💡 In simple words: This page tells the long story of how WikiDeal was born, starting from a Swiss foundation created in 1998.

⚠️ Not yet approved. This page describes a proposal that is still under community review. It is documented here so it can be discussed, improved and endorsed.

History of the Project

From WikiDeal — About · Onboarding

In brief

WikiDeal did not appear out of nowhere. The project builds on more than twenty-five years of work carried out by the Ynternet.org Foundation, a Swiss non-profit organisation active since 1998 in ethical and inclusive digital transition. This article traces the main milestones of that history, from the founding of the organisation to the strategic reflection that led to WikiDeal.

1998 — Founded at the invitation of Swiss cooperation

The Ynternet.org Foundation was created in 1998 as a non-profit organisation, at the invitation of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

At the time, Swiss cooperation wished to support non-profit international cooperation projects. The organisation it had until then primarily supported had gone public (IPO) and thereby become a for-profit company. The delegates of the Swiss federal body chose instead to favour structures driven by a non-speculative intent — not mere service providers, but genuine partners in an ethical and inclusive digital transition.

1998–2003 — First funding and a first social network

Between 1998 and 2003, Swiss cooperation funded the organisation’s activity (then constituted as an association). As early as 1998, the association had launched a social network called cooperation.net, one of the first of its kind.

Archive snapshots (via archive.org / the Wayback Machine): - cooperation.net in 2001 (earliest archived capture) - cooperation.net in 2003
Note: the site existed from 1998, but the Wayback Machine holds no capture earlier than July 2001.

In 2003, Swiss cooperation ended its funding while encouraging the organisation to diversify its sources of revenue and become self-sufficient.

2003–2008 — Self-sufficiency and sharing the know-how

The organisation succeeded in becoming self-sufficient over roughly a decade. It began to put its know-how to work for other actors, then developed educational programmes across Europe and internationally — notably for Eastern European countries.

2008 — Becoming a foundation, and a strategic direction

In 2008, the organisation became a foundation. A meeting bringing together all the expert members of the scientific council set a clear direction:

Digital transition is, above all, a matter of education.

In practice, this meant courses, mentoring and methodologies, designed to be deployed afterwards — directly within citizen associations, or through universities and other institutions. This positioning went hand in hand with the ambition to gather experts in free software culture and free culture more broadly, drawn from a wide range of organisations.

An underlying strategic tension

A significant minority of members (around 35–40%) leaned instead toward a technological lever. Their argument rested on the fundamental question raised by Wikipedia: is Wikipedia above all a piece of software (the wiki), or above all content (knowledge)?

There was no clear-cut answer, nor any real confrontation — rather a tendency. The operational team and the foundation’s board implemented the educational direction, drawing on many experts, notably in the development of research and training programmes.

2008 onward — Diversifying the programmes

The foundation broadened its scope, for example through:

organising the TEDx conferences in Geneva;
active participation in the launch of Wiki Loves Africa, aimed at showcasing the creativity — particularly photographic — of Africans, for a re-appropriation of African culture by Africans (a form of autonomous visual ethno-anthropology);
the Nos Jardins programme (presented on the foundation’s website, ynternet.org);
many other training programmes of all kinds.

In total, 30 to 50 socio-educational innovation programmes were created. Socio-technological work remained very rare — almost non-existent — with two exceptions:

Credit Commons: interoperability of complementary currencies under free licensing;
Kowaboost: networking of useful addresses (URLs), i.e. a shared-bookmarks system.

2020–2023 — Reformulating the strategy to reach the mission

Over time, one observation became clear: the activity was sustainable but limited in scale. The approach was not managing to spread more widely.

In-depth work was therefore carried out between 2020 and 2023 to reformulate the strategies for achieving the mission. It was in this context that the thinking which led to WikiDeal emerged.

2020–2022 — Two needs converge

This reformulation work raised the question of the role the foundation could play in the global digital ecosystem. Two distinct needs ultimately converged.

First need: federating an ethical digital ecosystem

The foundation considered connecting the various actors of the digital world within a global package — a monthly subscription bringing together the smartphone, the computer, relevant software, training and the internet provider — all within a non-speculative framework.

This idea grew in particular out of an invitation from the Fairphone team at TEDx Geneva, and from a network of skills already mobilisable around the foundation:

the Fairphone team (hardware);
a former founder of Framasoft (free software);
the vice-president of the foundation, the first woman to have chaired the foundation that runs Wikipedia;
one of the founders of the GNU/Linux movement, Richard Stallman.

