I need to write more extensively about two things that I for now want to link / bookmark here, both coming from Neil Mather.

One is local-first software, an article by Ink and Switch:

In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.

This resonates with me on two frequencies, one the notion that tools need to be useful on their own, and more useful when connected across instances, the other that information strategies and agency in my mind correlate with social distance.

The second thing is Neil’s reference to Gevulot. At IndieWebCamp Utrecht one session took place around oversharing and conditional sharing. Gevulot is a device that allows for very precise contextual sharing, in the SF trilogy The Quantum Thief by Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi (previously mentioned in this blog).

Gevulot is a form of privacy practised in the Oubliette. It involved complex cryptography and the exchange of public and private keys, to ensure that individuals only shared that information or sensory data that they wished to. Gevulot was disabled in agoras.

This resonates again with information strategies and the role of social distance, but also with how I think that our tools need to align with how we humans actually interact such as flexibly and fluently switching between different levels of disclosure for different aspects of our lives in conversation with someone. That link to a posting on what I’d like my tools to do is from 2006, and my description of a ideal reader more recently is still consistent with it over a decade later (albeit from the reading perspective, not the sharing perspective). Gevulot from now is definitely the shorthand I will use for these type of explorations.