One of the goals of the Future of Coding is to foster collaboration. Many of us are working on projects to bring about some vision of futuristic computing. Others don’t have a project of their own but would still like to contribute. There are even a few folks independently working on projects for the community itself. The resources on this page will help all our members combine their efforts.
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Are you working on a project that represents your vision for the future of computing? Do you want contributions from our community members? Get in touch, and we will list it here. Please provide the name of your project, a link to any relevant pages, and what sorts of contribution you would appreciate.
Teliva is an experiment in end-user programming, a platform for little text-mode apps that can be edited right from within the platform. The goal: to be able to use an open-source program, get an idea for a simple tweak, open it up, orient yourself, and make the change you visualized – all in a single afternoon. It’s still highly experimental, and welcomes contributions of all kinds from all skill levels. In the spirit of end-user programming, try it out for yourself, suggest apps you’d want to use. The process of building and using apps will naturally give you a better sense of where best to contribute.
Future of Coding Website — Yes, the website itself is a project that welcomes contributions. If you’d like to add information, fix errors, or make improvements (especially to the visual design), talk to @ivanreese in the Slack or open a PR.
If you’d like to contribute to a project, get in touch and we will list you here. Please provide your name, any relevant links, and what skills you have to offer.
https://www.github.com/futureofcoding
There is a Future of Coding Github organization. If you would like to host your FoC project under the community banner, or if you are working on a project for the community itself, you are welcome to use this organization. Get in touch to ask for an invite.
This is a spreadsheet listing Future of Coding projects in and around the community. It’s not an exhaustive listing, but it does provide an interesting starting point to see who here is working on what, plus a few projects elsewhere that might be of interest to our members. If you’re looking for a project to contribute to, this is one place to explore your options. If you are working on a project, you may edit the spreadsheet to add your project (please stick to the existing format).
There are a handful of ongoing projects by and for the community, and many more that could be undertaken. They are collected here for reference. If you have an initiative you’d like to undertake on behalf of the community, just say so and we’ll support it however we can.
Local hero Mariano Guerra (of Instadeq fame) publishes a weekly newsletter for the community, collecting links and discussions from the Slack. Given that Slack isn’t especially good for permalinks, he also built a cool history search tool.
The history search tool is on Github. I’m not positive, but I believe contributions are welcome.
There have been a small handful of virtual and in-person events under the community banner. We’ve workshopped format ideas for new events, but haven’t yet found something with strong resonance. If someone here is interested in organizing a virtual meetup, conference, demo day, or other avenue for coming-together, the banner is yours to take up.
We need a wiki or zettelkasten, a place to organize the links and projects and ideas amassed during our Slack discussions. We need a place to house curations — of slices of the history of computing, of speculative futures, of people working to bring it about.
There’s a small group within community designing a “metazettel”. They’re working in private, to keep the amount of noise around their project to a minimum. The hope is that they’ll create something that we will be able to use, and since it comes from within the community, we’ll be able to mold it to suit our needs.
If that project doesn’t pan out, we’ll set up an existing wiki or similar collaborative knowledge system at the start of 2021.
When we eventually have a knowledgebase, and ideally a sponsor for the community itself, one type of project that really ought to happen is curation or cultural anthropology of computer-futurism. In particular, we should produce histories of futurist computing by underrepresented people (women, BIPOC in North America, non-Americans / western Europeans, etc.), preferably curated by people from the same underrepresented backgrounds — and we should pay them to do this work.