ToS double meaning (if you don't have ToS, you get ToS)
Before, during, after a project, and parallel to.
How to translate process knowledge into a form that's more durable / sharable with others.
Translation of dynamic to static form -- is a loss of something, but also a gain. (DIfferent kinds of editability/addressability)i
Formality/informality --
Informal way of sharing based not on ownership.. a way of working together. How formalized do they have to be.
Shadow Libraries: How to keep de-centralized, ... Movement to another level
What comes after the end...
When the domain name bill ends...
The choice of new domain name or a subdomain, such as:
http://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch/
Planning for a wordpress website to transform to static HTML to then live on after a project / reduce the burden of maintainability.
How to leave space for the unforeseen.
Ways of thinking infrastructure that doesn't need a universalist turn
Responsive infrastructure?
Tim Berners Lee: Cool URLs don't Change https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
"Uris don't change, people change them"
Release/Relief.
Alternative URL/URI:
Magnet links
DOI (scihub) .. link from Springer to go to scihub
The fiction of stable Url references.
"the internet is not a library"
There is something with the issue of scale/scalability/dreams of scale
The "cookie licker" as a unclarity of limits in collaboration, someone has marked territory so someone else can't enter.
Standards as a way to go against this. Formality/informality.
Intuition: go with the informal.
Tactical reuse of an existing standard rather then proposing new ones
MUltiplicity by default (require ability for multiple
Different dependencies -- tyranny of structureless: TOS :-P and peer pressure.
[TOS]: Tyranny of Structurelessness <https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm>
Informality creates boundaries too.
Opening as well, as soon as there are structure you can use them (as Freeman describes).
Tactical usage of existing standards. Even if fictional.
Standards come with tools, practices, ... even bad standards can be useful.
Resisting the new movements of Twitter/Facebook to disable "para-infrastructures" --- outside services that via an API push content to these platforms.
https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/new-developer-requirements-to-protect-our-platform.html hmmm
Multiplicity: The NASA approach
Checklist for designers of new infrastructures:
- it is not about the shortest path
- make sure there are multiple ways to do things
How to make the Failure of one component isn't vital (doesn't completely disappear)...
How to make the work more modular to allow use by orgs with different temporalities / skills / perspectives ...
Pilfering from existing institutions
"under commons" http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf
How can I make use of my own institutions resources to help:
Provide a mirror for ubu
An example of differnet logics that combine but does not involve a dependency
(On a technical level, this is similar to TOrrents vs. HTTP, the more seeders the better)
How to make failure not catastrophic?
- translate things
- make different elements function according to different logics and able to continute despite disapearing of one element?
Reading List?
(Alan Kay: COmputer science is a strnage engineering, based on structures as thin as gossamer threads, vs "traditional" engineering such as bridge buiding )
Ad hoc markup --
Complentarity redundancy vs. Competitive redundancy ... Avoiding a ONE must win.
"What makes your data five star"
Controlled vs. evolving vocabularies
A conversation about Responsive Infrastructures/Finite infrastructures
Eva: it would mean fall back to small entities. Not trying to be universal.If we develop these smaller projects, is it necessary to connect them
in order to make them work for everybody
and how we can connect them without losing their specificity, urgency, contextual
Felix: I don't think it is necessary. It gets in the way ... to translate parts of things.
Within the frame work in which you work. It's not the live, reasons to close things down and make them limited, but how do you avoid this evaporating at the end. What stays? What format is useful for others and not a burden for you. That moment of what comes at the end. This moment of the boundaries
Eva: If it has been relevant and working for a particular moment
it does not need to be an implicit disaster closing something.
Michael: To me responsive/finite isn't oppositional, if you think of infrastructure that understands a life cycle / transformations
Moments you need to hand things to the future. Getting rid of monsters.
Example of purging the etherpad database with every keystroke of every pad for years, into documents with no history and space to continue.
Felix: I remember a discussion at xerox park about gravestones as a memory device, and digging through a dead message system (digital). What do you need for memory. Gravestones are richer. It supports memory better. (Memory vs. Storage) (Also: Bowker: What do you archive, and at what cost? [remembering Bowker and the rebuilding of the house?])
Femke: Thinking about the VTI ... for every theater piece that crosses Flemish soil (including Brussels) they keep 3 different media-objects, which did not need to be the same: A loose way to dealing with keeping track, acknowledging limits. At the same time since 97 they had indexed the credit list of each production in form: Name / Role .. Both a lively unpretentious way of capturing the history, next to a much more disciplined approach. As a result you can see the change of roles, it's a rich history. (Sadly this institution was merged into another and the practice disappeared/the database is no longer maintained).
