Collective digest — 2020

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.

Catalog

In the early days of the collective site (March 2020, which feels like several years ago), there were 10 related works listed in our catalog. With the additional suggestions and curation of our community, we’re now up to 19 works in the catalog, with 27 further suggestions waiting for curation! Thanks to everyone for their contributions.

The new additions to the catalog include:

• HyperCard (Bill Atkinson, Dan Winkler, HyperCard team at Apple)
• Glamorous Toolkit (feenk)
• User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons (Allan MacLean, Kathleen Carter, Lennart Lövstrand, Thomas Moran)
• A Future of Programming (Stefan Lesser)

Matrix

When we first set up this site, it wasn’t clear which communication styles and channels would see the most use. Looking back over the first year, our Matrix room has by far seen the most activity among the community!

Here’s a sampling of interesting conversation topics from our room in 2020:

• Living in the stone age
• Security, capabilities
• UI customisation, tearing down walls between apps
• Avoiding silos, core web concepts
• TiddlyWiki, local-first data storage
• The path ahead, many different experiments needed
• Extracting frames out of apps
• Challenges of funding open software
• Static and gradual typing for modules
• Self, Smalltalk
• Language design, gradual typing
• Moving programs across devices
• Window management
• Project Cambria, lenses
• Related podcasts
• Add-on systems
• Knowledge management tools
• Decentralised authentication
• Extensibility, resource sandboxing, permission management

Related communities

The collective’s goals and dreams intersect with some other communities, which we encourage you to check out:

• Thinking Tools: rethinking how we create, share and organise knowledge
• Future of Coding: sharing many different projects and possible futures of more humane computing

Looking ahead

In the year ahead, we hope the collective will continue to grow and take on a more active experimentation role as some of us try out various ideas we’ve discussed. In particular, we’re hoping to have more projects and experiments shared here on the site as people try out various approaches to extensibility and user empowerment. As always, please do contact us if there’s something you’d like to share with the collective. I’m planning to share my own efforts here, and perhaps that will encourage others to do the same.

2020 was quite a draining year, and I found it hard to have energy for new efforts. I imagine many people may have gone through something similar. I’ve got big plans for 2021, and I bet many of you do as well. I hope the world state will allow us all to follow through on our dreams of malleability in the new year.