Who writes this

4-loop is written and built by Pablo Flores. One person, working on it alone.

There is no company behind it. Nothing here is sold, there is no account to make, nothing anybody draws leaves their own browser, and there is no arrangement with a third party that any of it feeds into. What the site collects says the same thing in the detail a privacy page owes you.

The name is not a coincidence

The ideas this site is built on are Fernando Flores's — the conversation for action, conditions of satisfaction, the network of commitments — set out in his 1982 dissertation and in Understanding Computers and Cognition, written with Terry Winograd in 1986.

He is my father, and I have been a student and a collaborator of his. I was also one of many who worked on the software and the practice that came out of this — which is why the site is a return rather than a discovery. Saying all of that up front seems better than leaving a reader to work it out from a surname, or to wonder whether the site is quietly borrowing one.

None of which makes this site his. It is not approved by Fernando Flores, by Terry Winograd, or by any organisation associated with either, and having worked alongside somebody is not the same as speaking for them. This is one reading of the work.

Whose work this stands on

Worth setting out in one place rather than leaving it scattered through the essays, and worth being exact about how I came to it: almost none of this reached me by my own reading. It came through Fernando's work and through years alongside it. I have no independent connection to most of the people below, and it would be easy for a page like this to imply otherwise.

Fernando Flores — the conversation for action, and the claim underneath it: that an organisation runs on a network of commitments made in language — requests, promises, offers — rather than being a machine for processing information. It came out of Management and Communication in the Office of the Future, his 1982 doctoral thesis at Berkeley, with John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus advising and his studies of Austin and Heidegger behind it. The office of the future was two years before the Macintosh and seven before anybody started on the web.

The work did not stop with the loop. Building Trust, written with Robert C. Solomon in 2001, takes trust apart into ability, sincerity and care. Disclosing New Worlds, with Charles Spinosa and Hubert Dreyfus in 1997, is about opening a possibility that was not there before. This site draws almost entirely on the earlier work, which is a limit of the site rather than of the material.

Terry Winograd — Understanding Computers and Cognition, 1986, written with Fernando Flores.

Gloria Flores — Learning to Learn and the Navigation of Moods, and the account of moods in it. Where this site says a decline is something people avoid rather than something the notation forbids, that is her work and not the notation's. The editor has a field for the mood on a commitment because of it.

Terry Winograd, Fernando Flores, Rodrigo Flores, Juan Ludlow, Raúl Medina-Mora and the others who built the software — The Coordinator, and ActionWorkflow after it. The loop was put on a screen and sold to companies forty years before this editor drew one, and most of what is here was tried there first, including the parts that did not work.

Chauncey Bell — the work of carrying this into companies rather than into software: business design, and what commitment-based practice actually asks of the people running a place. What it costs and what it buys is in that territory and owes him more than it says.

The errors are entirely my own. Every one of these people said something more careful than the version of it here, and where the two differ they are right and I have compressed something badly. I would rather hear about it than not.

Why it exists

My career has been in software development, which is the other half of it. Spend long enough building systems and you notice that they are all very good at recording what happened to a record, and have nothing to say about who asked whom for what — which is what the teaching is about, and what actually breaks.

This is an attempt to make that difference visible rather than argue for it: draw the promises, run them, and see what the design asks of the people in it. Reading about a distinction and watching it move are not the same, and the second is what the editor is for.

Saying something back

The address is hello@4-loop.com, and it reaches me rather than a queue. Corrections to the writing are especially welcome — several pages make claims about a forty-year-old tradition, and getting those wrong in public is worth fixing quickly.