Mission · Ownership · Governance
The Foundation
Hacking Biology is the non-profit foundation that owns and stewards biohack.it. What it guarantees, who governs it, how it is funded, and what it cannot do.
Hacking Biology is a non-profit foundation. Its job is narrow and permanent: to own biohack.it and to guarantee the properties the community has to be able to trust — for longer than any individual’s interest in the project.
Why two names, one mission
biohack.it is the software and the initiative: the open platform people use to document protocols and measure them. Hacking Biology is the non-profit that stewards it — it directs the project and its development, and exists to guarantee what the software promises.
The separation is not cosmetic. A tool can be forked, sold, or captured. A steward with a mission lock is what makes the promise credible and permanent. The Foundation is the guarantor; biohack.it is the thing guaranteed.
Ownership
The Foundation owns the biohack.it software, brand, trademark and copyright. It cannot relicense the software away from AGPL-3.0, and it cannot relicense it away from the mission.
The Foundation is to be incorporated in Roatán, Honduras, within the Próspera ZEDE — a special economic zone with regulatory autonomy — chosen deliberately to preserve a progressive spirit of experimentation in longevity and biohacking, alongside an aligned community.
Incorporation is not data hosting. Where the entity is registered is a separate question from where user data lives: for users in regulated jurisdictions such as the EU, data-protection duties are met at the hosting and technical layer, independently of the Próspera seat.
What the Foundation guarantees
Never commercial. The project is never sold, taken proprietary, or turned into a walled garden. This is the reason a foundation holds it, and not a company.
Open by code and by data. Software under AGPL-3.0. The public dataset released as a clonable snapshot. Content under open licences. Anyone can run their own instance — including against the Foundation, if it ever fails at this.
Harm reduction first. Safety guardrails are not optional features. The platform describes, never prescribes; the reason it exists is that beginners already copy off-label protocols without monitoring, and they deserve better than a forum thread.
Transparency of method. Where AI is used and where it is not is published. Every upstream project whose work is reused is attributed and notified: this project is a connector of other people’s effort, not a silent consumer of it.
Evidence language is earned. The word distributed trial is used only for work that clears a published bar — a pre-registered endpoint, a shared protocol version, declared timepoints, an adherence floor, a minimum cohort, a published analysis plan. Short of that, a result is reported as a self-experiment or a cohort observation, and called that plainly. The platform reports what was observed, never what caused it.
Data belongs to the person. Full export, always. The individual owns the record, not the platform.
Governance
The Foundation holds the stewardship: the domain, the trademark, the software copyright, the canonical instance, and the guarantee of everything above.
The board is a basket of biohackers and software hackers — practitioners of the domain and builders of the tool — composed so the project stays impartial and on-mission over time. Mixing the two makes both capture and drift harder: the biohackers hold it to the community’s needs, the hackers hold it to open, verifiable engineering. Composition and the first seats are not yet named — said here rather than left implicit, because a board you claim before you have it is worse than no board at all.
Development is directed by the Foundation with an open contributor community; architecture decisions and specifications are public from day one. Community governance attaches to the community that already exists rather than to a cold-launched forum, and contested claims are discussed in the open rather than triaged privately.
Sustainability
The Foundation is funded by public grants. Beyond grants, equity participations in dedicated startups pursuing the same goal may arise — aligned ventures whose success feeds the mission, never the reverse.
The knowledge is never for sale. Protocols, biomarkers, safety rules and the open dataset are not products, and nothing in the funding model lets a supplier buy influence over which protocols emerge.
What could go wrong
Stating the failure modes is part of being accountable for them.
| Risk | What holds it back |
|---|---|
| Mission drift over time | Charter, AGPL, and open-data licences that cannot be quietly reversed; mixed biohacker/hacker board |
| Funding pressure toward commercialisation | Public-grant funding; only mission-aligned equity; knowledge never sold |
| Capture of the canonical instance | Full clonability and self-hosting — the community can always leave and take the data |
| Regulatory qualification as a medical device | Descriptive-not-prescriptive posture by design; legal review before public launch |
| Jurisdiction versus data protection | Próspera seat for the entity; user data protection handled at the hosting layer |
| Statistical rigour lagging the data model | A public evidence hierarchy and an observed-not-caused phrasing rule; a dedicated statistical-methodology specification is in progress, not yet done |
| Genomics shared publicly by default | A heightened consent gate before publishing — identifiability, relatives, irreversibility, spelled out — and the decision itself put to the community at public beta |
Two sites, two jobs
biohack.it is the product site: what the platform is, the plan, how to join the community. It speaks to biohackers.
This site is the organisation: who the Foundation is, what it guarantees, how it is governed, and how to support or partner with it. It speaks to institutions, researchers, funders, and the sceptical clinician.
One message from both — open infrastructure for longevity, stewarded so it stays that way.