Causes
things that need software — and a way to say which ones matter
A cause is something that needs software written for it and is not going to get it from anybody else. The reef keeps a short list, and the list is short because we would rather have two real ones than ten made up to fill a page.
You can back each cause separately. Backing one is not a vote against the other.
Whatever the factory forges for a cause is released as AGPL free software: the commons gets the code, and no cause here produces a proprietary product.
The Gloriously Impossible Effort to Lovelace MULTICS
Rebuilding pieces of one of computing's most important systems with modern formal methods, and checking them against the original.
A cause proposed by you
The second slot is empty on purpose. Tell us what needs building.
Propose one
The list grows from outside as well as inside. Put up your own cause — one per person, anonymous like the ballot; the ones taken up get their own page here, with their own vote. Questions and arguments about the reef in general still belong on the discussion board.
How the vote works
One vote per visitor, as far as an honest server can tell without cookies — we rate-limit and hash addresses, we do not store them. The hash is salted, it is what stops a second vote in the same week, and it is thrown away when the week turns. Your address itself is never written to disk.
That is not one person one vote and we are not going to pretend it is. Two people on the same home connection share a hash, and one person on two networks has two. It is a steer, honestly counted, and it is the best a site can do without following you about.
No scripts, no cookies, no analytics here either — a vote is an ordinary form, posted to this server and counted on it. View source and check.