Mind over Machine

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

The Regenerative Software Development Manifesto

👣 We step back from a linear “take-make-dispose” economy.
👣 We go a step further than merely a circular sustainable recycling economy.
👣 We position ourselves where our vision is that software can and must be regenerative.

Regenerative should be understood as restorative and healing.

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

We strive to see the value in the whole. In our approach we include all the value that software creates, for people, that is for society, organisations, businesses, end-users and developers.

Our goal is to explore and develop a path to how software can contribute to a regenerative economy, which collectively 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 derived disciplines, where you can meaningfully put software in front of: software development, software development processes, software deliveries, software licenses, software infrastructure, software programmers, software-anything, …

Our focus is therefore at once very specific and infinite; We do not say anything about the whole World — only the software world, but just like the sequence of numbers between zero and one, it is itself 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 task to dogmatically define it. Instead, we — in dialogue with the wider world — have taken on the task of examining it, concertizing it, debating it, developing techniques and tools that support it. We will concretely develop software systems based on these assumptions and thereby empirically gather feedback, which enables us to continuously adjust our assumptions and improve our processes and contributions to “Regenerative software development” by supporting and enabling its spread.

Principles

We are driven by — and governed by — a number of concrete principles. These principles are based on our assumptions. That is, we base these principles on the assumption that they will bring us to the goal. These principles and values may be adjusted and change over time, as we test them in practice.

• We reject manipulative models that treat end-users as a product to be exploited.
• We eliminate digital waste and technical debt through principles such as end-user involvement, accessibility, high quality and consciously 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 humanity’s cultural heritage, not merely corporate intellectual property (IP). The systems, and the knowledge, we develop are Open Source and CopyLeft.
• We actively work to improve and optimize the personal experience of developing and contributing 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 prioritised over short-term or immediate gains. We commit to holistic thinking and explore and strengthen relationships between systems, components and events, rather than breaking them down and viewing them as isolated parts.

The Influence of Lean Manufacturing and Lean Management

We acknowledge and embrace the influence that lean manufacturing and lean management principles have had on modern systems and software development through trends such as: Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Agile software development, #NoEstimates, Developer Experience (DevX), Transformational Leadership — We acknowledge that legacy and stand on the shoulders of it, but simultaneously see it as our task to continue to contribute to translating and communicating how these principles concretely contribute to “Regenerative software development”.

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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 rely solely on pricing, cost-benefit and gross domestic product. Examples of alternative economic theories we lean on are Wellbeing Economy or more broadly Heterodox economic theory ↩