About Armillaria
Six people.
No account managers.
The person facilitating your roundtable is the person who designed the schema and will be in the room at handover. That is the advantage of being six, and it is also the limit.
Thirty years of impact finance ecosystem design. Ten years of humanitarian coordination in the field. Deployed in twenty-five countries since 2016.
Why the name
Armillaria ostoyae is the largest living organism on earth — a mycelium network spanning nine square kilometres in northern Oregon. It is a single organism because it is connected, not because it is centralised. The challenges facing us require better ways of working across social, organisational and national boundaries, which is a coordination problem before it is anything else.
The practice · Who does the work
The people who design it are the people who build it.
In most engagements the senior people appear at the pitch and are never seen again. We are deliberately lean and extend our capability through a network of partners and subject-matter experts rather than by hiring a delivery layer.
Cameron Burgess
Co-founder & CEO
Thirty years designing impact finance ecosystems and convening the people who have to agree before anything gets built. Facilitates the roundtables, runs the participatory design processes, and writes the frameworks the platform then implements.
Dr. Astrid Scholz
Co-founder & CFO
Economist and serial founder. Designs the capital structures and ownership models that make coordination financially possible, and holds the operating discipline institutional diligence asks about.
Madelynn Martiniere
Co-founder & Senior Advisor
Crisis response and community resilience. The needs-and-offers model at the centre of the platform comes directly out of her work in the field.
Miranda Weston
Head of Product
Owns the product surface and the configuration playbook: what gets set up, in what order, and what a deployment looks like from the client side.
Francisco Romero Conde
Head of Engineering
Platform architecture and the data model. Responsible for the infrastructure every deployment runs on.
Daniel Forero
Lead Engineer
Delivery and deployment. Builds the light development that sits on top of configuration when a requirement genuinely is not in the platform yet.
◇ Two further names appear in older drafts — George Bugan (Innovation Exchange Global Lead) and Matheus Souza (NeedsList Global Lead). Confirm whether either is current before this page is treated as the roster of record.
The cost
Six people. We say so rather than implying depth we do not have. If you need a hundred-person systems integrator, we are not that. If you need the people who designed the thing to be the same people who configure it for you, that is exactly what this is.
Principles · Ten
Design without principles produces unprincipled design.
These are not values. They are hard-won requirements that constrain what we will and will not build, and they are the reason the platform is shaped the way it is.
01
Thrivable
Addressing major global challenges requires regenerative systems that go beyond basic sustainability, aligning technical, financial and legal frameworks with living systems and with the full range of value flows.
02
Humanity centred
Prioritising collective wellbeing rather than individual interest produces equitable outcomes that transcend cultural, organisational and political divisions.
03
Equitable
Systems must be redesigned for justice: addressing historical inequity, enabling universal opportunity, fairly compensating all value creation, and giving stakeholders a part in governance.
04
Cooperative
Genuine cooperation surpasses simple collaboration, enabling mutual benefit and cross-organisational partnership at the pace urgent challenges demand.
05
Adaptive
Complex planetary challenges require iterative solutions that respond to environmental and market feedback, with the capacity for rapid adjustment.
06
Distributed
Breaking the stranglehold that large technology firms and governments hold over what is done with our information requires distributing data, power and digital sovereignty.
07
Modular
Solutions that incorporate multiple stakeholder inputs and contextual flexibility produce system reliability, rather than depending on individual heroic effort.
08
Robust
Systems must function reliably in resource-constrained environments that lack consistent power or telecommunications infrastructure.
09
Ubiquitous
Consistent availability across platforms, without tool-switching barriers, is what makes a system something people actually use.
10
Measurable
Valuing outcomes alongside measuring outputs is what supports informed decision-making and honest capital allocation.
Published work
The thinking came first. The platform is what it produced.
Four papers on how coordination actually works, written before we built the tools, which is why the tools are shaped the way they are. This is the record that makes everything else checkable by someone who wants to check it.
Paper 01
From Billions to Trillions
How citizens, governments, corporations and civil society can share the burdens and the benefits of solving wicked problems.
Paper 02
Impact Finance Ecosystems
How and why to create the connective tissue that enables interoperability between impact finance platforms.
Paper 03
A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats
How mobilising knowledge between marine conservation organisations supports large-scale outcomes in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Paper 04
Project 1800
An outcome-driven, multi-stakeholder framework for the scale of coordination required to achieve SDG 6.
Ongoing
Armillaria on Substack
Working notes on why coordination fails and what infrastructure would fix it.
Entity and governance
TwentyThirty
Inc · trading as Armillaria
One company, two ways to work with us.
Armillaria is the trading name of TwentyThirty Inc, a US company. Governments, agencies and large NGOs licence the Innovation Exchange, and that revenue runs the business.
Armillaria Foundation is a project of the Charitable Partnership Fund, a US 501(c)(3) public charity. Philanthropic funding pays for the layer with no commercial buyer — free access for organisations with no budget, open source release, standards work and deployment in crisis contexts.
The two are described separately because they are funded separately. If you are considering a grant, the Foundation page sets out what it buys and what it costs.
Contact
Talk to the people who would do the work.
There is no sales team to get through. Tell us what you are trying to coordinate and who has to agree, and we will tell you whether this is configuration, development, or not a fit.
◇ [email protected] is a placeholder — confirm the address that should receive this.