We have four key principles that guide the development and evolution of nodenogg.in.

Sustainable

• This project is student-centred, not profit-seeking and is funded as a part of open access digital commons globally. We cannot be bought out, ‘sunsetted’ or be pressured to scale in a way which contravenes our principles.
• nodenogg.in cannot depend on cloud services that might drop off or where someone might forget to update billing details.

Portable

• We already have more web standards and formats than we know what to do with. As much as is reasonable we will use sensible, minimal extensions of existing storage formats (JSON Schema, Markdown, HTML) that respect the semantic web.

Local

• This project is designed for communities of people that know each other, and supports rather than replaces collaborative work in person. It has been carefully designed to respect and enhance the real needs of students and teachers.
• The software we make is peer-to-peer, distributed software by design meaning we let users look after their own data. We help them understand the trade-offs and benefits of that.
• We aim to try and alleviate the often slow and fraught IT procurement processes associated with large organisations like universities.

Private

• Down to its core nodenogg.in is designed to respect privacy. We want to resist the growth of surveillance platforms.
• A key long-term design goal is to avoid the use of any persisted data in servers.
• In the context of large language models huge amounts of data are being harvested. We want new creative tools that keep users firmly in control of their ideas.