Social coding commons | Blog

Shared responsible social web ownership

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This post is written in response to discussions in the Social experience design chatroom that ponder the question whether we must develop fediverse regardless of whether bad actors also benefit from our work.

Not doing something that would empower humanity because it would also “benefit authoritarians” is where the issue is. I believe the saying is “cutting off the nose to spite the face”.

The general uses benefit everyone, in the same way universal healthcare or access to clean water also benefits everyone. yes, even the people who don’t need it.

What are we cocreating together?

That our work “empowers humanity” is an assumption that the net result of its impact on society is positive, and I don’t know if this holds true in how we currently evolve the fediverse. Our devices are owned by Big Tech. If we build superpowerful decentralized software that falls in the hands of Big Tech we may be worse off. What we don’t have today in most of the world are Big Tech “super apps” that are required to be used by everyone to even participate in society. Like you have AliPay and WeChat in China, where cash payments have all but disappeared. We trend in the direction of composable applications that form super apps. If we build tech innovations we cannot own, we only help those who would dominate us. Going forward with best intentions, we nonetheless prepare the way to our own domination and further submission to Big Tech and its owner class. Technology innovation by itself does not mean progress for humanity.

It is a tough dilemma, and almost a paradox. This upside, the thing that “empowers humanity” is certainly there. At the same time we develop it under the conditions of hypercapitalism where we are almost certainly going to lose control over it, with our current approach. Must we build the atom bomb, before others do it? Or even just carbon-neutral nuclear power technologies? Not a really good analogy, but it highlights a similar difficulty in getting desirable outcomes.

The quest to “empower humanity” is valiant. But what exactly does this entail? The fediverse is decidedly NOT first and foremost a project aimed to empower humanity. That is only what a handful of pioneers want the fediverse to achieve. Meanwhile the person next to you is just building a technology platform that’ll earn them big bucks, and the Big Tech giants are keeping an eye on things to not become a threat to them and what they can usefully adopt. A corporate takeover looms, triggered by growing commercial interest. Fediverse very much evolves mostly in the technosphere. It is all tech talk all over the place, and much less “empower humanity” strategic planning and well-coordinated action. If empowering humanity was the overarching goal then much more attention would need to be placed on “where do we end up with all of this?”, and talk about the vision of the future social web from the perspective of the sociosphere. There’s hardly any of that today.

Ben Werdmuller just wrote Growing the open social web and starts off with the important question “why do we want to grow the open social web, and for whom?” and then continues to saying that we need shared ownership. The article says all the right things, and I can’t agree more with it, but at the same time it only hints at the desired outcome but does not yet outline the solution, and the path towards it. How do we guarantee we build things having what we call “ownership”, where this new tech isn’t slapped from our hands by the next wave of Big Tech products?

Responsible healthy evolution

Inclusion, equity, and shared ownership. That might be on the sticky note of the SX solution design at the start. Yes, open technologies. Yes, protocol standards. To a degree. No, proliferation to Big Tech. Note that the ownership part becomes more important than the “open” part. The ownership requirements should drive the openness of the technology. You can compare with the Russian war on Ukraine, where you wouldn’t want open trenches laid out according to all-accessible protocols. That basically guarantees you lose the war.

On the development side Social experience design via “working in commons” provides a means for inclusive cocreation of a healthy technology base that is able to evolve and driven by stakeholder needs. As for the solutions-side, the social experiences being delivered, care should be taken that these solutions do not fit the needs of Big Tech, who are not a stakeholder in our solution designs. So when does Big Tech become interested in what we do? Roughly in two places. When they can earn money and power, and when they risk losing it. Our success inevitably means they’ll lose, so it is clear they will join a fight full-on when our solutions become influential enough.

Then for starters up to the point where that happens we can discourage their technology adoption, their entry in the field, while we gain strength, mature the technology base, and position ourselves for the fight to come. For years I have been frustrated about the lack of progress in fediverse open technologies and standards, complaining about the development approach that ever increases protocol decay and tech debt, making interop harder and not easier. But if anything it has bought us time, so we can gather more numbers and become better organized and on the basis of grassroots dynamics that play to our strengths. Healthy culture needs to be nurtured and fostered, and this is by no means easy. The latest fediverse vs. bluesky megathread I bumped into yesterday shows this all too well.