R E A D I N G L I S T
- Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf
- Jo Freeman, Tyranny of Structurelessness <https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm>
- Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/UDrmLp2Nw818VcudoOc5GpX6UxkxMwIqOSfC5brOlCkclx2X
- Bowker, Geoffrey : The problematics of the archive. in Memory Practices in the Sciences Geoffrey C. Bowker0262025892MIT Press 2005
- Rebekah Overdorf, Bogdan Kulynych, Ero Balsa, Carmela Troncoso, Seda Gürses, Protective Optimization Technologies https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02711
Jo Freeman's Best Practices (from TOS, Tyranny of Structurelessness/Terms of service)
- 1) Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. Letting people assume jobs or tasks only by default means they are not dependably done. If people are selected to do a task, preferably after expressing an interest or willingness to do it, they have made a commitment which cannot so easily be ignored.
- 2) Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them. This is how the group has control over people in positions of authority. Individuals may exercise power, but it is the group that has ultimate say over how the power is exercised.
- 3) Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with many others in the process of exercising it. It also gives many people the opportunity to have responsibility for specific tasks and thereby to learn different skills.
- 4) Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's "property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have time to learn her job well and acquire the sense of satisfaction of doing a good job.
- 5) Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group or giving them hard work because they are disliked serves neither the group nor the person in the long run. Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of "apprenticeship" program rather than the "sink or swim" method. Having a responsibility one can't handle well is demoralizing. Conversely, being blacklisted from doing what one can do well does not encourage one to develop one's skills. Women have been punished for being competent throughout most of human history; the movement does not need to repeat this process.
- 6) Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one's power. When an informal network spreads new ideas and information among themselves outside the group, they are already engaged in the process of forming an opinion -- without the group participating. The more one knows about how things work and what is happening, the more politically effective one can be.
- 7) Equal access to resources needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible, but should be striven for. A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press owned by a husband, or a darkroom) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources. Members' skills can be equitably available only when members are willing to teach what they know to others.
Bowkers problematics of the archive:
- Perfect memory has a high overhead: It would be nice if we could preseve all the external murals in Italy, but this militates against our action in the present (we can't paint our current houses).
- Perfect memory is not what it seems: The Ise Shrine in Japan has been torn down and rebuilt every twenty years since AD 652 using the same tools and skill set; it is recognized as the oldest temple in the country. What is being preserved here is not the ding an sich (which creates a legacy of preservation techniques) but the mode of building (which creates a legacy of organizational forms). The overhead problem of course recurs at this level.
- Perfect memory does not matter if no one is listening to your stories: The "archival literature" in science is written as if someone someday will have time to go back and read all this welter of material and make sense of it — assigning priority, determining value, and so forth. This is the secular version of the Last Judgment — and is equally dependent on an Entity capable of massive data storage and analysis. There is no evidence that this Entity is in the process of formation.
- — The Mnemonic Deep, p. 173
===================================
Wrap up session
What is AL really good at -- bringing people together, finding curator of net art.
bad at: sustainability / long-term
Maurit: What if that set of books has never been used / never exchanged.
Do you know if the books actually travel again.
Many time, actions are poorly documented. Then waves of historicizing ...
The notion of handing over...
What are you good at / what can other do better...
Starting of a project?
Are you capable of providing that end?
Can you end it well, not catastrophically.
How does this apply for physical spaces / autonomous spaces.
And for informational systems / mesh networks / guifi /
[Protocols] of sharing knowledge / materials / experience
Scale of relevance from the beginning towards the future (document the iniative)
ENding: can also be the ending of YOUR OWN participation in a project (RELEASING a project in a personal sense)
"Betting on the future" .... how can elements renew themselves / so that others can continue.
Small team balance to separate small pieces making it manageable (ref SpiderAlex)
Separate the temporary from the transitional, living, dead
zombie: dead data that might come alive again... as needed
Consider the communities around a platform / format (MediaWIki ipv customized db)
Intangible capital (Platoniq donation of code/dev worth 50K to the constitution of the Goteo's Foundation > time-bank as part of the capital compensation in future)
(Jo Freeman: Skills and information are also resources.)
Check to see if what you are doing is already happening, or there's a community already seeking help.
OPenKi... open educational communities
Writing iwth situated classification that has a chance of finding / strengthening community
Write documentation is a luxury (high resource consumption) yet you can try to do other kind of things (???) > inside meta-data in a human scale
people who have gone through the process become teachers for those entering...
the best programmers are often not the best teachers / resources.
those with some skills / who remember how they got the skills are often better teachers.
gradients of knowledge and comprehension of how the infraestructure work or function
good teachers are facilitators, you take into account people's knowledge and motivations.