I, François-René Rideau, have been building reflective computing infrastructure since the TUNES project.

My current active projects include growing the ecosystem for Gerbil Scheme, my Lisp platform of choice, on top of which I am building a compiler for a programming language for decentralized applications (see my early startup MuKn.io).

My aspiration is to empower individual developers and users to fulfill their creative potential and cooperate freely with each other, without falling prey to centralized people-farmers.

My contribution towards that goal is to promote computational reflection: the property of systems that possess an active, bidirectional representation of themselves as first-class computable data.

Reflection supports the creation and maintenance of whatever invariants digital systems possess that makes them valuable to humans, even as they evolve based on interaction with humans. In particular, Reflection allows humans to bootstrap their trust in a digital system: they can reach high levels of trust from lower ones at minimal cost by using those parts they trust to assess the trustworthiness of larger parts and extend their trust.

More generally, Reflection enables digital systems to interact with humans and each other beyond the paradigm of command-and-control by superior beings, into conversations between complementarily abled entities. The underlying attitude towards computing is a challenge to the hierarchical attitude promoted by dominant corporate and political Establishments.