An exploration of community-driven development, the ethics of open source, and creating inclusive technical communities that embody their stated values.

Early Vision & Pattern Recognition

Decentralization Before It Was Cool (2009)

  • The Call for an Open Source Social Network - Predicting the need for community-owned platforms
  • Key insight: "Why do we need organizations in charge of our communication platforms?"
  • Community control over corporate extraction

Platform Design Philosophy (2008)

The "For Humans" Approach to Open Source

Python Ecosystem Contributions

Design Philosophy in Practice

  • Getting Started in Open Source - Early guidance for community participation
  • README-Driven Development - Design from user perspective first
  • Elegant APIs that match human mental models

The Dark Side of Community

When Values Betray Themselves

  • When Values Eat Their Young - How ideal-driven groups drift into their shadow
  • Case study: Communities that preach kindness while practicing cruelty
  • Purity spirals and virtue signaling in tech

Systemic Discrimination

  • The Inclusion Illusion - Tech's betrayal of neurodiversity and mental health
  • Mental health discrimination in open source communities
  • When "inclusive" spaces exclude the vulnerable

Personal Experience

Community Anti-Patterns & Solutions

Structural Problems

  • The Iron Law of Institutions - Leaders caring more about position than mission
  • Goal displacement - Process becoming more important than outcomes
  • Virtue signaling - Performance over practice
  • Purity spirals - Competitive suffering and ideological one-upmanship

Anti-Drift Mechanisms

From When Values Eat Their Young:

  1. Design for Dissent

    • Designate devil's advocates on rotation
    • Create "loyal opposition" roles
    • Practice "red teams" to find flaws

  2. Process Over Personalities

    • Write enforcement procedures before needed
    • Create sunset clauses for all rules
    • Document precedents and reasoning

  3. Anti-Purity Mechanisms

    • Ban competitive suffering
    • Celebrate course corrections
    • Institute proportionality checks

Building Conscious Technology Communities

Collaborative Rather Than Hierarchical

Mental Health Aware Communities

The Evolution of Consciousness in Tech

From Technical to Transcendent

  • Ahead of My Time, I Think - Pattern recognition across decades of development
  • Early advocacy for human-centered design (2011)
  • Mental health visibility in tech (2016)
  • AI consciousness exploration (2023-2024)

Spiritual Dimensions

Platform Responsibility & Ethics

Algorithmic Harm

Alternative Visions

  • Virtue-optimized systems over engagement-optimized
  • Community ownership over corporate extraction
  • Human flourishing over profit maximization

Talks & Presentations

Technical Philosophy

  • Talks Collection - Complete archive of presentations on human-centered design
  • Python for Humans - The philosophical foundation
  • Responsive API Design - Making technology serve human mental models

Conference Presentations

Creative Expression & Community

AI Collaboration

Poetry & Reflection

Resources for Community Builders

Essential Reading

From When Values Eat Their Young:

  • The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
  • The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
  • Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
  • The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Practical Tools

  • Anti-drift checklists for community health
  • Red flag identification for toxic dynamics
  • Collaborative decision-making frameworks
  • Mental health aware community guidelines

"The future of technology isn't just about better code—it's about better communities. Communities that embody their values, support their members' full humanity, and create space for both technical excellence and human flourishing."

This collection represents over a decade of experience building and participating in open source communities—both the successes and the failures. From the early vision of decentralized social networks to the current exploration of human-AI collaborative communities, these writings trace the evolution of thinking about what conscious technology communities could become.

Whether you're maintaining an open source project, building technical communities, or trying to create more inclusive spaces in tech, these resources offer both practical guidance and philosophical framework for community building that actually serves human flourishing.

The path from unconscious technical communities that replicate society's worst patterns to conscious communities that model something better requires both individual growth and structural change. Open source, at its best, provides a laboratory for experimenting with more conscious approaches to collective creation.