Rizom Brains: Knowledge Infrastructure for Distributed Teams

Yeehaa (Jan Hein Hoogstad) is a philosopher and developer who came to technology through continental thought, realizing that the most interesting questions about knowledge and community were being answered by those building digital infrastructure. After founding Offcourse—an open-source learning platform attempting to reimagine education outside institutional walls—and working extensively in education technology, he recognized a fundamental problem: organizations were being built like machines when they needed to work like living systems. This insight led to the creation of Rizom, an ecosystem of tools designed to help individuals and organizations create, connect, and share knowledge through distributed, regenerative structures rather than traditional hierarchical models.

Organizations fail to scale not because they lack talent, but because knowledge gets trapped in two places: in key people's heads (creating bottlenecks) and scattered across disconnected tools (making context inaccessible). This creates predictable failure patterns: new team members repeatedly interrupt domain experts asking the same questions; important context disappears when decisions need to be made; critical expertise becomes single points of failure; and coordination costs grow faster than the team itself. Traditional knowledge management treats organizations as machines to be optimized rather than living systems to be cultivated, resulting in tools that extract and control knowledge rather than enable it to flow naturally.

The underlying problem is philosophical: we've inherited mental models from industrial factories and military hierarchies, applying them to knowledge work that requires emergence, serendipity, and unexpected connections. These models optimize for predictability and efficiency at the cost of resilience and adaptation.

Rizom Brains implements distributed intelligence through three integrated layers: personal knowledge brains that evolve like Git repositories (using markdown, plain text, YAML frontmatter, and version control), outcome-based certification that enables trust without gatekeepers, and open standards (HTTP, MCP, ACP) that prevent vendor lock-in. The system treats knowledge work through the lens of Transactive Memory Systems (TMS)—an organizational psychology framework showing that high-performing teams don't share all knowledge, but rather share awareness of who knows what and build systems to access it quickly.

The technical architecture prioritizes portability and ownership: content stored as markdown files syncs bidirectionally with a local database, giving users full ownership, git-based version control, and the ability to export or migrate anytime. AI agents (Rover, Recall, Ranger) provide the infrastructure that makes distributed teams operationally viable—maintaining specialization maps, building credibility signals, and enabling coordination across the network. A franchise model with equity stakes ensures that individuals own what they build within the ecosystem, transforming the relationship between humans and machines from passive consumption to active collaboration. This approach deliberately prioritizes solving the immediate, achievable 90% of problems—synchronizing information after absences, extracting tacit knowledge for onboarding, processing shared research materials—rather than pursuing uncertain moonshot projects.

Rizom Brains represents a concrete instantiation of ecosystem architecture principles: enabling knowledge to flow freely while preserving ownership and creating conditions for collective intelligence to emerge from individual autonomy. The system demonstrates that organizations don't need to choose between flexibility and excellence—they can access expertise at the speed they need it without the usual coordination overhead of traditional consulting or staffing models. By grounding the infrastructure in TMS theory and open standards, Rizom proves that sustainable advancement comes from accumulating many successful, focused solutions rather than betting everything on transformative breakthroughs. The framework has evolved from years of learning: Offcourse taught lessons about how design can inadvertently trap systems in mechanical thinking; bootcamp work revealed the gap between collaborative curriculum and hierarchical execution; and ecosystem architecture emerged as the unifying principle that connects technology, organizational design, and human flourishing. The outcome is not just a product, but a new way of thinking about how distributed teams can outperform traditional organizations—proving that the future of work requires gardeners, not engineers.