The Commons · Civic coordination — Newcastle & the Hunter
Your community already has
everything it needs.
The flour, the trucks, the trades, the water, the customers, the capital — it’s all here. What’s been missing is the coordination: knowing who has what, who needs what, and making the connection easy. That is now a software problem — and we’ve built the software.
Runs on hardware in Newcastle·Every step receipted·Free to list
Why this exists
Buying local is nobody’s job.
A bakery in Charlestown freights flour from interstate while a mill forty minutes away runs under capacity. Ten cafés each place small orders that one local roaster would happily fill at volume. A carrier with idle trucks never hears about any of it. None of these businesses is doing anything wrong — finding each other is a full-time job nobody has time for, so the default supplier wins, and the money leaves the region by habit.
Coordination used to require layers of brokers, agents and middlemen, each taking a cut. It is now something software does: read what everyone needs, read what everyone supplies, and put the obvious deals in front of the right people with a number attached.
How it works
Four steps from stranger to supplier.
List
Your business gets a node on the Commons: what you supply, what you need, roughly what it costs you now. Five minutes, free, delist any time.
Match
Every morning the matchmaker reads every listed profile and finds the overlaps — a local supplier for your need, or several businesses needing the same thing.
Decide
You get a plain-English proposal with an estimated saving. Accept or decline. Nobody’s contact details move until every party has said yes.
Connect
Everyone who accepted is introduced by email and takes it from there. The connection is signed into an audit log you can verify — receipts included.
A worked example
One bakery. Three connections.
Take a real shape of business — a suburban bakery. Flour, water, deliveries. Here’s what the matchmaker does with it.
Flour
pooled orderBeforeFreighted from interstate, price at the mercy of fuel and distance.
AfterTen bakeries pool one order with a Hunter mill. Volume pricing, one delivery run, and the mill runs at capacity.
Water
new local lineBeforeA local spring operator with great water and no way to reach commercial buyers.
AfterSix bakeries switch their baking water to the spring. “Made with Hunter spring water” goes on the label.
Trucking
loop closedBeforeA removals firm with trucks idle between jobs; the spring has no transport.
AfterThe matchmaker closes the loop: the carrier runs the water route. Three businesses, one standing arrangement.
Group buying between competitors is done properly: proposals carry the ACCC collective-bargaining class-exemption notice, the group lodges the (free) form, and the platform never sets prices or terms — it introduces, and the businesses take it from there.
The infrastructure
Runs on Perimeter —
private, local, checkable.
The Commons is built on Perimeter, our sovereign AI platform: open-weight models on hardware in Newcastle, every action written to a tamper-evident log with receipts anyone can verify, and a bill you can check to the cent. Your profile is yours; your documents never train anyone’s model; delisting takes one click. Each business also gets the rest of the platform — helpers that answer from your documents, customer apps and websites on your own domain.
First $5 of usage each month is free · listing is free
Who this is for
Three ways into the Commons.
Local businesses
List what you supply and what you buy. The matchmaker starts proposing the moment there’s an overlap — a closer supplier, a pooled order, a customer down the road. Free to list, and you see the estimated saving before you say yes to anything.
List your businessAnchor organisations
Hospitals, councils, universities, big employers: redirecting even a slice of procurement locally moves more money than a hundred small switches. In one UK city, six anchor institutions took local procurement from 5% to 18% in four years. We’ll map your spend against the local supply base.
Talk to us about anchor procurementLocal capital
Businesses on the Commons can post what they’d do with funding — new trucks, bigger ovens — and locals can register non-binding interest. A noticeboard, not a fund: no money is handled here, no fees, no recommendations; real arrangements happen directly between the parties and their advisers.
See how the board worksQuestions
Asked often, answered straight.
What does it cost?
Listing on the Commons is free, and introductions are free. The platform underneath charges for AI usage at our cost plus one disclosed 20% margin, with the first $5 a month free — most businesses using the Commons alone stay inside the free allowance.
Who sees my information?
Whatever you choose to list — what you supply, what you’re looking for — is public on your node page, because that’s what makes matching work. Your contact details are not: they’re exchanged only when both sides accept a proposal. Delisting removes your node immediately.
Is the AI deciding anything for me?
No. The matchmaker proposes; you decide. Every proposal is an automated match, not an endorsement — it shows its reasoning and its saving estimate, and nothing happens until every party involved clicks accept.
Is this legal for competitors to buy together?
Yes, done properly. Australia has a collective-bargaining class exemption designed for exactly this: small businesses forming a group to negotiate with a supplier, lodged with the ACCC on a one-page notice, free. Coalition proposals carry that notice, and the platform never sets prices or terms.
What about the investment board?
It’s a noticeboard, deliberately. Businesses post what funding would let them do; locals register non-binding interest; the platform holds no money, takes no fee and recommends nothing. Anything real happens off-platform between the parties and their own advisers. We’d rather grow slowly than pretend to be a bank.
Newcastle AI Hub is also an engineering practice — audits, custom builds and training for businesses putting AI to work. The Commons is built by the same hands.
The consulting practiceNewcastle NSW · Built here, run here
Put your business
on the map.
Two minutes to list what you supply and what you need. The first proposal usually says everything the pitch can’t.