Meanwhile needs more humans
We are a pro-human software practice, so it is at least consistent that the thing we need most is people. This page is the plain version of the slide that other companies call "the ask". If you are a government team, a business, a foundation or a person with resources and an interest in this work existing, here is exactly what would make the most difference, in order.
Everything on this page comes with the same condition: any gift or favour we accept - support given toward the work, not paid for at arm's length - gets listed here, publicly, who gave what and when. We have spent a good deal of ink lately arguing that policy influence should be attributed; that has to include ours, or none of it means anything. The client work that keeps the lights on - our World B - is ordinary business, not a gift, and lives in the accounts rather than on this page; this register is for what is given to the mission. If your support is a gift that needs to be quiet, we are not the right recipient.
1. People
The single constraint on everything else. The commercial work funds the mission work, and the commercial work is currently very few humans deep - which means every hour of client delivery is an hour not spent on the research, the civic tools, or the policy artefacts you may have arrived here from.
Who we would put to work immediately: builders who are comfortable in Python and unafraid of an opinionated platform; a researcher who can run disciplined experiments and write plainly about negative results; a person who can take settled technical work and make it readable by a policy officer. If some of those are the same person, better still. What we offer is unglamorous and real: paid work when it is commercial, published work when it is not, problems that are unusual, and a standing rule that the computer suggests and the human decides - including about their own job.
If you are a department or company that cannot send money but could second a person for six months: that counts, and it might count most.
And if you build or maintain open-source software, you are already doing the thing this work depends on - much of what makes any of it possible is kept running by people who never sent an invoice. Contributors and maintainers are especially welcome, whether that turns into paid work, a shared problem, or just being in the same room now and then.
2. Hardware
Our research position is that meaningful capability runs on hardware ordinary organisations can own - and we prove it on machines we could afford, which is the polite way of saying the fleet is small and elderly in places. What would actually help: modern consumer and workstation-class graphics hardware for local inference, one serious multi-card node for the experiments that need it, and the boring parts nobody donates - storage, networking, a UPS. Rough figures: a single capable inference workstation lands somewhere in the low five figures in Australian dollars; the multi-card node is more. We will publish what any donated or funded hardware is used for and what it measured.
3. Compute and data-centre credits
The research programme compares small local models against frontier models on cost, quality and energy per correct answer. The frontier arm and the controlled runs need metered compute we do not own. Cloud credits, sovereign data-centre time, or access to a research allocation all work. Credits are the one resource where we note a caution learned from watching others: credits create relationships. See the condition at the top of the page; it applies double here.
4. Travel
Consultations, hearings and the meetings that matter tend to happen in Canberra and Sydney, and we are not in either. A travel budget is the least romantic item on this list and the difference between "sent a submission" and "was in the room". A few thousand dollars covers a year of showing up properly.
5. Speaking invitations
Cost you nothing, worth a great deal. Panels, seminars, committee appearances, internal government forums, university classes. We bring running software, not slides - the whole method is that the demonstration does the arguing. If your event wants someone to say "computers are amazing" or "computers will kill us all", we are the wrong booking; if it wants someone to show an audit trail answering "who decided", we are very easy to schedule.
6. Introductions
The artefacts on this site are written for the people designing Australia's new standards and safety machinery. If you can put them in front of the Office of AI, the AI Safety Institute, a departmental policy team, a regulator, or a minister's adviser - a forwarded link is enough. Thirty minutes with someone drafting the instruments is worth more to this work than most cheques would be, and unlike the cheques, it goes straight on the public record here.
Introductions do not have to point at government. If you work in an adjacent field - civic tech, open data, digital rights, community media, or the open-source projects all of this quietly runs on - or you are part of a network of people who do, that connection is worth as much as a policy one. Much of this work belongs to the wider community of people who care about civic life being represented properly; the more of those worlds it touches, the stronger it gets.
7. Office space
Last because it is the most solvable and the most pleasant: a room where collaborators can sit together sometimes, host a workshop, and put a whiteboard. If you have space near a train line and like the idea of this work happening in your building, say hello.
The scene
You know the scene. Forty minutes into the film, the situation has finally become undeniable, and the boss - who has spent every previous scene saying no, not now, not the budget - looks across the desk at the person who has been banging on about the problem since the opening credits, and delivers the lines the whole audience has been waiting for. Get this man a team. Get him a room. Get him a vehicle. Whatever he needs.
The list above is what "whatever he needs" itemises, priced and in order. We have been banging on since the opening credits, and the situation - as the rest of this site documents in some detail - has become undeniable on schedule.
Which leaves the casting question, and it is a real one, so ask it plainly: are you the character who says the lines? Somewhere there is a department head, a company owner, a foundation trustee or a person with means who gets to find out this year whether they are that character or just someone who watched the film. The difference between the two is one email, and the scene is considerably better from the inside.
That is the whole list. No tiers, no bronze-sponsor logos, no urgency theatre. The work continues either way, because the commercial side pays for it - just more slowly, with fewer humans, than the moment seems to deserve.
The register of support received lives below, and starts empty on purpose.
Register of support: none yet. This line is the page working as intended.
Written with model assistance. Read and edited by a human - though I'm not an editor, so tell me what I've missed: drop me a line. Parts of this were generated; all of it was read, checked and meant. Feedback is welcome and gets used.