The amount of social protocols that are used and how they interact, are all technical concerns, and tech should not have the prevailing focus if the goal is to “empower humanity”. Tech only serves. Where do we want to be in the future, and what needs must we address? Those are social, if not societal questions. We must solve wicked problems.

Ownership requires shared concerted action

From a pure technological perspective we can imagine technologies that aren’t attractive and useful to Big Tech and other corporate exploitative actors. Build systems that aren’t profitable enough, and do not align with their hyperscale business models which are based on surveillance capitalism, unfair market domination, and stubborn network effects. Find the weaknesses of Big Tech and pounce on them. Work around hypercapitalist models to avoid Conway’s Law from creeping in our solution design. We can apply personal social networking to tailor solutions exactly to our day-to-day needs. We all carry powerful computers in our pockets that are certainly able to support our online and offline social networking activities. We need not design for scale. Design for ease of use and accessibility where small individuals can eek out a living. And where there isn’t the profitability that makes a Big Tech giant take an interest and jump in the fray.

Our biggest strength however, is a dormant one. It is the power of numbers of the grassroots movement when it is ignited and sparks into concerted action. This strength might be our biggest weakness at the same time, as we seem unable to tap into this power. Unable to ignite the commons. While we individually all do the right things, there is a lack of shared direction, common goals, and coordination. And where we try to organize at scale, we do let Conway’s Law apply by applying “herding of cats” top-down governance models that are not fit for large grassroots movements. These models only work in smaller organizational settings, with clear audience and well-bounded scopes.

How do we ignite the commons?

It is this wicked problem and highly fascinating challenge that is at the heart of Social coding commons and Social experience design. SX focuses on the healthy evolution of entire technology ecosystems in grassroots environments on the basis of well-stated needs and objectives. SX recognizes that the concerted action and coordination that is needed, cannot be enforced. They are emergent forces that can only be facilitated, encouraged, and thereby reinforced. The SX research field of Hedonic peer production is the mechanism by which this happens. It is based on the notion of self-interest and maximising the incentives for people to participate and collaborate in order to better address personal needs.

Elaborating Social experience design is an adventure quest. There are ups and downs, frustrations and controversies, but our Social web is maturing, gaining resiliency all the time, enriching its culture. This takes time. Slow growth is a boon, it is only natural, and evolution is an organic process. Igniting our commons is the point where our Social web allows people to truly blossom and society to bloom.

Our revolution is Evolution! All it takes is for everyone who gives a dime, to contribute their 2 cents. And then reap the rewards.

Discuss this article on our Social coding commons forum, in the Social experience design chatroom, or react to my post on the fediverse.

For some inspiring videos on the future of the Social web I recommend watching Darius Kazemi’s Q&A Keynote talk “Let’s play and win our own game” given at the 2019 ActivityPub Conference in Prague. And very recently the urgent talk by Michiel Leenaars, the director of NLnet, at FOSDEM 2026 titled “FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI” which addresses the many challenges we face today, and new threats to FOSS (and the social web) that is posed by the unprecedented and highly disruptive rise of AI technologies. NLnet is a major supporter of healthy fediverse evolution, and provided EU NGI funding and services to well over 86 commons based R&D initiatives.

How We Reimagine the Social Web

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome social coder. Ahead of you lies an adventure. To explore with others innovative new ways to collaborate and create value together. We focus on the delivery of Sustainable open social systems — elevating FOSS projects to become Sustainable open social systems, i.e. SOSS initiatives — that provide a means for people to earn a living in free software development and in the areas where they are most passionate. This introduction provides an overview of our movement, and some of its innovative aspects.

Social coding commons
- Chaordic organization
Social experience design
Sustainable open social systems
How to get involved?
- Commons participation
- About this commons

While offering home to active practitioners with concrete services that are developed and evolved collectively, Social coding commons dedicates to finding solutions to a number of wicked problems that ail grassroots movements, particularly in innovative technology areas. Most prominently these wicked problems relate to ..

