the humans

We are a small group of people building software for the interval between now and later. Small on purpose: a larger team needs more coordination, more meetings, more decisions about whose turn it is to make the coffee, and we would rather spend that attention on the work.

The people here come from technology, policy, and communications, and share a quiet suspicion that most software asks too much of the people who have to use it. We work remotely, mostly out of Melbourne, though "out of" is doing some work in a sentence where everyone is in a different room.

What we believe

That technology should serve the people using it, not the people who have to bend around it. That a capable machine should propose and a person should decide, and the system should keep the receipts either way. The model is the astonishing part. The hard part, the part worth doing, is everything that has to be true before a person can trust what it said, and we built that conviction into the architecture rather than onto a values page. Though here we are, writing a values page.

We think humans are mostly trying their best, and that the future is worth showing up for. These should not be controversial positions.

Why "meanwhile"

Because we are doing this in the meantime. While the bigger things become possible, while the world sorts itself out, while we sort ourselves out, there is work to be done, and it can be done in a way that leaves the people doing it with more of their day and less of their patience spent. Meanwhile is the name for that: the useful interval, put to use.

We hope you are doing okay out there.