ROBERT LECHTE

Robert Lechte is a technologist and an idealist. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is not to be confused with Robert Lechte the handball player from Sweden.

He works towards more humanistic computing and a fairer society.

Financially sustainable open source

Robert has created a number of widely used open source tools and libraries. His startup Database CI is attempting to build a financially sustainable way to develop open source database tools, and recently recieved funding from Startmate/Blackbird Ventures.

Radically different programming interfaces

Robert is in the early stages of building radically different user interfaces that remove the divide between users and programmers, and development environments and operating systems that are instantaneous, interactive, and fully, pervasively programmable.

He recently presented a talk on computing history, debugger customization, and alternative, instant-feedback programming interfaces at PyCon Australia, Australia's python conference: Instant-feedback, instant-debugging Python coding.

His widely read essay Programs are a prison: Rethinking the fundamental building blocks of computing interfaces highlights the way software is broken because it traps information within separate applications, and observes that the solutions are more social than technical.

Welfare state writing and advocacy

Robert wants an end to poverty and a classless society, with Norway levels (at least) of public ownership and shared wealth - that means a bigger welfare state, sovereign wealth funds, and a universal basic dividend.

He writes regularly on these issues in an Australian context, with a particular focus on Australia's superannuation system from a progressive left context, within the broader context of global financialization.

Read Australia's Superannuation System Enshrines Inequality and To Protect Australian Workers' Retirement Savings, We Must Democratize Pensions in Jacobin magazine, or Australia's super system is three trillion dollars of unused worker power on this very website.

He recently launched the Workers Against Super campaign to build support for a fairer, more democratized, more publicly owned superannuation system in Australia.

Recent posts