Sustainability Inability to steer social web technology innovation towards responsible adoption and introduction in society.
Cooperation Inability to collaborate at scale and choreograph overlapping activities so they reinforce each other synergetically.
Participation Inability to cocreate inclusive solutions that serve the needs of all their stakeholders, and of society as a whole.

Social coding commons follows a methodical approach to commons based development, called Social experience design that combines applied research and continuous self-servicing (dogfooding) of good practices and lessons-learned. The research areas are ..

Personal social networking Personal vantage point and inter-personal relationships are model for how we want live our lives.
Hedonic peer production Accept the role of self-interest to incentivise collaboration to occur on a basis of intrinsic motivation.
Sustainable open social systems Cocreate harmonious social networking solutions that are self-sustainable as they to evolve.

Chaordic organization

A movement in the truest form of the word, Social coding commons either progresses, when proactive participants contribute value by their collaboration, or pauses in anticipation of new participants to become active in a particular area that has their interest. Based on a new organizational formula of working in commons, which is also a research area, Social coding commons grows organically as a new type of chaordic organization. Among the objectives is the gradual emergence of an affiliation network that is able to dedicate to responsible evolution and custodianship of social web technologies.

“Ask not what you can do for the commons, but what the commons can do for you.”

— First principle of Hedonic peer production.

The chaordic commons is a network infrastructure created to support P2P-like initiatives, created by Dee Hock, the former chairman of Visa International and author of The Chaordic Age. Here are the principles behind the movement:

Based on clarity of shared purpose and principles
Self-organizing and self-governing in whole and in part
Exist primarily to enable their constituent parts
Powered from the periphery, unified from the core
Durable in purpose and principle, malleable in form and function
Equitably distribute power, rights, responsibility, and rewards
Harmoniously combine cooperation and competition
Learn, adapt and innovate in ever-expanding cycles
Compatible with the human spirit and the biosphere
Liberate and amplify ingenuity, initiative, and judgment
Compatible with and foster diversity, complexity, and change
Constructively utilize and harmonize conflict and paradox
Restrain and appropriately embed command and control methods.

— P2P Foundation.

Social experience design or SX was originally introduced by Toshihiko Yamakami in a 2012 IEEE paper, but did not gain broad mindshare as a separate field of IT. Social coding commons revives the concept with a twist that involves a complete rethinking and paradigm shift to how software solutions are created within a commons. Instead of a fragmented landscape of individual projects, where people work past each other while having many overlapping and shared interests, SX views the commons as a living and breathing organism that can be fostered from an ‘organic soup’ to become a beautiful creature able to sustain itself.

Social experience design targets the social web and considers social networking to include any direct and indirect human interaction between people. This definition includes both our online and offline worlds, and Social coding commons envisions a peopleverse where these are seamlessly intertwined. SX broadens the design and development space beyond the existing fields of Development experience (DX) and User experience (UX). Social experience design covers the end to end lifecycle and evolution of a solution, and takes all stakeholders and their needs into account. SX helps bridge the gap between technology and people. Connecting technosphere to sociosphere, SX brings the missing ‘social layers’ to the development stack.

People nowadays take the internet for granted. A global copper and glassfiber network that provides a means to connect with other people remotely. We engage our “socials” and realize insuffiently how our online communications have fundamentally different social dynamics. Online we find it normal to “follow” someone to socially interact with them. While offline this would be considered highly creepy behavior. How many people are shouting details about their private life to complete strangers, standing on a soapbox in the public square of their hometown? Yet online we do that daily, and we do it even on global public squares that record our actions of the day forever. It is no wonder that social media platforms have many unintended side effects on us as human beings and on society itself as they are used at ever larger scales.

In general we just introduce our technological innovations, dump tech into our world, with a mostly implicit and dogmatic “technology means progress” assumption. Under hypercapitalism the only consideration ever made is profitability. Today artificial intelligence is about to disrupt us as never before. Inhuman AI agents increasingly become our intermediaries that shield us ever more from having direct human connection. We become lost individuals in online space. The eroding effects of AI tears the social fabric of society even further, and serves to dehumanise and disempower us. Technology to keep humanity under control, so that hypercapitalism can fester on.

Social networking involves all direct and indirect human interaction between people. Personal social networking is a design perspective that focuses on the individual experiences of all participants in the elaboration of a solution design.

