Over on the community forum, we’re trying out a new activity called a “challenge problem” where we focus on a theme for several months through submissions that may take various different forms. It’s like a hybrid between a virtual workshop and a game jam. For our first challenge problem, the theme is “fearless extensibility”. Why “fearless”…? Allowing extension authors complete freedom to change all aspects of a system may seem like a malleable path to take, but it carries with it maintenance and security headaches.

2023 is drawing to a close, so it’s time for our annual round-up of collective activities for the past year!

Do you have malleable ideas or projects you’d like to discuss, but you’ve been wishing there were a more structured medium for longer conversations than just the Matrix room? Try out our new community forum! 🎉 Along with a forum-style interface for general discussion, there’s also special support for our catalog, which is now easily editable via wiki-style posts on the forum. The Matrix room will continue to live on in parallel with the forum.

2022 wobbled it’s way through some version of normality, with a bit more energy than recent years, but there’s still a lot going wrong as well… Let’s jump into this 2022 digest of collective activity and reflect on our conversations over the past year.

2021 is drawing to close… I think many of us were hoping it would be a better year than 2020, but sadly it did not play out that way as the pandemic continues to rage. As with last year, let’s jump into this 2021 digest of collective activity and try to forget the general madness of the world for at least a few moments.

2020 is almost over… finally! It’s been the longest and saddest year in recent memory due to the global pandemic. I hope you and your family are staying safe at home. Let’s jump into this 2020 digest of collective activity and try to forget the general madness of the world for at least a few moments.

Emacs is probably the most successful malleable system in the history of computing. What can we learn from it for designing the malleable systems of the future?

Geoffrey Litt and Daniel Jackson have been working on Wildcard, which enables customising websites via one of the most popular programming models in existence today: the spreadsheet. Wildcard’s sheet is bidirectionally linked to the site content, so that changes and also user additions to the sheet are reflected back in the site’s UI. Similarly, if the site content changes, the sheet is updated as well.

Welcome to the Malleable Systems Collective, a community space for those interested in redefining our relationship with software by dismantling the boundaries of contemporary applications. If you haven’t already, read through the collective’s mission to get an idea of the revolution we’re working towards. While we believe this mission is achievable, it will likely take many years and the work of many people to achieve. Quite a few of the ideas that our mission is built around have been percolating for decades already.