Projects

Jai programming language

I’ve been a beta tester for the Jai language since early 2020. I contribute to the Jai Community Library and maintain several libraries:

This list might be incomplete. My Github profile will be more up-to-date. I’ve also contributed to a few other libraries, which can be found there too.

Icelandic Parliament and the Icelandic Pirate Party

I co-founded the Icelandic Pirate Party and stood as their number one candidate in Iceland’s south constituency in the 2013 general elections, and again, more successfully, in 2016 and again in 2017. After serving 5 years in the parliament, I decided to move on, and did therefore not stand in the 2021 general election.

During my time in Parliament, I gave exactly 1000 speeches, had way too large a portfolio, proposed several bills and other proposals and voted a lot. All in all I had a good time, think I did some reasonably good work for the Icelandic people, the European Economic Area, and maybe even for Earth and its humans more broadly. While I’m proud of my contributions, I’m also glad it’s over.

Nordic Voting Systems

I’ve been doing some research into Nordic voting systems (in particular, Iceland, Sweden and Norway) with Þorkell Helgason and Kurt Jörnsten. One of the outputs is a voting system simulator, available here.

OCCRP

From 2014-2016 I was the chief technologist at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. It was a wonderful job. A lot of the software we built is freely available on OCCRP’s Github.

Mailpile

I’m one of the folks behind Mailpile, a modern, fast web-mail client with user-friendly encryption and privacy features. It’s free software, written in Python, available on Github. If you want to talk about it, join #mailpile on irc.freenode.net.

I’m no longer very actively involved, although I do occasionally annoy Bjarni with my opinions.

Liquid Democracy

Around 2007 I started thinking about the shortcomings of democracy as it stands, and started writing about it. In 2008 I did a talk at Oekonux 4, where I presented some of the ideas about how to democratize democracy by allowing proxying of votes. Since then I’ve become acquainted with the works of Miller, Hill, Lomax, Hodgeson and others on this same field, which predate my own work. However, I seem to have triggered this most recent interest, which has generated useful software built by a host of smart people.

I frequently work on issues related to this; mostly writing and lecturing. I built Wasa2il, a free software platform for Liquid Democracy.

Older projects

Some of these I haven’t worked on for a while… some live good lives without me, others have faded into history or taken on new lives with others at the helm: