The OA Blog

I talk a lot about the sovereign web — the idea that the tools running our digital presence should be ones we understand, control, and can move away from if we ever need to. So it’s worth being upfront about a small contradiction I’ve just built into my own stack. Signalforge is my new inbound communication system: a single channel that all of the sites now use for contact forms, spam filtering, and getting messages into my inbox reliably. Before Signalforge, contact forms across the OA websites were scattered, inconsistent, and dependent on whatever third-party form service happened to be bolted on at the time. Signalforge replaces all of that with one purpose-built pipeline that I designed and can own end to end. ...

Management Committee Status: June 2026 June was the month where the architectural theories of the previous quarter were tested against the reality of the live application. The primary focus was the “reintegration” phase: plugging the newly modular Xylem libraries back into the main TextRoots application shell. This was a rigorous process of discovery, as we identified bespoke logic within the app and systematically migrated it into the appropriate Xylem subsystems—Flow, Surface, and Buffer. ...

Management Committee Status: May 2026 May was the month when Xylem moved from being an emerging core idea into the clear centre of gravity for TextRoots. In April, the main shift was the recognition that the deeper content and storage logic needed to be separated from the app itself. In May, that separation started to become much more concrete. The project’s energy was focused less on outward-facing features and more on building the underlying library structure that can eventually support many different interfaces, runtimes, and workflows. ...

Management Committee Status: April 2026 April was an important month for TextRoots, even if this update is arriving a little late. While we made a start on outward-facing work such as launching a blog, publishing a few articles, and restarting social media activity, the more meaningful progress happened behind the scenes. The project is beginning to move beyond the shape of a single app and toward a broader ecosystem of tools and services. ...