Software is not soft. We want softer software!
Why is the accepted software paradigm to separate humans into two categories: the programmer and the user?
One reason is that software is still so difficult to modify that even programmers have a hard time, leaving the user completely hopeless!
Users exist in a disempowered and (even more frequently today) often disenfranchised position. Because power structures exist in software just as they do in society, the choice to build and distribute software through apps packaged for the market reinforces and hardens this unfortunate imposition on the user and compounds many of the imbalances we see in society today. Computing is too transformational a medium to relegate to the limited domain of the app.
We are a coalition of researchers, designers, educators and builders working toward a new paradigm of computing that is more malleable, transparent, and user-empowering. We seek not only to make computing as thoughtfully crafted and as easy to change as it is to use, but to leverage that softness of software to recenter the user as the locus of ownership over their digital lives. This is super fun and very ethical! Imagine all the amazing forms of software when billions more people are able to effect change over their computing medium and build on each others ideas.