Open Work

Open drafts

Art by Darija Medic

These are works in progress about which I very much welcome feedback—just please don’t quote from or cite them until they’re published.

Open projects

These are ongoing projects that support research and organizing efforts.

  • CommunityRule – a governance toolkit for great communities
  • Modpol – a governance system prototype for the multiplayer game Minetest
  • Monopoly Ledger – an interface for rule modifications in Monopoly

Open notebooks

These are places where I gather notes from ongoing projects. They may or may not be useful to anyone else.

  • School – Syllabi and other course materials
  • Zotero – Bibliographic repository

Open software

I see using free, libre, open-source software as an integral part of how I do the work of contributing to the knowledge commons. These are some of the tools and communities that I work with:

  • Cloudron – Manages the self-hosted cloud tools we run at the Media Enterprise Design Lab (not entirely open source)
  • DokuWiki – A simple wiki platform based on flat text files, which I use for my syllabus repository
  • Emacs – My main writing environment, a programmable terminal-based text editor first developed in 1976
  • Jitsi – Web-based audio/video conference software
  • LibreOffice – When it’s necessary to use a full-featured word processor, this program can interact with a wide variety of formats
  • Manjaro – Linux-based operating system that makes the Arch family accessible for civilians
  • Markdown – A markup language for writing documents in plain text, capable of exporting to a bewildering range of formats with Pandoc
  • Mastodon – My go-to social network, which I access through Social.coop
  • May First Movement Technology – Social-justice oriented web hosting and cloud services through a member-governed cooperative
  • Mozilla – Developer of such essential tools as Firefox and Thunderbird
  • Nextcloud – A cloud-services platform that keeps you in control of your data
  • Pandoc – Document conversion tool (markdown -> everything) created by a philosophy professor
  • Piwik – Self-hosted website analytics
  • Reveal.js – Pretty HTML slides
  • Riseup.net – Online communication tools for people and groups working on social change
  • System76 – A Denver-based manufacturer of open-hardware, Linux-based computers and the Pop!_OS operating system
  • Wallabag – A self-hosted read-it-later platform with accompanying smartphone apps
  • WordPress – The blogging platform that, thanks to a vast developer community, can now do pretty much anything else
  • Xfce – Lightweight desktop environment for GNU/Linux
  • Zotero – Essential bibliography manager that works well with Pandoc

For more on my rationale, see this interview with LinuxRig.com and this essay for The New Republic.