We are starting weekly online get togethers to explore and push the boundaries of interactive personal computing. If you are interested in joining us, please sign up for the mailing list:
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/as-we-may-thunk
Historic computing systems like NLS/Augment, Smalltalk, and Lisp Machines featured interactive, programmable environments that mixed information organization and software development. Modern computing feels like it has lost that spirit.
These kinds of integrated systems for interactive programming, information organization, and collaboration (which should be intimately related) could be invented anew using what we've learned from modern research in programming languages, networking, cryptography, etc.
We're interested in questions like:
To explore these ideas, and directly experiment with new kinds of online collaboration, we are starting weekly online get togethers. We invite others interested in these topics to join us. These online get togethers will include discussion of ideas, exploration of current and past computing systems, demos of software and languages, guests, and, most critically, collaborative hacking to build prototypes of new solutions in this area.
Our 3-hour kickoff will be Tuesday, October 13, at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific. Although our first get together will probably use Google Hangouts, it is our explicit goal to move to better collaboration technology as soon as possible, ideally tools designed and implemented by our group.
More details, including the link to the kickoff meeting, will be posted to the mailing list:
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/as-we-may-thunk
Hope you will join us!
-- Michael Ballantyne and Will Byrd