Mumblr, TFT NYC, SocioTechnica
This last week, I’ve been splitting my time across three major projects and made significant progress on each one. Which felt really good!
mumblr: a decentralized blogging platform
I’m still not quite sure what mumblr is. My initial goal was to learn about decentralized application architecture and get familiar with Fission’s WebNative library. At the same time, I wanted to build something real that I would actually use. It has successfully served both purposes!
On this week’s livestream, I updated the UX of “logging in” to reflect a stronger notion of “connecting to a user-owned resource.” I’m quite happy with how it turned out, including a nascent little “status” indicator. I’m hoping to further improve the UI on it.
Mumblr is now “good enough” for real use, which is exciting. I’m buying a domain (if you vote now on twitter, you can help me choose which one!), and writing up some instructions for how to use a custom domain to point to your website if you host it on IPFS.
Check out stream.jessmart.in to see my custom mumblr in action.
Tools for Thought Rocks NYC
After almost a year of online TFT Rocks meetings, we are having our first in-person event in NYC on Sunday, June 26th! I’m thrilled beyond words to get to hang out with folks in-person and think about thinking, together. I’m planning a “workshop style” meeting where we use some fun prompts to generate novel tools for thought. If you can make it to NYC, I’d love to meet you!
In any case, I’m planning to share all of my workshop materials, and perhaps others can use them as well.
Resourcing the (Software) Commons
Over the last few years, I’ve been thinking about the problem of sustainable ecosystems for innovation. How can one get paid to work on open source libraries? How could you make a career out of building software prototypes? How might we secure the resources to reboot the protocols that undergird the internet? Why do some types of software have well-understood business models (SaaS comes to mind) and others are chronically under-resourced?
Along with a good friend and support from Fission, I’ve started a new project to tackle some of those challenges. For now, we have a simple website up at SocioTechnica.org, including some working notes and an overview of the problem we’re trying to solve; feedback welcome! We’re also heading to Funding the Commons in NYC at the end of June to meet up with others interested in the same problem.
If this sounds like an interesting problem to you, please reach out! Part of what we’re doing right now is reading, talking with people, “mapping the space,” and running some small-scale funding experiments.