The Mutual Computing Project

This is a project to mutually envision and develop a mutual computing paradigm. one that reflects, relies on, and strengthens our connections with others.

When we speak of mutuality here, we refer to the type of information and resource sharing that happens between friends. Their relationship provides context to the information and assurance to the resource. The information and resources flow both ways - it is mutual. This is not an original observation, but our computer paradigms by and large ignore it, or seek to exploit it for the benefit of centralized platforms.

We seek to develop tools within a paradigm that helps us share resources along those connections. Networks that makes running fiber to and between our neighbours' houses and storage that make hosting encrypted backups for our friends on other continents into straight-forward projects. Protocols that mean when I message my partner in the other room, that message doesn't leave the house, much less require a data center five hundred kilometers away. Software that realizes collaborative interaction with the same code, drawing, design, soundscape, or anything else, even when we're not at the same computer, on the same continent, and have only an intermittent connection to the Internet.

To do that we need paradigms for storage, networking, interaction, and thus computing generally that support that mutuality. Then we can devise the interchange formats and protocols and eventually software and hardware, but we need to understand the paradigms first, lest we recreate the alternately centralizing and isolating world we already have.

This Wiki/Forum

This wiki is part of a fossil repository collects ideas, thoughts, plans, and perhaps some day software and hardware for mutual computing. Fossil approximates some aspects of mutual computing, though it falls far short of the vision in many ways. You can clone the repository from this server, edit it to create your own version, get updates from this server, and host your own copy of it.

The mutual part is a bit more complicated though. Either this servers operator needs to set up pulling changes from your server (which means hosting it and them seeing it), or you need an account on this server (which usually means knowing the operator). Fossil also doesn't make configuring all that especially easy, but such is the state of mutual software.