Abundance Federation
A civic strategy for building public wealth in an age of technological concentration.
What We’re Building
The Abundance Federation exists to drive the cost of living steadily downward — toward the real cost of providing the things people need to live well.
We do this by organising people to build and own productive systems together — using modern tools like AI, robotics, and digital coordination where they genuinely reduce cost, labour, and waste.
Abundance is structured as a federation of mission-locked, not-for-profit cooperatives. This keeps systems resilient: local projects can succeed or fail on their own, and decisions stay close to the people they affect.
The goal is durable, shared systems that get cheaper, stronger, and more useful over time.
Why this matters
Across Europe and beyond, people face rising costs, fragile systems, and growing uncertainty.
Advances in AI, robotics, and renewable energy now make it possible to produce essential goods — food, energy, housing, healthcare — with far greater efficiency and far lower cost.
But how these technologies are owned matters. As AI becomes embedded in everyday systems, it starts to function as infrastructure. In those conditions, efficiency gains tend to accrue to system owners rather than users, unless ownership and governance are designed differently from the start.
This creates a limited window of opportunity. Once core systems are settled and dependencies are established, most people — including public institutions — become price takers rather than price setters, with little leverage over costs or terms.
The Abundance Federation exists to act within this window, by building shared productive capacity early that ensures the benefits of AI flow back to the people who rely on it.
an individual journey
By 2028, if we are successful, we would like to be able to say to a young person early in their career:
Put €20 a week into a cooperative farm fund and, when you have the time — help with simple, structured data collection — anything from photographing common farm weeds in the country, to documenting recycling contamination or delivery bottlenecks in the city. When life gets busy, step back. When life eases up again, return, knowing that the work you have already done continues to compound.
After several years, you would own a full share in a farm cooperative, guaranteeing access to food at cost for the rest of your life. At that point, you might redirect your €20 a week into an energy cooperative and, if you choose, help build datasets for renewable energy optimisation.
By your early thirties, you would have guaranteed access to both food and energy at cost for life. Through your work (and the work of other volunteers) AI and robotics systems, trained on farm and energy datasets, would continue to drive costs down further over time.
There are many secondary benefits to this individual journey, outlined on the What We’re Building page. The example above is illustrative rather than exhaustive, but it is intended to make the ideas behind the Abundance Federation more tangible.
Get involved
The Abundance Federation is a solution proposed by Richard Doody, an Irish engineer and entrepreneur with a background in software, and building organisations. Over the past two decades, he has worked across product development, sales, operations, and governance in early-stage and scaling technology companies, alongside founding and running volunteer-led community projects.
The idea grew out of practical experience: seeing how modern technology can compound value when it is designed well — and how fragile essential systems become with modern investment and return cycles. It is a structural solution to the structural failings that are driving up the cost of food, energy, housing and the other fundamental elements of a secure life.
The Abundance federation is now engaging domain experts across AI, robotics, governance, energy, agriculture, and finance to define feasible first steps toward an abundant future.
Core infrastructure is already in development, including a participation platform for coordinating volunteer contribution and early work on the systems needed to support shared, civic-aligned data production.
If you have relevant expertise and are interested in helping shape the direction of this work at an early stage, we’d welcome a conversation.
You can reach us at hello@abundancefederation.org.