E.V.E — Foundational Legacy Project

The Prototype That Helped Shape Platform One

E.V.E (Evolutionary Village Enterprise) was an intentional-community prototype and one of the most influential precursors to the Platform One Framework.

Emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s, EVE tested how communities could live, collaborate, resolve conflict, and make decisions together in ways that honoured shared values, transparency, and collective wellbeing.

Its focus was human systems — alignment, purpose, consent, and stewardship — rather than infrastructure or energy.
Through lived practice, EVE contributed directly to the DNA that Platform One now carries.

What EVE Explored

EVE served as a testing ground for:

  • consensual and participatory decision-making
  • values-aligned community governance(principles as the organising force, not authority)
  • conflict resolution and relational integrityinside a living community
  • interdependence and systems thinking
  • alignment-based participation(joining through shared kaupapa, not status or ownership)

Why EVE Matters to Platform One

EVE’s insights informed many of Platform One’s most important features, including:

  • the nested governance circle structure
    (EVE → Governance Circle → Project Circles → Sub-Circles)
  • the use of values and kaupapa as active safeguards
  • the separation of governance and operations
  • bottom-up system design driven by community insight
  • the understanding that alignment, not authority, creates lasting stability

EVE’s Ongoing Legacy

Although EVE as a community project concluded, its learnings did not.
They directly shaped:

  • Platform One’s values and ethical framework
  • the modern consent-based governance architecture
  • the safeguards that now protect WE Share
  • the replicable community-systems approach carried forward today
  • the recognition that long-term stewardship requires both cultural and structural protection

EVE is remembered not as a past project, but as a formative governance prototype that proved communities can intentionally design the conditions for human and ecological flourishing.