An idea.
Case study of malleable system communities: Decker, LÖVE, PICO-8, Uxn
Those are the first examples that came to mind, of active software communities I’ve seen where people are learning, teaching each other, and in general having fun making silly and serious things, self-expression through programming and creative computing. They’re delightful in their own weird ways.
All have community participation on itch.io. But none of them are scalable or practical for daily computing use, one might object. With Uxn, its minimalist design and philosophical foundation has a focus on post-collapse practicality. How it’s bootstrapped from a handful of compute primitives, it’s arguably more practical than relatively enormous commercial software systems with globally entangled external dependencies, reliance on corporate funding and control for its development and direction.
An aspect I love about each of the cozy cute systems, is that they’re free in important ways, both for the creator of the system and the creators on the system.
Well, I don’t know about an actual study, but there are interesting parallels among them conceptually. Perhaps some lessons can be gained from their success as ecosystems.
PICO-8 and the Search for Cosy Design Spaces - PRACTICE 2018: Joseph White
