Here we outline the notion of the toolstack layer, and its significance.
Platform provision is basically important in digital infrastructure. Nevertheless, it's also true that pretty well everyone now holds a bunch of digital tools on their phone or laptop, and *some* of these - often not many - are stand-alone tools that do the work on the device, rather than mobilise some computing on another device - that is, a platform service - somewhere across the internet or in the (corporate) cloud.
> A contacts list is an example. A word processor is another. A spreadsheet is another. A graphics package or image-processing package might be a third.
**Peer-to-peer apps** are an important category of tools, which put my device in touch with your device, and thus me more or less directly in touch with you (as distinct from some bunch of algorithms and 'intelligences' in some oligarch-owned data centre somewhere). > Messaging is an example, or voice-over-internet. A particular case is where I 'own' - actually, rent - a piece of space in a cloud, and hold shareable resources there that you can directly access.
So our federation needs to be concerned with what kinds of tools are available on their own devices, that help people and organisations and civil society formations to be directly in communication with one another, and to assemble and share their own documents and data in secure ways. This is the 'toolstack' space.
It's different from the platform space because, while everybody on a platform has the same tools available - in the core app and in the UI - everybody's personal device contains a different collection of stand-alone tools. The question of which stand-alone tools we hold and use in common, and which collections 'are best', is a difficult but important one: for example, so that we can exchange files and share work, or pick up one-another's workflows. > The same wordprocessor is an example. The same graphics package might be another. The same news feed might be a third.
Many toolstacks have now been centralised on corporate-controlled platforms - the Google Docs suite or the Microsoft Office suite are examples. These can be very helpful even when the setup is basically compromised by corporate control and lack of security, because the capacity for sharing of documents is buult-in. But the matter of independent tools on individual devices remains an important one. What toolstack serves you or me 'best'?
> Toolstack layer - Our federation is concerned with the provisioning and curating of **commons of digital tools** (or maybe we should say protocols of tool-use) within a community, as an intrinsic part of what *constitutes* the dynmics and relationships and capabilities of **practices** in the community.