CIRCUS foundation was formed in 1997 by Charles Armstrong as a platform for experimental projects investigating the transformative role of digital technologies on society. Projects are entirely self-contained and the foundation has no employees. Since 2007 the foundation’s primary focus has been on internet-era governance at multiple scales. The Themis project is examining innovation in democratic systems whilst the One Click Orgs project is looking at corporate  structures.

The foundation’s Trampoline project started as an ethnographic study into emergent collaborative behaviour, which spawned an experiment to mimic this behaviour by analysing electronic communication patterns. In 2003 the project was spun out to form the software business Trampoline Systems which in 2009 was identified by Red Herring as one of the world’s top 100 privately-held technology businesses.

The foundation can be contacted at open [at] CIRCUS-foundation [dot] org