What is your concept of writing?

During my studies at the Piet Zwart Institute, I began writing a text entitled An Ongoing Manifesto For Processual Design, in which I propose a design focusing on social processes and other human interactions rather than on the production of goods. Naturally, I wanted the text distribution model to be compliant with its content, and that each person could modify and expand that text. Along with the decision to release the text under the Free Art License, Stéphanie and I started to look for technical solutions for its distribution. Noting that there wasn't (to our knowledge) any software aiming at both collaborative writing and criticism we decided to start our own, taking inspiration from free software writing practices, and "hijacking" one of their tools: Git.

Git visualization of the development of a collaborative project.

This software, Brainch, allows its practitioners to duplicate and edit their peers' texts. Several versions of a text can exist in parallel, and be recombined or not at any time whether their owners' opinion converge or diverge. Thus, unlike a conventional wiki requiring its users to reach a consensus since they all work on a single shared copy, Brainch allows the authors to freely express their opinions.

Each copy of a text comes with its full history (authors, versions, etc.). Therefore Brainch becomes a critical tool by documenting the process of writing a text, identifying the commiters and their contributions, revealing relationships - agreements and conflicts - between the various protagonists.

This is just the beginning, and one must consider the online version as an alpha one. Short term plan includes working on the visual design, vulgarization of the vocabulary, and a graphical navigation through the texts and their history.

The source code is released under the GNU Affero General Public License.