SX takes “Personal social networking” to be the starting point of solution design that can lead us towards a better future. A means to always put people first on the basis of Freedom and Humanity, which are intrinsic values to the design process. SX considers individual needs and how they relate to others, as people mingle together trying to balance work, hobby and life events, and do the things that give meaning to life. Personal social networking takes examples from the real world as the basis for solution design, and envisions a peopleverse where humane and harmonious technology is fully supportive of people’s needs, and beneficial to society at large. Social coding commons dedicates to collecting design patterns and recipes to develop solutions on this basis.

Pyramid of perspective

In order to reimagine social the question rises what that really means. Social experience design is based on the pyramid of perspective. In this model solution design begins at the level of individual people living their daily lives. From the moment a person wakes up they process social activities as they move through various social contexts. Each person thus ‘lives’ their own unique social experience. SX solutions take the personal needs of all participants into account, considering them stakeholders. This also includes the creators of the solution from the very start of the solution design. SX considers a solution to exist as soon as it can be imagined. The next step is to write it down on a sticky note with pen and paper, and then evolve it further until it is fully realized.

Where people come together, their interests collide, and individual social experiences weave together. In the second perspective of SX these inter-personal social relationships are more closely considered. The connections between people form intricate social graphs. The third perspective of SX considers the desired social impact of the solution, and the design focuses on leaving a societal imprint that aims to achieve that impact. The top of the pyramid is where society itself takes shape in the form of complex and dynamic social constructs. These can have any scale, from the socio-cultural environment in your tennis club, to entire religions and (geo)political realities.

Circles of sustainability

Sustainability at any one time, and at all times. SX is based on the notion of holistic sustainability, and made sustainability a core principle for commons participation. This includes all initiatives and people who are working in commons, as well as the commons as a whole. SX uses an adapted version of the Circles of sustainability model, which is better suited to consider technology innovations and the introduction of new technology into society.

Ever since the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, mankind has always implicitly or explicitly equated availability of new technology to mean progress for society. This near dogmatic notion has led us to an age where we all wear our devices on our skin and let them be controlled by all-powerful tech giants that are ruthlessly exploiting us. The adaptation of the model used by SX drops the “Politics” circle and introduces an all-pervasive Technology circle. The technology is a given. We live increasingly in a high-tech society, a technosphere. The quest of SX is to deliver and evolve holistically sustainable solutions in the domains of Economics, Culture, and Ecology respectively. To bridge the technology gap, and weave the sociosphere that people and planet need.

Politics and power dynamics are intricate emergent forces that depend on social context and permeate our social fabric.

“How can you just eliminate the Politics circle?”, one may ask. In FOSS circles there are many who feel that “All tech is political”, or even that everything is political. Interestingly the SX Circles of sustainability model aligns to this notion, yet avoids using the (over)loaded and vague term. Politics, or rather power dynamics, are an emergent force. A very nuanced and intricate force that permeates the social fabric of society and has different names that depend on social context, participants and the kind of human activities they are involved in. “Politics” itself can be said to constitute a social construct when adopting the societal perspective of SX, albeit not a very useful one.

By eliminating the Politics circle SX encourages a focus shift that avoids the inevitable negative impact on any discussion once the word “politics” is dropped, and everyone has their own perception of what that entails. The term is too vague, too overloaded, and even weaponised. It’s use has the effect that heels go in the sand, ideologies are brushed up, and arguments prepared for the fight with ‘political opponents’ — instead of coworkers — in fierce, often heated debate. For furtile cocreation a safe and inclusive environment is a requirement. We need to be able to rise above politics to be able to analyse its power dynamics properly, and need places where people are stimulated to be creative and open-minded in the discussion of fresh ideas. There is a time and place for constructive political discussion and debate, but politics should not be the default modus operandus that sets tone and culture of commons participation. Otherwise, under Conway’s Law, we’ll be unable to design better societal systems.

