About

Box Fraise is a project about solving the username and password problem.

The problem. A username and a password are what you use when there is nobody there to recognise you. They stand in for being known. Every account is a small act of proving yourself to a machine, repeated forever, and the whole apparatus exists because the digital world has no equivalent of walking into a room where people already know your face.

The approach. Box Fraise solves it in person, and it does it playfully. Verification happens face to face, at events, between people — an in-person design structure rather than a login screen. The playfulness is not decoration. A structure people enjoy taking part in is one they will actually turn up to, and turning up is the entire mechanism.

A friendship network. Because that in-person element is community-oriented, the accurate name for what it produces is not a social network but a friendship network. Membership is not a form you fill in. It is people meeting other people, with the software keeping faithful track of the fact that it happened.

Consent and accountability. As a platform, its behaviour is to create an environment where it is possible to consensually call people out — accountability that people have opted into, rather than accountability imposed by an anonymous crowd. That is what lets the physical world and the digital one sit in harmony instead of in tension. The consequence is physical communities reinforced by being online rather than hollowed out by it.

A login for everyone else. In time Box Fraise will publish its own login API, so that other projects can authenticate people through the network instead of issuing usernames and passwords of their own. Someone verified in person, once, becomes someone any participating project can trust. That is what solving the problem is for — not one platform with a better login, but a way of being known that other people's software can build on.

On it seeming new. The world we live in now has not been through an update like this one, so parts of it will read as unfamiliar. Nothing here is exotic, though. It is the obvious next thing, and someone was going to arrive at it eventually.