The results
LIVE AT TAVWS.ORGWhat it did.
The Association went live on 24 July 2026, under 90 days from signature, with under five minutes of planned, announced downtime at cutover. Everything below is measured from the live platform seven weeks later.
Member records carried across, with membership history preserved back to December 2019.
Academy meetings, regional chapters and global Assembly calls, with 67 active registrations across them.
Planned and announced. The community was never locked out of its own home for longer.
Who they are
The Association of Value Webs
A global collective of collaborative designers, facilitators, and sense-makers on a single mission: “a world where we can solve anything together.”
The Association exists to provide the professional infrastructure and neutral platform that lets this community excel at the art of working together, stewarding a craft built over 40+ years of models, research, and practice.
What the platform has to carry
One home for three pillars.
Academy
Mastering the craft
A living knowledge base, self-paced learning pathways, and a certification ladder from familiarity to mastery.
Assembly
Convening the community
Monthly sessions, a global meetup network, and the annual gathering that ends professional isolation.
Advocacy
Better decisions
Journals, white papers, and a public voice that legitimises the craft and shapes how the world decides.
Why a member portal is needed
A neutral steward can’t live on rented land.
The Association is being built in the open, and its whole promise is to be a trusted, neutral home for a global commons of knowledge, members, and standards. That promise is hard to keep on a consumer social platform you don’t control, where data, pricing, and the member experience belong to someone else.
- Stewardship tiers and member benefits need to be managed, not improvised.
- Decades of frameworks and research need a permanent, governed knowledge base.
- Academy learning, Assembly events, and Advocacy publishing belong under one roof.
The challenge
Renting the community on someone else’s platform.
- Locked into Mighty Networks, with limited control and deepening vendor lock-in.
- A fragmented member experience scattered across separate tools.
- Years of knowledge and learning materials at risk of being stranded.
- A hard, immovable launch deadline with no room to slip.
The approach
Move from renting to owning, without dropping the community.
Discover
Map the current platform, data, and what launch really required.
Architect
Design a self-owned platform built for control and longevity.
Migrate
Extract, clean, and restructure members, content, and archives.
Launch
Test, validate, cut over, and hand the keys to the team.
What I built
One home for the whole membership.
Adapting mid-flight
A leaner stack, fully in their hands.
Partway in, we re-architected onto a simpler, self-owned setup: their own server, self-hosted code, and integrated payments. Fewer moving parts, lower long-term cost, and no platform landlord between The Association and its members.
The outcome
They own their platform, and their future.
- One unified home for the entire community.
- Members manage their own access and payments.
- A craft’s worth of knowledge preserved and migrated.
- No vendor lock-in. The platform is theirs to keep.
Let’s talk
Got a platform you’ve outgrown?
I help associations and teams move off rented tools and onto systems they own, calmly, and on deadline.