Hedonic peer production

In our commons assumptions are often made that “people will come” to help build the solution, and that it is enough to “show, don’t tell” a codebase for them to contribute to. But why would they? Why do people involve themselves with the commons? Why are they active in communities, or contribute code to free software projects? Part of SX design philosophy is that self-interest is only natural and plays a vital role in commons participation. Based on this assumption, and inspired by existing technology adoption models, Social coding commons develops a new concept of hedonic peer production and a SX formula called “Hedonic harmony” as a concrete implementation to support its own affiliation network. The mechanism takes inspiration from the field of positive psychology and “Well-being theory” by Martin Seligman.

Hedonic peer production works on the basis of anticipating people’s needs as they are participating in the commons. Knowing the needs of individual participants, the methodology of working in commons allows people to provide maximum incentives to collaborate in particular areas and reap value and synergies that help satisfy these needs. This way intrinsic motivation serves as the attractor, engine and binding factor for people to get things done together. Technology support for such peer production systems helps to do all this at scale. Social web technologies can be a tremendous help to orchestrate and choreograph collaborative cocreation workflows.

“The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.”

— E.F. Schumacher, Small is beautiful

A good analogy of hedonic peer production as the Hedonic harmony SX formula envisions it, are the cells in a human body that are involved in protein exchange and help keep a much larger organism alive and healthy. Each cell is autonomous, yet receives timely all the nourishment it needs to thrive, grow and multiply. Social coding commons takes inspiration from Nature at many levels. The affiliation network that is shaping up by hedonic peer production functions on the basis of ongoing service development and service exchange, forming a commons based service economy of sorts. This is tuned to lead to continuous value aggregation that helps empower the commons as a whole. Hedonic peer production involves stimulating emergent natural forces and setting flywheel effects in motion, then foster them for more spontaneous emergence to occur in areas where it is needed most.

Hedonic drivers

Hedonic peer production works on the basis of a set of hedonic drivers that help steer and nourish the emergent forces throughout the lifecycle of a solution, to give direction to its organic growth and evolution. These drivers and the collaboration incentives they provide to people — on the basis of intrinsic motivation — are the ways to foster spontaneous emergence within the commons, of the right solutions, and based on real needs.

Hedonic harmony focuses on allowing people to pursue their dreams in relation to those of others.

The Hedonic harmony SX formula that Social coding commons develops for its own affiliation network, defines a set of ten incitements for proactive participation that are fundamental building blocks of our growth formula and approach to solution design. The incitements provide three pathways towards rich social experience ..

	incitement	impetus	hedonic driver characteristics
1.	center	”Dare to dream”	self-reflection, self-discovery, meaning
2.	think	”Dare to act”	deliberation, knowledge, strategy, planning
3.	act	”Dare to feel”	doing, realization, collaboration, progression
4.	feel	”Dare to experience”	humanity, freedom, social experience
5.	tease	”Dare to nudge”	awareness, perspective, insight, attraction
6.	nudge	”Dare to play”	connection, affiliation, activation
7.	play	”Dare to experience”	exploration, invention, cocreation
8.	dream	”Dare to be”	imagination, vision, course, direction
9.	be	”Dare to experience”	safety, belonging, inclusion, acceptance
∞	experience	”Dare to live”	fate, luck, chance, opportunity, life

Hedonic harmony aims to stimulate people to follow ones dreams towards realization, based on realistic life goals, expectations, and awareness of other people’s essential roles in fulfilling them. Social coding commons uses these incitements to formulate strategies and model work processes. The three most prominent ones are ..

“Think, act, feel” Methodical approaches for collaborative design and cocreation.
“Tease, nudge, play” Outreach, attraction, activation, emergence, growth trajectory.
“Center, be, experience” Sustainable solutions, focused evolution, joy of creation.

Self benefit center

Self-servicing, the terminology that SX uses instead of the unappetizing term of dogfooding, is an integral part of Social experience design. The recursive nature of this concept may take time to wrap ones head around. Social coding commons constitutes a self benefit center where participants in the commons can tap into a network of value-added services that have been created and aggregated over time. Social coding commons thus offers solutions that help make grassroots environments more productive and sustainable, able to cocreate at scale. These solutions all evolve as SX designs and result in social experiences that reinforce each other through synergetic flywheel effects. This includes Social coding commons itself, and as it evolves its own SX design and its particular SX methodology implementation, it will start to exhibit dynamics of self-organisation or autopoiesis to occur within the commons. Emergent forces to be studied and wielded in order to improve hedonic peer production processes.

