I am very excited about this project. At the end of 2020 I found myself completely burnt out on the construction business I'd been helping run. I just wanted to be my own boss and work with friends. But after 5 years it was depressingly clear just how difficult this was to put into practice.
Being a programmer in a past life, I spent much of those 5 years trying out every app I could get my hands on. In the end nothing proved any better than Quickbooks and Excel. The biggest problem though was that my Excel file was getting so large Excel was crashing just trying to open it.
It took a few depressingly isolated weeks, but eventually it hit me: forget power queries - I needed a proper database. So I spent the next year building a webapp that worked well enough for my own business.
It's been getting the job done for 3 years now, and I've got a long list of friends who have been waiting way too patiently to get a copy for themselves.
Wesley was blessed with a positive vision for the future upon becoming a father. After more than a decade of studying and working with rural intentional communities and urban collectives and cooperatives, Wesley had identified a problem common to them all – no matter how visionary and well-intentioned the organizers were, budgeting together was always a weak spot.
This led him to experiment with a revolutionary new approach to budgeting, called co-allocation, where a group can create a budget together mathematically such that no individual has to pay for anything they don’t actively support and where the diversity of perspectives and active feedback loops built into the system strengthened not only participants sense of agency and emotional investment in the group, but actually made for wiser decision-making overall.
When his son Salvador was born, Wesley fully signed onto “team human” and decided to use his findings to help humanity to survive and thrive in what certainly appears to be troubled times ahead.
Since then, he has written books and a blog, continued his experiments with co-allocation in his own family and with the rural land-owning community he helped formed in Puerto Rico, Comunidad Ecologica del Rio, and began to program Drzl, the simple, elegant way to budget together.
This project was born out of an effort to run a collectively owned business in a fair and flexible way. Which is to say it wouldn't exist without the efforts of all the people who participated in that journey for the last ten years.
Most of the fundamental principles were formed over years of conversations and experiments between Daniel Creim, Wesley Dawson, and Eirik Arvey. When Eirik made the sudden switch from construction worker to webapp developer, Sheryl Arvey and Kait Sage helped make it feasible. And most recently we have been blessed with the patient and insightful QA Team staffed by Lock, Jack, J, Alyrian, West, and Ash.
Missing here are countless others who have contributed in their own way. To them and everybody else we are deeply grateful for the support, and look forward to many more years of building collaboratively.
Right now Chzl works well enough for one business. But every time we tell folks about it, the waitlist of people who want a copy for themselves just keeps growing.
We've maxed the capacity we have to continue development. So it's time to expand. If you want to help build software and/or contribute financially, we welcome you to do so!