The Problem
Black Socialists in America (BSA)—a coalition of anti-capitalist, internationalist Black Americans / New Afrikans—envisioned a platform to support grassroots organizing, mutual aid, and cooperative governance. They needed more than just a product—they needed a process aligned with their politics: transparent, participatory, and community-driven.
Their ask:
How can we build digital infrastructure for
decentralized, directly democratic organizing—with the people it’s meant to serve?
The Approach
I worked across product strategy, product design, organizational design, and brand development, helping set the foundations for what would become the Dual Power App.
From the start, our approach centered radical transparency and community participation. I organized and hosted a series of open, livestreamed design sessions, inviting in BSA’s broader community—many of whom don’t typically see themselves reflected in tech or design spaces. These sessions weren’t presentations—they were true co-design workshops, where people could shape the product in real time, on their own terms.
In Practice
These collaborative efforts shaped the foundation of the Dual Power App, an open-source platform designed to empower individuals and groups to self-organize, make decisions collectively, and act on shared values. All made possible by:
Hosting open design sessions, planning and facilitating livestreamed co-design workshops that invited everyday people—not just designers—to actively shape the product, while creating a transparent archive of the platform’s evolution.
Designing product interfaces, leading the creation of core UX and UI patterns that align with the platform’s organizing structures and enable intuitive user participation across working groups and initiatives.
Co-creating the brand identity with Devin Halladay, crafting a visual language that blends pedestrian and technical styles inspired by isometric imagery, emphasizing scale and moments of high contrast, creating a vision reflecting the impact and breadth of building collective futures
Co-designing the consent-based voting model in partnership with the community, developing a decision-making system rooted in consent rather than majority rule to foster inclusive, values-aligned grassroots governance.
The Outcome
Our work resulted in the strategic, visual, and functional foundation of the Dual Power App, now in open-source development through BSA’s Open Tech Development community.
This wasn’t just a design project. It was a model for how communities can co-create the tools they need. Through a participatory design process, collaborative decision-making structures, and community-informed branding, we created infrastructure that reflects and supports collective power.
The partnership continues today as we expand the platform, evolve the design system, and deepen the community’s role in shaping the tools built in their name.