The challenge: to federate these skills. But for that, agreements were needed.

Second need: contract templates for living and cooperating together

In parallel (2020–2022), a long-standing partner of the foundation expressed a concrete need. This actor manages places of cohabitation and cooperation (Living Labs and ecovillages): the cooperative Bâtir Groupé.

Its need: contract templates allowing human facilitators to combine several agreements smoothly — lease, service contract, volunteering contract, placement of shares, amendments, addenda, and so on — without falling into the vague disputes of the “you told me / I told you / it wasn’t clear / it’s unfair / it’s too complicated” kind. Because deep ethics often requires several agreements, to be refined with care.

This need echoed an emerging movement at the time (less prominent today): the PropTech — technologies applied to property.

The WikiDeal idea: the culture of agreements as a commons

From the meeting of PropTech with these various contract templates emerged the vision of a wiki platform whose distinctive feature would be to adopt the governance of Wikipedia, with a deliberate internal competition.

Just as, on Wikipedia’s articles and portals — or on sister projects such as Wikimedia Commons or Wikibooks — discussions, reversions, conflicts and at times edit wars coexist, all of it remains held together by a fundamental agreement: “knowledge is a commons.”

WikiDeal transposes this principle to the realm of transactions:

“Transactions, the ways of managing them — more broadly the culture of agreements — are a commons.”

The goal: to create a non-speculative environment for the culture of agreements.

Sources of inspiration: the Swiss cooperative foundation

WikiDeal’s vision is rooted in several features of Swiss culture:

La Mobilière — a cooperative insurer that redistributes its profits to its members;
Coop and Migros — leading cooperative supermarkets, non-speculative (the subject of internal yet constructive criticism from humanist-minded citizens);
Raiffeisen — a cooperative banking movement;
The stability of the Swiss franc — a kind of “stablecoin”, not on a blockchain, yet deeply anchored;
An innovation-friendly environment, which explains the density of “crypto-creatives” in Switzerland — for legal and innovation-stimulating reasons, not for tax evasion.

It is from this cooperative heritage and this twofold demand — federating an ethical digital ecosystem on one side, equipping the culture of agreements on the other — that the WikiDeal adventure was born.

Why the Wikipedia model?

The choice to draw on Wikipedia’s governance is no accident. That governance uses decision-making modes adapted to complexity, which can go as far as elections or the Condorcet method — often presented as a possible new stage of democracy.

Wikipedia is also often nicknamed “the miracle”: it is the only leading project in its field to sit at the top of the global digital world without being a speculative structure. Among the ten to twenty leading digital players, all (or nearly all) are publicly listed companies — Wikipedia is the exception. It is precisely this model that WikiDeal seeks to transpose.

2023–2025 — From idea to flagship project

The vision was then worked on in depth. Florence Devouard, vice-president of the foundation and former chair of the foundation that runs Wikipedia, took part in around a dozen sessions (between ten and twenty) of analysis and proposal within the foundation’s council, over two to three years.

Between 2023 and 2025, the principle was adopted in successive cycles, through workshops and validations in council sessions. WikiDeal thus became the foundation’s new flagship project — one intended to encompass existing initiatives as much as possible, without abandoning the TEDx conferences or the other training programmes, now regarded as progressively secondary.

This work was carried out under the presidency of Théo Bondolfi, who continues to drive the deployment of the approach today.

The economic model: funding without privatising

One decisive question remains: how can the launch of such a platform be funded without privatising it?

The starting intuition: if WikiDeal operates at the scale of an international structure comparable to Wikipedia, the operating costs — and more broadly the financial flows passing through the marketplace — will be counted in hundreds of millions, even billions.

The model envisaged (prototype 1) reconciles two seemingly contradictory goals — attracting initial support and preserving a commons:

10% of each Entry Ticket (CHF 10) is reserved for the Early Supporters, the first backers, as a reward, only within a sustainable mode of operation;
the financial attractiveness of early support follows a decreasing bonding curve (×100 → ×30): the larger the user community grows, the less the incentive needs to be high. The earliest supporters benefit from the strongest multiplier, which then decreases as newcomers arrive.

The intended outcome: enabling initial support while guaranteeing the non-privatisation of a commons — a global platform launched, run and maintained by the users themselves. A genuine shared marketplace.

“Can it be done when the platform is, at the same time, launched, run and maintained by its users?” — that is the experiment at the heart of WikiDeal.

Imagination: Théo Bondolfi for Ynternet.org Foundation. Created with AI assistance. This content awaits more human validation.