A recent Harvard study indicates that Free and open source software (FOSS) has truly eaten the world. It also makes painfully clear that the rewards do not flow towards the creators of FOSS. Is FOSS a great success or inherently unsustainable then? That is not always easy to tell, and depends on the people involved in a particular project. Are they pure hobbyists and in it for the fun, or are they people seeking sustainable income from their free software development efforts? This makes a great difference to the nature of the collaborations that take place, and the expectations that each participant has.

Reasoned from ones who want to earn a decent living with FOSS, or even just see their often ambitious expectations with regards to their FOSS projects fulfilled, FOSS is a failure. Those who argue against this and point out successful large-scale FOSS projects, display severe survivorship bias, as these are the exceptions to the rule. The majority of those who want to sustain themselves from FOSS, find themselves on a road of disillusionment and burnout.

Social coding commons embraces FOSS, the software, while it focuses on improving sustainability of FOSS, the movement.

Furthermore, zooming out, the value of FOSS lands in the hands of hypercapitalist corporations. New approaches and open minds are needed to improve the track record of the free software movement, and make it more sustainable as a whole. It does not help that highly principled people in FOSS and social impact movements often outright refuse to learn from the best-practices that work in the business world, and often shoot themselves in the foot by their principles and values. An important part of SX is to adopt what works, and adapt it to the dynamics of grassroots environments, such that these principles and values are properly accounted for.

Successful companies are much more aware of what solutions they want to build, what needs must be served, and for which stakeholders. They do product and service development that involve numerous parties and supply lines, recognize that needs change and solutions have a lifecycle. They involve all their company deparments and employees in intricate business processes to timely anticipate these changes. While in FOSS there’s oftentimes only a codebase, a release, a project website, and a basic and implicit issue-driven design-by-consensus workflow on Github or Codeberg that allows tech-savvy people to request features to be added on top of what was already built. App-centric, the project a siloed concept. The deliverables loose fragments that do not connect well with others.

SOSS initiatives become inherently sustainable by addressing relevant aspects of the free software development lifecycle..

Social coding commons speaks of SOSS, Sustainable open social systems, and reserves the term “FOSS” exclusively to refer to software artifacts that comply to the four essential freedoms of Free software. SOSS initiatives are solution-oriented, delivered in the form of services, and focus on the sustainability of these solutions throughout their entire lifecycle.

The Free software movement attracts nearly primarily technical people and fosters a culture that is deeply tech-oriented. It is a very vibrant environment where people dare to experiment, do research and create prototypes, and inspire others to follow along. The FOSS commons is a cauldron of innovation. Yet because of the deep tech focus, the value that is being created this way, the rewards, does not flow in the proper direction: in the hands of creators and their clients. Most of the value ends up in the hands of hypercapitalists who contribute little to our society.

SX focuses on adding the missing social layers to the technology stack, and design solutions that help bridge the gap between technosphere and sociosphere, where they address people’s needs. Doing this at scale within a commons, weaving social experiences together, poses both a big opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is in how an empowered commons is able to outcompete exploitative corporate rivals by the ‘completeness of services’ such ignited commons is able to offer. Company business generally restricts itself to product and service development within their own walls, at UX scope. While a united commons can choreograph social experiences cocreated by many parties, thus able to rise above this level to address SX scope and make deeper, even societal, impact. The challenge is in breaking the indvidualism in FOSS and activate people to follow common trajectories, to diversify the development process and make it more inclusive to people in less-technical roles. With the ultimate objective to develop experiences that are loved and embraced by clients.

In order to make the paradigm and mindset shift, SX conceptualises three social layers to exist on top of the technology stack. First, based on the notion that the social web is service-oriented, SX discerns a Service layer, where discoverable autonomous services compose, orchestrate and choreograph with each other. Specifically they compose into evolvable solutions in the Solution layer. Solutions under SX are self-contained and include their own design blueprint that can be introspected to various extent. Finally the upper Experience layer is where the social experiences of all these solutions intertwine with the social graph and become part of the social fabric.

