The federation — Cascade

Founding partners

Cascade was born from the concrete needs of transitional urbanism players.

The initiative was launched by three organizations that were already managing venues day to day, before pooling the tool so they would no longer each depend on it separately.

Plateau Urbain

A transitional urbanism cooperative that turns vacant buildings into affordable workspaces, with emergency housing solutions when possible.

Yes We Camp

A collective that creates and runs welcoming transitional venues, blending culture, inclusion, and experimentation.

Communa

A Brussels-based nonprofit association that develops collective, activist occupations to turn vacant buildings into genuine urban commons.

Economic model

A commission that follows usage, not software that captures value.

Cascade draws on the model pioneered by CoopCycle, the federation of bike delivery cooperatives that showed a digital tool can be pooled and governed democratically instead of being captured by a private actor.

Proportional to actual usage

Cascade takes a small share of the revenue managed through the platform — never a fixed subscription disconnected from a venue's actual activity.

Capped, never extractive

Beyond a certain threshold, the rate decreases: the goal is the federation's financial balance, not profit maximization.

Funded by its members

Cascade grows through the contributions of the organizations that use and govern it, in keeping with the Coopyleft license.

Coopyleft

Open code, under a Coopyleft license.

Cascade's code is open and auditable by everyone. The Coopyleft license goes further than a standard open-source license: it reserves commercial use for cooperatives and non-profit organizations. It's a way of staying true to what the project stands for — pooling resources rather than extracting value.

github.com/cascade-coop/cascade

cascade-coop / cascade

Digital infrastructure for the collective management of resources — contracts, contributions, invoicing, payments.

128Stars

24Forks

CoopyleftLicense

TypeScriptLaravel

Experiments

They're testing Cascade with us

Collective occupations (Brussels)

Communa

We can't wait for adaptive contributions to land — in the meantime, finally having subscriptions, contracts, and contributions in one place already changes everything.

Transitional urbanism cooperative

Plateau Urbain

Cascade let us stop juggling multiple spreadsheets just to keep track of contracts and contributions across our sites.

Transitional cultural venues

Yes We Camp

We can finally see at a glance who's contributing, to what, and what still needs sorting out.

Have a question or a project?

Write to us to talk about it.