Postcards from Montréal: Our Team Retreat & AI Vision

Hello, hello and welcome to our Autumn newsletter. In this issue, we’ll give you a quick recap of our awesome annual retreat in Montréal, and share some recent work and give you our (hype-free) thoughts on AI.

Each year, Hypha members gather in one place for a week to plan, work, and have fun. This year, our annual retreat was held in Montréal and everyone agreed it was the best yet. Impressively organized by Vincent, who calls Montréal home, the team spent five days reflecting on the challenges of the past year, celebrating our wins, and planning for what’s next. Since 2023, we’ve experimented with organizing our work and business development into Practice Areas; at the retreat, we opted to reorganize our work into three pillars: Stability, Solidarity and Growth, and have nominated members to steward these domains. We’re betting that this bold change will help Hypha continue to collaborate with our existing clients, support projects and causes we love, and most importantly, form new partnerships and win new clients.

But it wasn’t all work: we also created a collective Bingo card – which led to some funny encounters and strange missions around the city – honed our paddling skills with a second year of dragon boating, and enjoyed some truly délicieux meals.

So, AI. Those initials are inescapable this year, and while we’re all hoping for the hyperbole to return to Earth, we’ve also been busy exploring the domain of artificial intelligence, testing various tools (ranging from mind blowing to ho-hum), and formulating our own Hypha-take on all this pattern-prediction-induced excitement. Below, we’re re-sharing some of our writing as well as shedding light on a few of the interesting AI-related projects we’re following.

First up: are you following the work of The Collective Intelligence Project? This newish initiative has been gathering data and releasing interesting research on how AI is shaping and reshaping people’s perceptions and views. Their Global Dialogues Challenge is definitely worth checking out – for this initiative, they asked for creative submissions based on their open dataset. The winners are here, and you can explore Vincent’s submission here.

2025 might be the Year of AI but it’s also (ICYMI!) the International Year of the Cooperative, which is a good segue to introducing a recent co-operative AI collaboration - the Cooperative AI Blueprint project. With funding support through Co-operators “Co-operative Development Program”, Hypha is teaming up with CanTrust Hosting to gather practical data on LLM energy usage, and create a feasibility report on creating AI tools outside of the long shadow of Big Tech. If you’re working in the cooperative or social economy sectors, we have a survey for you on AI use! Fill it out here, please and thank you. Your answers help us build better AI tools for everyone.

Speaking of building tools, Hypha is taking our AI chatbot on the road (or the plane to be precise). Hypha members Andi and Vincent are presenting a workshop on developing value-aligned products at the upcoming Platform Cooperativism Consortium’s Cooperative AI Conference, happening later this month in Istanbul. 

We’ve also been continuing to experiment with local AI and its performance. Vincent has been building a prototype OCR system that takes in photographs of handwritten tabular data, and transforms it into digital tables (CSVs). This is exclusively using AI image recognition models running on hardware we own, which means the data is always private to ourselves and the client, and kept within Toronto. We’re doing this for Climate Justice Toronto, in the hopes of making their tenant advocacy more efficient.

Last but not least, Andi also wrote a personal reflection on AI, that starts to map out what we mean by cooperative AI.

In other exciting news: Hypha has joined the Cosmos Hub’s product roadmap team as a technical partner! We’ve been working on the Cosmos Hub’s governance and testing since 2021, and we’re super thrilled to get our hands dirty writing code for it! 2025 might be the year of AI and the year of the co-operative, but every year is a good year for financial decentralization and innovation!