We're delighted to welcome Yousef El Dadiry to We Make Commons — co-founder of BlockNote.js, the open source block-based rich text editor framework that gives developers a Notion-like editing experience without having to build one from scratch.
Making great editors a shared resource
Rich text editing is one of those problems every collaborative tool eventually has to solve, and historically each team solved it badly and separately. BlockNote changes that calculus: a polished, extensible, block-based editor — built on top of real-time collaboration primitives — that any team can adopt instead of reinventing. That includes the very Docs platform behind this blog's publishing workflow.
Open source as the default, not the afterthought
By building BlockNote in the open, Yousef and the team turned what could have been a closed, proprietary editing engine into shared infrastructure other projects can build on, extend, and improve collectively — exactly the dynamic that makes a piece of software into a genuine commons rather than just "free to use."
Why this matters for We Make Commons
Editors are deceptively hard, deceptively invisible, and deceptively easy to take for granted. BlockNote is a reminder that even the tools we use to write about the commons are themselves commons.
Welcome to We Make Commons, Yousef. Glad to have you.