Mind over Machine

"We want to make the world a better place — at least the software world."

The Regenerative Software Development Manifesto

👣 We take a step back from a linear “use-and-throw-away” economy.
👣 We go one step further than just a circular sustainable recycling economy.
👣 We position ourselves in a place where our vision is that software can and must be regenerative.

Regenerative must be understood as restoring and healing.

In the regenerative paradigm, we do not only have an eye on the value that can be priced on the basis of a cost-benefit based business value. We also aim to include the value that is not priced in conventional economic models ¹.

We strive to see the value as a whole. In our approach, we include all the value that the software creates, for people, that is for society, organizations, companies, end-users and developers.

Our goal is to explore and develop a path to how software can contribute to a regenerative economy, which overall contributes positively to people and the world.

We believe that software systems, like biological systems, must evolve continuously.

Like complexity in nature
Complexity in software isn’t built — it’s grown

Fred Brooks

Core focus

Mind over Machine has a very specific focus on software and all derivative disciplines that you can meaningfully put software before: software development, software development processes, software deliveries, software licenses, software infrastructure, software programmers, software-whatever, …

Our focus is thus both very specific and infinite; We are not saying anything about the whole world - only the software world, but just like the series of numbers between zero and one, it is also infinite.

We cannot say with certainty what “Regenerative Software Development” is — that is what we must contribute to.

We do not see it as our job to define it dogmatically. Instead, we will — in dialogue with the outside world — undertake the task of investigating it, fleshing it out, debating it, developing techniques and tools that support it. We will concretely develop software systems based on these assumptions and thereby empirically obtain feedback that enables us to continuously adjust our assumptions and improve our processes and contribution to “Regenerative software development” by supporting and enabling its spread.

Principles

We are driven by – and manage according to – a number of concrete principles. These principles are based on our assumptions. That is, we base these principles because we assume they will bring us to the goal. These principles and values ​​may be adjusted and changed over time as we test them in practice.

• We reject manipulative models which consider end users as a product that can be exploited.
• We eliminate digital waste and technical debt through principles such as end-user involvement, accessibility, high quality and conscious generic and reusable design.
• We build systems that serve people’s general needs rather than commercial interests. We believe in transparency and integrity.
• We advocate that software is part of people’s cultural heritage, not just companies’ intellectual property (IP). The systems and the knowledge we develop are Open Source and CopyLeft.
• We are actively working on improving and optimizing the personal experience it is to develop and contribute to software. Not only with a focus on capital interests but also with a focus on people’s lived lives.
• Long-term systems thinking is prioritized over short-term or immediate benefits. We profess holistic thinking and explore and strengthen relationships between systems, components and events, rather than breaking them down and seeing them as isolated parts.

The influence of Lean Manufacturing and Lean Management

We recognize and embrace the influence that lean manufacturing and lean management principles have had on modern system and software development through trends such as: Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Agile software development, #NoEstimates, Developer Experience (DevX), Transformational Leadership - We recognize that legacy and stand on its shoulders, but at the same time see it as our task to continue to contribute to translating and communicating how these principles concretely contribute to “Regenerative Software Development”.

---

Footnotes

1. We see it as a prerequisite for a regenerative software development paradigm that we use economic theory that does not accept the idea of the market’s self-regulating “Invisible hand” and that does not base itself unambiguously on pricing, cost-benefit and gross domestic product examples of alternative economic theories we lean on are Wellbeing economy or more generally Heterodox economic theory ↩