Future of Text

Dear Frode and company,

What am I working on?

I am building Effective.af (code): secure task management software with a bevy of unique features, designed to enable large numbers of participants and projects to join forces – especially activists trying to change the world.

I imagine a world in which anyone, anywhere can create a highly productive, volunteer-driven, 100-person organization – in 1 hour.

Its features and benefits are centered around making groups of humans radically more effective and secure:

• Speed, Coordination, & Semi-automation => Global Superorganism
• Assign tasks from one project to another project
• Auto-assign tasks to users by skill set (coming soon)
• Self-healing: auto-reassign idle tasks to users with the appropriate skill set (coming soon)
• Assign tasks to always-on automated chat bots (coming soon)
• Mass invite users by skill set (coming soon)
• Auto-estimated due dates for tasks whose parent tasks (or above) have been given a due date
• Structure & Efficiency
• Each project contains a hierarchy of tasks
  • Easily express which tasks depend upon others
• Each task has its own end-to-end encrypted chat
  room for discussing or getting help with that task
  • Attach files and links to tasks (coming soon)
• Per-user unified task list, thus answering the most critical question that task management software answer, and one that basically never is: “what should I work on right now?”
• Security, Privacy, & Anonymity
• End-to-end encrypted tasks (coming soon)
• Tor integration by default; access server as an Onion Service
• Ability to invite people not yet on the system via URL without them needing to specify their email to join
• Open source & self-hostable

How do we want to collaborate?

1. Orientation via demo | For starters, Duke and I were thinking that it would be great for our next meeting to give each participant the opportunity to spend 1-3 minutes doing a very quick demo of what they’re building. Now that I think about it, after this next meeting it would also be cool to have each subsequent meeting’s new people perform such a demo for us. All of this will help make it clearer which people in particular should be talking to/collaboritng with the demoer.

2. Extra-meeting working groups | Outside of the existing Tuesday meetings, which I suppose can be focused on on-boarding new people, the aforementioned very-brief demos, and reporting relevant project progress to one another, we should also have more serious work-oriented sessions of some sort, perhaps once a week. Addition specifics will depend on the nature of the integration, so let us first answer “what do we want to achieve?” – specifically what we want to present in November – then answer “how should we work together to achieve X?”

(In general, if you’re building something exciting and new, send me a link to your demo or app! I am happy to try it out and give you feedback, provided that I can run it on Linux, either natively or in a web browser.)

What do we want to achieve?

Some combination of the following:

1. Agreement upon open specs that enable cross-app integrations or interactions of various sorts could be hugely valuable. If the debates become too trivial or laborious, I say we ask Frode to make the final decision as to what each spec says.

2. If #1 enables us to, say, pass JSON between apps in order to trigger various behavior, I am interested in building functionality exposed as APIs and/or chat bots that is meant to augment various tools relevant to the future of text and beyond.

3. Let’s do #1 and #2 so that we have something epic to demo for this year’s Future of Text Symposium. We should figure out what we want this to be as soon as possible, and we should each do a gut check to make sure it’s something we are sufficiently serious about and excited about the goal we set!