جماعةjamāʿa · About the collective
A gathering of people who build, together.
The Islamic Tech Collective is a home for engineers, researchers, scholars and builders who want their work to carry their values with it.
Our story
Many of us came to this work the same way: alone. A developer maintaining a library for her community in the evenings. A researcher asking questions no lab would fund. A teacher trying to explain new technology to students who would one day build it.
The work was good, but scattered. Nobody reviewed it, few people saw it, and much of it stopped when one person ran out of time. The Collective began as a simple idea: put that work under one roof, hold it to shared principles, and make sure it outlives any single pair of hands.
We organised ourselves as five houses so that each kind of work can keep its own rhythm and its own voice, while answering to one trust.
Mission
To build technology with intention, in service of people, and to raise the builders who will carry that work forward.
In practice that means three commitments: to make useful things and maintain them; to publish what we learn; and to welcome and teach the people who come after us.
What the name means
Three words, each chosen with care.
- Islamic
- Our principles come from the Islamic tradition, and so does much of our vocabulary. The Collective is open to anyone who shares the work and respects the values it is built on.
- Tech
- Software, models, research and the craft around them. We use the word broadly: a well-written curriculum is technology too.
- Collective
- In Arabic, جماعة jamāʿa: a community gathered around a shared center. That center is drawn as the solid dot at the heart of our star.
The four principles
Four words we build by.
Each principle is a word from the tradition, glossed in English. Each one has a practice attached, because a value that changes nothing is only decoration.
Arabic terms and root glosses to be reviewed by a native speaker and a scholar before launch.
Find your house.
Five ways into the same work.