Joshua Poddoku

Build real companies.Build the person first.

I help founders and communities build in a humane way: people get heard, and they build with you.

I write AI and human contribution policies for teams, products and communities. I’ve spent seven years inside pre-seed to Series A startups.

Joshua Poddoku in a navy sweater and glasses, writing on a tablet with a stylus

Ask before you build.

Experimenting on a laptop is fine, because nobody gets hurt. Once real people use what you built, your mistakes land on them. So before anything gets built, I ask three questions.

  1. Is the problem real, or a what-if?
  2. Does it serve people, or take from them?
  3. Who gets hurt if it misfires?

Lately there’s a fourth: who, or what, did the work?

Write down how the work gets done.

AI is now in how your team works, in what you ship, and in what people send you. Funders have started asking about it too. When nobody writes down how it’s used, people stop saying what worries them, and that’s where the hidden rot starts.

So I write it down with you, in plain words, for the people it affects. When the problem runs deeper than that, we do Groundwork.

A contribution policy
The shorter piece of work, written for your team, your product, your community and your funders.
Groundwork
Four weeks to find the real problem, with a map of every pain point back to its root.

Book a conversationEmail me what you're buildingHow it works

Writing

  1. I want to share about enabling more human-led, ai assisted approach which respects both the entities with guardrails, boundaries, guidelines and this results in community-led evangelism and governance instead of overwhelming maintainers or shifting the blame towards AI
All notes

Projects

Community Signals
How people talk about AI-written code, 4,621 posts so far, read twice a day. It’s how I know what people feel when AI enters their work.
HuyoWorld
The lab I steward: humane, community governed and local first, growing into grants, incubation and stewardship. One of its projects is Clansurf, offline radio nodes a neighbourhood runs itself.

Notes from the Open Source World

Every week or two I send a short note on what moved in Open Source, what the community signals are showing, and what I would do about it. You can unsubscribe from any email.