Malleable systems collective

This catalog highlights projects, people, groups, research, discussions, and other initiatives in the malleable software community. It is our hope that bringing more awareness to these efforts will lead to greater collaboration and better systems for us all that support the essential principles of malleability.

Community section & Principles outline copied from the website

Comparing with DWeb Principles is interesting.

Community

The Malleable Systems Collective is a community space that catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power via several essential principles detailed below.

For all of these principles, it is not yet clear how to best achieve them, and there are sure to be many possible solutions with different tradeoffs. We’ll need to experiment as community with various approaches. The collective’s primary goal is to report on such efforts and raise awareness of work in these directions.

Principles

1. Easy to change

Software must be as easy to change as it is to use it.¹

2. Arbitrary recombination and reuse

All layers, from the user interface through functionality to the data within, must support arbitrary recombination and reuse in new environments.

3. Open-ended potential

Tools should strive to be easy to begin working with but still have lots of open-ended potential.

4. Retain ownership and control

People of all experience levels must be able to retain ownership and control.

5. Freely sharable

_Recombined workflows and experiences must be freely sharable with others.²

6. Modifying in the context of use

_Modifying a system should happen in the context of use, rather than through some separate development toolchain and skill set.³

7. Thoughtfully crafted

Computing should be a thoughtfully crafted, fun, and empowering experience.

Modern computing is a jungle of arcane, inscrutable tools that throw up walls of difficult to parse errors that slowly chip away at your enjoyment of the creative work of building something new. While today much of this is only seen by software developers, it does sometimes leak through, such as when raw error messages are displayed.

If we are to have any hope of giving all people the same power over computers currently accessible only to experts, we must get rid of these obstacles by refining our tools so that we can focus more on the actual goal, which should make computing more fun and accessible to all.

Revolution

Most contemporary applications fail to meet all of these principles, leaving us with no pathway towards improvement. The only option is to plead with the app developer and hope they will deign to grant your request. As the importance of computing in everyday life grows with each passing year, we must fight for these values to ensure the power of computing is evenly distributed.

We hope you agree this is a revolution worth fighting for.