Ibis Coordination

About Dan Allison

Hi I’m Dan Allison. I founded Ibis Coordination in 2024 with the mission of making group coordination easy using the tools and practices that I’ve learned over the years.

This page details my journey in the field of group coordination and how I ended up here. My other work (drawings and writings and such) can be found on my website.

Early Lessons in Coordination

Music

My education in coordination started in childhood when my drum teacher taught me the concept of “coordinated independence” (originally taught by jazz drummer Jim Chapin), which is the idea that a drummer’s four limbs should each be able to play a different pattern independent of what the other three limbs are doing, while also staying coordinated with the other three limbs (and the rest of the band, of course). Years of practice of coordinated independence as a drummer instilled in my bones this distinction between coordination and dependence.

Comedy Improv

In my early 20s, I studied comedy improv at The Second City and iO Theater in Chicago. Improv taught me not only how to coordinate spontaneously under conditions of total uncertainty, but also that the upper limits of group coordination potential are much higher than most people assume. Spontaneity is not just a last-resort strategy that groups fall back on when their plans don’t work. Rather it is a way of harnessing collective intelligence to do things beyond what’s possible through mere planning.

Building Coordinated Systems

Systems Thinking

My interest in systems thinking began when I first read the book Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, around the same time that I was studying improv. The concepts in that book have been essential to my understanding of how systems become greater than the sum of their parts and how groups do more than what individual members can do separately. My interest in systems thinking eventually led me into a career in software development.

Software Development

I began working as a software developer in 2012 and have worked primarily on systems related to resource management, logistics, and group decision-making. Over and over in the software domain, I have encountered problems that are presented as software problems but are actually language problems or people problems. When people don’t know how to coordinate effectively, they often turn to technology, even when technology is not really the right solution. One of my goals with Ibis is to help people solve coordination problems at the right level, which is sometimes at the technology level, but often it’s at a more basic level.

Founding Ibis Coordination

A big lightbulb moment for me occurred in 2021 when I read the book A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins about how the neocortex of the human brain processes information. After reading the chapter in which Hawkins describes the details of the voting process that cortical columns use to consolidate sensory data into unified perceptions, I had to set the book down and go for a walk because my mind had been blown by what I had just read.

I immediately recognized the voting method as approval voting (even though Hawkins does not use that term), which is a voting method I had been advocating for for years through my support of The Center for Election Science. I realized that if Hawkins is right, then approval voting is not just a good voting method for democratic elections, it’s a fundamental mechanism of collective intelligence in nature.

This realization inspired me to begin building the software that would eventually become Harmonic Team, which then led to the creation of my variation on approval voting called acceptance voting and ultimately to the founding of Ibis Coordination.

Influences

In addition to my own experience and research, I have learned a lot from the experience and research of others. The following is an incomplete list of books that have significantly influenced how I think about group coordination, organized into the topics of spontaneity, systems & complexity, and collective intelligence.

Spontaneity

Systems & Complexity

Collective Intelligence