where-old

What is where-old and what is it for?

where-old is a Holochain app for groups: it lets collaborators see where each other are across shared maps that the group builds itself. It was made to give remote and distributed groups the context about one another that makes working together easier.

where-old was published under the lightningrodlabs GitHub organisation as tooling for group self-awareness on Holochain. Its README explains the problem it set out to address: groups, and remote collaborative groups in particular, often lack the contextual information about one another that makes working together harder. The repository is archived, so the project is best read as a historical one rather than as something in active development.

The idea is a shared map for a group. Members place themselves across the spaces they care about, and each map evolves as the group adds to it, so everyone can see the emergent "whereness" of the others — where people sit relative to the work, the places and the projects that matter to them. Instead of one fixed directory of members, where-old proposed a pattern for maps that groups grow for themselves.

A concrete case from the README's framing: a distributed team keeps maps of its projects, locations and activities, and uses them to see who is present in which context before starting to work together. The README, its background notes and the design documents it links sit in the repository, which is the only first-party record of the project.

From 1 public source, checked 23 September 2026.