-quality product made by and for flourishing communities.
You can support TechnoEthos through our Founding Community Round via Open Collective, where our financial inflows and outflows are publicly visible. This is the most direct way to help fund our initial team, technical infrastructure, and pilot compensation. You can learn more and support us here.
We are accepting indications of interest for subject matter experts and institutional partners for framework integration, corporate and consultant pilot partners for product development and beta testing, and local business and community partners in Vancouver for collaboration proposals. You can join our interest list to indicate which category fits your expertise, organization, or personal interest here.