Building systems that honor shared care

We partner with stewards to keep communities safe, resourced, and accountable.

Ethotechnics keeps systems from leaving care work to chance. We surface where responsibility slips, design maintenance routines around those gaps, and stay with your teams until shared accountability feels ordinary.

Plan your maintenance pathway

Every path blends maintenance planning, stress testing, and documentation so your teams can steward the system long after our work together.

shared runbooks escalation maps restorative drills

Welcome

Welcome to Ethotechnics

Ethotechnics is a maintenance practice for organizations running complex services. We help you spot where care work is fragile, close the gaps, and keep responsibility shared instead of resting on a few people.

Practically, we map how accountability moves through your workflows, set up maintenance routines that keep people, data, and services safe, and train stewards so upkeep continues after we leave.

The theory underneath treats ethics as infrastructure: we design for the conditions that make collective care inevitable instead of optional.

The theory we draw from

Our maintenance-first approach is grounded in principles that keep accountability alive.

Maintenance is a right. Care and repair belong in everyone’s job, not just a few heroes’ bandwidth.
Accountability is designed. Responsibility must have pathways, checkpoints, and time built into the schedule.
Ethics is embedded. Safeguards live in tools, trainings, and rituals—not just values statements.
Community is the engine. Steward circles, upkeep crews, and labs keep responsibility distributed across roles.

Explore the maintenance pathways below

Join the movement

Ethotechnics doesn’t depend on a few heroes—it depends on all of us recognizing, designing, and sustaining the infrastructures that make moral life possible in our technological age. We invite you to explore, contribute, and help build systems that stop breaking people. Together, we can create a world where ethical living is not a burden but a built-in feature. Ethics is infrastructure. Ethotechnics builds it.

Lineage & contrast

See where Ethotechnics stands.

Situate Ethotechnics alongside traditions that keep accountability alive. We draw on governance lineages that center reciprocal obligation and on scholarship that treats upkeep as a civic act—while resisting ideologies that treat people as inputs to be optimized.

Lineages we build with

Indigenous governance. We follow leadership traditions grounded in kinship, treaty accountability, and consent so stewardship obligations remain reciprocal and place-based.
Maintenance studies. We prioritize the labor of upkeep, repair, and care infrastructures, borrowing methods that make maintenance visible, funded, and celebrated.

What Ethotechnics is not

Techno-solutionism. We refuse fixes that bypass community authority or push novelty without shared readiness.
Rationalist utilitarianism. We center lived harm and consent over abstract optimizations that discount who bears the risk.
Platform-capitalism. We reject extractive growth that externalizes upkeep onto workers, residents, or ecosystems.
Accelerationism. We slow down by design when safety, rest, or repair need protection from speed-at-all-costs logics.

Engagement overview

Care outcomes stay at the center of every pathway.

Before we plan any work, we chart how accountability, rest, and trust need to feel for your people. Each pathway layers in practices that keep those outcomes visible, measurable, and shared.

When you’re ready for collaboration, this overview walks through stewardship circles, maintenance crews, and systems labs in depth.

Review the rhythms, shared agreements, and starting materials for each path so you can choose the support that fits your system’s pressure. Every model is designed to distribute responsibility while keeping care centered.

Steward circles: peer-led rhythms that keep strategic stewardship shared and woven into existing rituals.
Shared upkeep crews: co-stewardship teams that rotate upkeep, rest, and accountability across groups.
Collective labs: community-led rehearsal spaces where we prototype safeguards together before they reach production.

“Our member-owners finally had a ritual to surface harm without fear—and we had the muscles to respond together.”

Relief for stewards

Seasonal reflection circles make room for collective decision logs and grounded next steps—so accountability leads aren’t isolated. See how stewards are supported
Accountability in motion

Maintenance crews bring shared drills, restorative check-ins, and living runbooks that distribute care work across teams. Hear how upkeep becomes communal
Safeguards you can trust

Systems labs host deep dives where impacted staff and operators rehearse future scenarios until the response feels reliable. Experience the lab container

Stewardship circles

Care-centered companionship that keeps leaders resourced.

When a mutual aid network lost two senior coordinators, stewardship sessions helped remaining stewards realign around care commitments, rebuild trust with volunteers, and chart relief plans that honored capacity.

Together we convene reflective circles, review stress signals, design interventions, and leave you with grounded next steps to steward change.

Connect with a steward companion

Seasonal accountability mapping Leadership mutual support circles Practice rapid improvement sessions with your teams Decision audits & refusal playbooks Updates for members and stakeholders

Shared care in practice

Maintenance crews keep shared responsibility alive.

For a city accountability office drowning in hotline escalations, embedding our operators meant residents reached someone who could act, and internal teams finally had rituals to hand off complex cases without burning out.

When your system needs hands-on support, Ethotechnics joins your operations teams. We co-own rituals, instrumentation, and escalation pathways so upkeep is shared instead of resting on a few people.

Co-design shared upkeep

Shared rhythm

Shared runbooks and dashboards to track stress signals.
Rotating stewardship teams that we train and co-facilitate.
Repair rituals and refusal protocols ready whenever they’re needed.
Documentation kits that keep improvements accessible across staff.

Systems labs

Labs create space to rehearse new safeguards.

When a worker cooperative needed proof that refusal protocols would hold under pressure, a lab gave frontline staff and directors space to surface fears, test responses, and leave with agreements everyone could trust.

Labs are time-boxed residencies for teams to experiment together. We hold the container, assemble the right collaborators, and ensure prototypes are ready for your everyday operations.

Reliability lab

Prepare teams for critical service moments before they meet the public.

We map failure paths with cross-functional staff, run facilitated drills, and prioritize mitigations so your team can intervene before harm compounds.
Maintenance lab

Redistribute upkeep with actionable rituals.

Together we prototype role rotations, service windows, and communication patterns that keep maintenance visible and resourced.
Governance lab

Translate accountability principles into policy.

We convene decision-makers and impacted staff to draft agreements, refusal criteria, and review cadences your teams can uphold.

Imagine a lab with us

Stay connected

Get updates on upcoming gatherings.

Receive invitations to new stewardship circles, upkeep openings, and lab opportunities as they launch.