Co-render.com

” The ever wonderful John Resig finally posted his totally awesome processing.js code to the web.”

To merit such total awesomeness, this latest instance of transparency for the greater good (via Christopher Blizzard) has done much more than merely reinforce the superiority of the open platform approach to innovation, and improvement. It has also served to advance our own personal theories on the subject of this blog.

As Christopher Blizzard points out in his post, the code was released on Thursday, May 8;

“By Friday, someone had already duplicated the processing.js environment as a XUL program and someone else already created an editor where you can try out processing scripts directly on the web. That’s in one day after the code was posted on the web.”

Depending on your learning curve, it might take slightly longer than one day to absorb, improve, and re-distribute your take on the processing.js code. However, the point is that you can, eventually. The development code, or API is readily available, and so is the requisite information to make sense of it. We can measure the health of co-rendered activity not only by the good samaritan developers who release their precious codes to the masses, but also by the wealth of tutorials, and online resources produced to help the masses “process” the code, as it were.

Perhaps co-rendering, crowdsourcing, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t really so much about innovation through access, but rather education through access. Co-rendering isn’t the archetypal image of some pale 25-30 year old male hacking away at the iPhone API; it’s the middle-aged president of the PTA having the ability to create a flash demo for the elementary school website, advertising next month’s wrapping paper fundraiser.