Data is not reality itself. It is only the part of reality that the system has learned to see. 🌾 Our network includes more than 60 ecovillages and community spaces. And almost everywhere, resources are scarce. One community needs to repair a roof. Another needs additional solar panels, better insulation for a shared space, or tools for a community bike workshop. To support this work, we create shared funding pools. For now, the mechanism is very simple: a community organizes a volunteer workday, publishes a report, and receives 10 USDC. But when we put all these reports into one table and visualized them, something more interesting than the distribution of money became visible. Some communities report regularly and receive a significant share of the support. Others are barely represented. At first glance, you might conclude that the first group is simply more active. But that is not necessarily true. Communities may organize volunteer workdays regularly without publishing reports. People may lack the time, energy, digital skills, or capacity to understand how the pool works and properly document what they have done. So funding does not necessarily flow to those who do the most work. It flows more easily to those whose work has become visible to the system. And this creates an interesting systemic problem. If rewards depend on reporting, while the ability to report depends on organizational capacity, the system may gradually reinforce communities that are already stronger. They document more → receive more resources → increase their capacity → document even more. Meanwhile, less organized communities can remain invisible even when a lot of real work is happening on the ground. This is no longer only a question of funding allocation. It is a question of institutional memory. What does our network actually remember about the work being done? Which actions become part of our shared history — and which disappear simply because nobody had the capacity to document them? And what can such a simple visualization tell us about weaknesses in the capacity of our communities? Perhaps the next round of support should go where organizational capacity is lower. Perhaps some communities need help documenting work they have already done. Or perhaps the reporting mechanism itself needs to become much simpler. And we don’t necessarily need complex accounting systems, blockchains, or dashboards spread across three monitors to see these patterns. Sometimes a spreadsheet, a pencil and a sheet of paper are enough. You could even visualize the distribution with stones on the ground. Accounting preserves the memory of what happened. But only of what was recorded. A good system should therefore do more than show us what it can see. It should also help us understand who — and what — remains invisible. Thank Will Ridduck and @grassEcon