Community-owned software,
built in the open.
We're building open-source tools for small businesses and local communities — starting with a specialty food shop in Brussels. First public build: March 10–14.
What brings you here?
In 2025, AI-assisted development crossed a threshold. Non-technical people started building real software — between patients, between customers, on the road. Not toy apps. Tools that solve hard problems. WTF Happened in 2025? →
This creates a flywheel: more contributors make open-source projects better. Better projects attract more users who build on them. The result is community-owned software that competes with proprietary platforms — without vendor lock-in, without platform dependency, without surrendering your data.
But building the tool is only 20% of the work. The real challenge is governance, maintenance, documentation, and community adoption. That's what Grassroots Hoppers exists to solve. We turn each project into a reusable roadmap, teach communities to run it themselves, and help them replicate it for their own context.
Think about literacy. Imagine most people can't read. The few who can use the law as a shield. Then — all at once — everyone learns to read. Everything changes. The power structures crumble.
That is the same revolution we are living through right now — but with software. Until yesterday, you needed engineers. Today, you don't.
These builders prove the thesis. Grassroots Hoppers exists to give people like them a roadmap, a community, and a governance model — so their projects outlast the weekend they were built in.
Between customers, on his phone. At the desk, on the shop computer. At home, on his personal laptop, late into the evening. No team. No funding. No technical background. Just stubbornness and tools that didn't exist a year ago.
The quality is astonishing. And this is just the beginning.
His prediction: the future is already here but not yet widely distributed. When it reaches normal people, it will enable them to have far more impact on their communities than ever before.
He'd watched patients leave appointments frightened and confused for ten years. Studies show they can only recall 49% of what a doctor tells them — and 15% of what they do remember is wrong.
He built PostVisit.ai in seven days — in the hospital between procedures, and in the air flying Brussels to San Francisco. No coding background.
PostVisit.ai turns a patient's clinical record into a plain-language AI companion they can ask questions at 2am.
postvisit.ai →His job: drive roads, assess damage, decide where the money goes. There are far more roads to assess than there are people to cover them. Schools, markets, and clinics wait while the paperwork catches up.
He built TARA while driving actual roads near Kampala — dashcam footage in, full investment report out in five hours instead of weeks. Surface condition, repair costs, equity assessment for which communities benefit.
TARA demo →His friend builds backyard cottages to ease California's housing shortage. Every permit application comes back rejected — a wrong code citation, a local rule overriding a state rule. Months lost. In San Francisco, the median time for building approval is 627 days.
Mike built CrossBeam in six days while still taking cases. Upload a rejection letter and plans. Get a precise, code-referenced action plan in 20 minutes. A process that took months now takes a lunch break.
The mayor of Buena Park testified: "I need 3,000 new homes permitted by 2029. We need this software."
CrossBeam on GitHub →One of these people walks into their favorite bakery.
"You don't have a system for demand prediction?"
The baker says: "No, that's reserved for the big chains."
The hobbyist coder says: "I can spend a weekend building one for you."
It only took a weekend. Today. Imagine what it looks like in one year, two years.
Transition Towns: 1,400+ communities in 50+ countries. Rob Hopkins didn't build a platform. He named an identity, wrote a handbook, and let communities self-organize. No corporation controlled it. No central authority managed it.
Grassroots Hoppers follows the same playbook. Instead of "your town can grow its own food," it's "your community can build its own tools." We're not replacing Transition Towns. We're adding the digital layer — community-owned software as infrastructure, the same way Transition added community-owned food and energy.
The method: we build a practical open-source project for a real community need. We document the entire process as a roadmap and a workshop. Then we publish everything — code, governance template, deployment guide — so other communities can replicate it without starting from zero.
Bottom-up, citizen-driven, not corporate.
Movement from person to person, community to community, city to city. Also: a nod to Lindy Hop, the dance community where this idea was born.
A movement name, not a brand exercise.
We create practical open-source tools for real community needs — retail intelligence, cooperative social networks, civic workflows. Each project is AGPL-licensed and community-owned from day one.
IN PROGRESS — HACKATHON MARCH 10–14
Every project becomes a roadmap: the decisions, the architecture, the governance model. Plus workshops that teach communities how to deploy and maintain the tool themselves.
STARTING — DEVLOG GOES LIVE MARCH 10
Other communities fork the project, adapt it to their context, and run it independently. City by city, the same pattern spreads — without central control.
PLANNED — PLAYBOOKS PUBLISH AFTER HACKATHON
A cooperative social network for local communities. No likes. No comments. No algorithm. You see what the people around you are creating. If you want to tell them it's amazing, you tell them in person. Designed to be forked city by city.
STATUS: SPEC PUBLISHED · DEVELOPMENT STARTS AFTER DAVID TOOLKIT SHIPS
Retail intelligence for a specialty food shop in Brussels. The tools big chains have — demand prediction, workflow management, ordering support — built open-source for Chez Julien. Starting narrow: one shop, two tools, documented so any shop can deploy them.
STATUS: BUILDING · HACKATHON MARCH 10–14 · FOLLOW THE DEVLOG
Grassroots Hoppers is built by GPFC srl, a registered Belgian company (BCE BE0545849385). All code is AGPL-3.0 — free to use, required to stay open. Every contribution is public and attributed.
The roadmap includes cooperative governance: a legal structure (SC — société coopérative under Belgian law) where contributors become co-owners. That structure is being designed now. Until it's filed, the commitment is simple: everything is open-source, everything is documented, and the governance templates will be published for any community to adopt.
We'd rather be honest about what's real than promise what isn't.
GPFC srl registered (BCE BE0545849385)
Initiative SPEC published
Social Media V2 SPEC published
David Toolkit repo live on GitHub
Workflow map prototype built
Website + hackathon infrastructure ready
Sales prediction engine (3 years POS data + weather)
Interactive workflow map for Chez Julien
5-day public devlog
David Toolkit playbook published
First "Fork & Deploy" workshop template
Cooperative governance design (SC statutes draft)
Social Media V2 development begins
First community replication pilot
SC cooperative filing
Or follow the launch: hackathon preview page