In one sentence

Stray Cats is an open-source, non-profit idea about how the world could remember the cats that nobody owns.

Listen to the idea

A 90-second introduction to the project, if you’d rather listen than read. It was made with Google’s NotebookLM from the pages on this site, so the two voices are AI-generated.

Speed
Giving Stray Cats a Permanent History, a brief audio overview (1½ minutes)

For the full deep dive (38 minutes), see The Building Blocks.

Dedication

This project is dedicated to Saibo, my cat of sixteen years, who came with me to Mexico and died here in September 2026.

Where it comes from

I’m living for a while in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, looking after a house full of cats: some pets, some strays, some of unknown origin. I pay for their food and sometimes their vet care. I’ve learned their names and stories from the people who were here before me, and I pass them on to whoever arrives next. I keep an Instagram account, @mimos_cat_sanctuary, to show off their personalities.

It works. But everything I know lives in my head and on my phone, and when I leave, it leaves with me. Read the full story →

The core idea

What if every cat could have:

  • an identity that doesn’t depend on one name, place or owner
  • a history built up from every human encounter
  • a network of people who care about it, who can find each other and pass the history on
  • a way in that’s a pleasure: meeting a cat takes one photo, and every meeting adds a little to its story (more)

What this site is

A notebook kept in public. Each story starts with something real and follows the question it raises. The ideas pages collect the concepts and open questions that come out of them.

What it isn’t (yet)

An app. There’s no code, no product plan and no business model, on purpose. Right now the job is to understand the problem.

Principles

  • Open source. Ideas, designs and eventually code are public.
  • Non-profit. No ads, no selling data. Ever.
  • The record belongs to the cat, not to any caretaker or platform.
  • Owned, not rented. This is a site of its own, not a page on Facebook or another social network.
  • Animal welfare and privacy first.
  • Cats first. Dogs later (they’re just a different type of cat).
  • Meeting, not owning. People meet cats here; no one owns or claims them.
  • Fun is the doorway, not the destination. Meeting a cat should be a pleasure, but every feature exists for the cat’s benefit and to help the people who care for it.
  • No popularity contests. No rankings and no exact locations. Attention can put a cat at risk.