Free software development lifecycle

SOSS initiatives in their approach focus on the end-to-end solution development lifecycle, ranging from the first inception of an idea to the end-of-life stage where a solution is phased out and its aggregated value disperses again. The Free software development lifecycle, or FSDL, is inspired by the Rational unified process and follows five stages of Evolution. Consecutively these are Inception, Ideation, Realization, Delivery and Dispersal. Services are delivered throughout the entire lifecycle, even when a solution is in state of value dispersal (for example when submitting its documentation to the Internet Archive for long-term preservation). Free software projects typically only address the Ideation and Realization stages, or even just Realization in code-only projects.

As a solution design progresses through the lifecycle, following parallel social activity tracks that may fan out to timely cover those areas that need most attention, whether that be coding, testing, service development, or public relations. Each SOSS initiative requires their own development approach, and the FSDL must be tailored to support that. The various patterns and practices of SX are organized into instrument sets and recipes that drive collaboration workflows between commons participants. The FSDL is applicable to single SOSS initiatives while taking their position within the larger commons and technology ecosystem into account.

Under SX the design process is considered an integral part of the solution itself, and not a separate preparatory stage that leads to a solution deliverable, as is the usual way we consider ourselves to be “involved with a project”. In an ultimate form of dogfooding SX solutions self-service themself. Starting with that first sticky note, participants — regardless whether they are people in creator or client stakeholder roles — will come and dedicate some of their work, hobby, life balance to contribute and add value to the solution, so that it evolves over time. As they mingle with other people, weaving social experiences together, the collaborative development process leads them along a number of social activity tracks (SAT’s) that are relevant to the particular solution design and help drive it towards further realization and maturity.

How to get involved?

This is not as straightforward as it usually is when people ask how to join a community. Social coding commons is a movement, not a top-down traditional organisation, and there is no membership. It is enough to feel yourself to be a social coder to participate. When the concepts outlined above piqued your interest, you are encouraged to join the discussions in our channels. When it comes to deeper involvement however, it depends what your ambitions, passions and aspirations are and in which fields you are interested in to engage in proactive participation with others. Collaborations that emerge depends which initiatives you represent and how they are value aligned to those of others working in commons. That should happen in a natural fashion, and gradually by mingling and doing things together. Social coding commons is a timeless movement. Collaborations form spontaneously as time progresses and growth of our commons happens organically and along natural pathways. As a movement we are aware of our value, open to more value creation, and only progress — no matter how small its increments — is what matters.

Commons participation

SX by focusing on the needs of all participants as they work in commons, provides natural pathways to safeguard and promote diversity and inclusion. In addition to how autonomous participants organise the governance of their independent initiatives, Social coding commons provides a set of commmons participation guidelines as handholds to the establishment of healthy collaborative arrangements within the commons. They are based on two intrinsic values of Humanity and Freedom and their relationship to each other, that are the lifeblood of the commons and the value it creates. Three core principles of Sustainability, Mindfulness, and Playfulness are the pillars upon which commons builds, and are staring points to how we think, act, and feel about organising our collaborative activities.

Intrinsic values

Core principles

Participation tools

About this commons

Social coding commons was initiated in 2025 by Arnold Schrijver and came forth from “Social coding movement” that preceded it. Years of experience in facilitating communities and doing technology evangelism via “weaving in public” in difficult and broad-scoped grassroots environments preceded this inception, whereby Arnold deliberatedly acquired new skills and studied the social dynamics as an insider active in the field. In 2018 he founded Humane Tech Community (which is now dormant) and from 2019 spent five years as community facilitator of SocialHub and the FEP Process, the developer community for the W3C ActivityPub social web protocol and the fediverse. Dealing with all the frustrations of ‘trying to herd cats’ and ‘commons janitoring’, doing the boring chores for others, he learned that the major challenges of the fediverse to overcome are mostly social in nature. Social coding commons constitutes an ongoing experiment to finally address them in a collective effort, with many people working in unison together.

Arnold Schrijver now acts in a custodianship role, since Social coding commons is leaderless. He is available for inquiries on the fediverse at @smallcircles@social.coop, on Social coding forum as @aschrijver, and as @circlebuilder:matrix.org on Matrix chat.