PeerDoc is a collaborative real-time rich-text editor with undo/redo, cursor tracking, inline comments, permissions/sharing control over documents, a change history. Things you would expect from a modern collaborative editor on the web.

But the main difference is that it combines two types of collaboration:

• real-time collaboration between collaborators on the draft of the document (push-based collaboration)
• fork and merge request style of collaboration with others, allowing collaboration to scale beyond a small group of collaborators (pull-based collaboration)

Keep reading

With recent NSA surveillance revelations many in the tech community started asking again for more decentralization and encryption of our Internet tools and services. We should build technologies which allow us to minimize trust and dependencies on others. Tools which allow each of us to self-protect ourselves. A new wave of such tools is emerging and while I agree that it is good that we have such tools, the question is if we want to live in such a society. In which society you would like to live? In society which is build around not trusting anyone. Or in society where you can trust your fellow beings and where we handle rare exceptions, misuses of trust?

Keep reading

I am still waiting for somebody to create a programming framework where user could edit the program itself while it is running. Each user interface element would contain an “edit” button and by clicking it you would get source code editor for all code related to that element. Edit it, try it temporary, click save, and you have a new version of the program.

Keep reading

I am publishing a longer document describing one my idea of a massive online collaborative decision-making system. I worked on this idea last year, but for now I put it on hold focusing on other projects. Still, I think there is some value in sharing it.

Keep reading

Is open source possible because of the general lack of programmers so we do not even need an union to be able to require from our employers perks? Employers do not have much space to negotiate if they want to do their businesses. As workers we are then so lazy that we rather cooperate with others from other companies then (re)do all their work ourselves. In which other industry you can say to the boss that you do not feel to do the mundane task which was already done by somebody else and you would rather just work together with that colleague from the other company and let the boss imagine some other business model instead?