I’ve been thinking about what I want to built in the next few years.

I’m really attached to this idea “to build a creative and open technology community”. I see it in projects like Urbit and I really think I want to be a part of them. I feel a bit stranded on the Internet - I’ve retreated to my own little safe haven of my blog and website. And I like it here, but it’s a bit lonely.

Having had plenty of time in the last few weeks to consider my options, I continue to come up against some kind of impasse where I can’t decide exactly what I want to do next.

I’ve had plenty of ideas for products over the years. I’ve seen some of my ideas being built by others. Some of them seemed too hair-brained to get off the ground at the time, but I’ll never know if I could have made a success of them. Plus, it’s gotten to the point where I’m pretty sure my parents are fed-up of hearing about them…

One idea is some kind of account-manager / password-manager, potentially built on a decentralised identity system. There doesn’t seem to be wide-spread adoption of such a system, and that could be down to the nature of today’s centralised app ecosystems (I wrote a bit about that in a recent blog post).

One of the things that keeps coming back to me is some kind of social gathering organisation app.

Whatever this idea is, I want to at least make it and either see it become a success or learn from it being a failure.

I feel like I’ve learned a lot about building systems for people in the last few years. I want to take that and the values that I care about and throw myself into something.

To that end, what I’m imagining is a small community or company rooted in a balanced understanding of people and how they want to live their technological lives.

I think the key tenets of this person-centricity should include:

• not distracting anyone, e.g. by showing ads
• not depending on people coming back to the app
• building a business model that works for the people who use it

I’m also considering making it exclusively part of the Urbit landscape, but I still need to decide on the details.

For now I think I want to learn more about Urbit and similar systems to see what is the state-of-the-art in this area.

I’m excited to see where this leads.