We live in the age of the "personal computer" these days. Even as the internet connects billions around the world every day, we still feel alone on the web. Our devices and interfaces were designed for individual experiences rather than collective ones. Communal Computing explores the shape of a world of "communal computers," filled with software made for people to create together and love each other and made by people who care about maintaining it for the long-term. How can technology bring us together and give us space to support one another and create together? How can we build it in a way that lets the human behind the design shine through the bits and circuits?

In this one day workshop, we'll explore alternative device interfaces and internet environments that foster intimacy, co-creation, and solidarity. The workshop is hands-on and experiential: each participant is expected to walk away with a functional "communal computing" interface.

What if we could enable sharing our presence on any website at any time?

Even though the web is teeming with thousands of people at any given moment, we often feel alone—just our cursor in the big world wide web. Even if we've stumbled upon the same places or crossed paths before, there's no sense of who else has been there and what kind of person they are. So much of what we do is hidden from each other.

playhtml is an open-source library Spencer Chang made to create web interactions that are shared in real-time and saved over time. From re-creating beloved existing interactions like shared cursors and message walls to imagining new ways of sharing digital space like internet furniture and digital fingerprints, playhtml imagines a world with a plurality of tiny internets and social networks that enable people to connect in more expressive and emergent ways than the text-centric platforms we have now, towards an internet that feels more like a shared city that anyone can shape.

Taking inspiration from everyday physical spaces we convene in (neighborhood cafes, transit stops, stoops, dog park) and emergent interactions in products (cursor parking lot, figma high-fives, party in a google doc), we'll enchant existing websites with real-time interactivity and create new tiny spaces that explore new ways of relating to one another and sharing space together on the web.

By the end of the workshop you will have built your own small, communal website.

playhtml is an open-source infrastructure for creating shared web experiences by enhancing web elements with real-time, collaborative interactivity. Actions taken are saved, so visitors can see the traces of past visitors and make their presence known to future ones. It makes creating collaborative web interactions (like movable Figma objects, shared text in Google Docs, and multiplayer video games) as simple as a single HTML attribute.