In 2014 the homepage of urbit.org was a direct statement to the world: “Urbit is unlaunched. Not that we ever launched it. It leaked… coding is our first priority…we love pull requests and bug reports, but please don’t confuse this with support”. Since then, Urbit has gone through many transformations. A Founder’s Farewell. A clean slate and network for the 21st century. A new computing paradigm that provides complete ownership of your digital world. These transformations never eschewed the past, rather, they represented the evolution of Urbit as both it and the world around us steadily moved towards the future. The Urbit Foundation grew into its own as a mechanism for developing public goods. Tlon’s operational model grew towards laser focused product development. Third party application development blossomed as software distribution was made public.

In August of last year, another era began: A Founder Returns. Admittedly, this era has been signified by conflict and disruption. Key contributors have clashed. The Urbit Foundation struggled during periods of uncertainty around both funding and leadership. The broader network wandered, wondering how things may resolve. But this conflict has also shown the strength of Urbit both as a community, and as an idea. Somewhere in its storied history, Urbit was ‘launched’. Put another way, it escaped its origins, and only in this most recent period of return has that escape become unmistakable. A critical mass had formed of those who demand the creation of a forever computer that is truly yours, in both identity and operating system, connected over an encrypted peer-to-peer network. A cohort of fervent builders gathered with the resolve to take on this ambitious project, aiming to mend the deep fractures of modern computing in order to heal the underlying ruptures we all endure in our digital lives. Whatever the exact inflection point, the true moment of escape, Urbit continues to demonstrate itself to evolve towards decentralization, rather than mimicking the centralizing nature of the modern internet.

For all the conflict–both intense strategic disagreement and operational challenges–Urbiters have kept building. Whether underfunded or not funded at all, they kept making contributions to the technical stack, the culture, and a future computing experience free of untrustworthy intermediaries. Additional capital flowed into the system from both venture capitalists and Bitcoin philanthropists. New organizations were formed, aligned towards specific segments of Urbit development, but all aimed at a shared vision of the future where we can truly own computers that last.

All this strife also included a test firing of Urbit’s governance: Azimuth was ‘used in anger’. Politicking not just for pretend, but confronting true conflict which required synthesis in order to move forward. There were coups and counter-coups; along with experiments in exit, loyalty, and voice. And the Galactic Senate held multiple votes in order to operationalize its duty to select the board of directors for The Urbit Foundation. To be sure, decentralized governance of a decentralized network has its pain points.

But, after 13 months, Urbit is entering a new era. One of greater operational decentralization for the project. And one that has The Urbit Foundation evolving to align with the times. The Galactic Senate has elected to replace the board of the Urbit Foundation and replace them with a three-seat board consisting of: ~lavlyn-litmeg, ~palfun-foslup, and ~hocfur-modlex. The board is appointing ~sicdev-pilnup as the Executive Director of the Urbit Foundation to replace ~sorreg-namtyv, who is leaving to found a new application development company, dedicated to building on top of the Urbit technical stack.

As for the Urbit Foundation, the plan is simple: continue building Urbit, and continue talking about it. In some sense, this has always been the plan, there have just been eras of greater or lesser scope creep. Of course, now there are more organizations than ever before sponsoring the work that must be done to make Urbit real. So while we will continue to steward urbit.org and other infrastructure, expect to see us sharing and amplifying not just what Urbit Foundation developers are working on, but work and happenings from across the entire Urbit landscape.

See you on the network,
~sarlev-sarsen
~faldur-marnus
~mastyr-bottec
~midden-fabler
~dozreg-toplud
~sicdev-pilnup