Chapter 3: Praxis Doubling

Praxis Doubling: Misfitting Infrastructures

Contributors: In-grid (Batool, George, Katie)

(theory*practice)*2

Praxis itself is the combination of practice and theory, of code and conduct, and of docs and protocols. We posit Praxis Doubling as a term for bringing together different praxis, making room for them to permeate one another, to deviate actions and animate relations otherwise. Praxis doubling is itself a plural. The _ing on doubling is a process ongoing, a verb and an action that is multiplied through different orientations and approaches. By doubling praxis we aim to coalesce together, seduce and mutually shape feminist network praxises with critical access praxises. We aim to see how both of these approaches bring theory into collective action and not only make room for more accessible technical praxis, but also for their matters to become more frictious and disputed.

To make-sense of these technical network relations In-grid has built up a debugging practice around technical docs. Technical documentation is a resource that explains processes and practices that make up technical infrastructures. This collective debugging praxis came about when we came in touch with Servpub's table of feminist network praxis, and brought with us our own background of collective access praxis. By disobediently making room at this collective table, we aimed to make-sense of our misffiting with the inherited figures and imaginaries of network infrastructures and their technical docs. Through accepting misfittings we can disorient dialogues towards forming our own collective counter imaginaries and figures which can reshape their limits, and what is backgrounded within a single praxis. Here, we will outline how we have come to practice Praxis Doubling, and the methods we have used to facilitate this mingling of praxis.

Methods

The practices we describe here are ones that have emerged through an entanglement between disciplinary conventions and our own dis-abilities to fit within them. We engage with time scarcity, technical language hegemony and the expectations of productivity from the situated-ness of our accessibility needs and political ethics. This chapter expands on the ways in which we put-into-practice these needs and ethics, going through the process of working as a computational artist collective and how we approached creating critical documentation for the technical infrastructure of Servpub. We will stop to reflect on the points where the tools we work with created frictions that halted the alleged smoothness of technological processes to a stop, and will expand on the ways in which we worked around, through, and within these tools to make room for ourselves and each other (Rice et al., 2024). Some of these ways include approaches to time management and note-taking, deliberately unpacking or abandoning technical terminology, incorporating anecdotal situations rather than writing for a universal user and critically examining the political implications of names and logos of different tools. The technical documentation that is the outcome of this nebulous process is presented here as one offering of what a doubling of praxis may look like. We have transcluded excerpts from the technical documentation to exemplify this. We also acknowledge that the duality held within the double is not capacious enough to contain the multitude of difference and mis-fittings that the tools and conventions we confronted try to erase. This chapter contains the doubling(s) of theory and practice that emerged from our particular confrontation with building this infrastructure as artists, technologists and crip, neurodivergent and queer peers. We will go through some of our work modalities, to confronting specific tools and their frictions and some methods for making room for misfitting within them.

Background to In-grids Docs Praxis

To describe why the Servpub docs look and work the way they do, we must first (briefly) explain how In-grid as a collective works. Specifically, the processes that make it accessible for us to work together. The number of In-grid members hovers around 13-15 active members at any given time. Of that group, smaller groups cluster around specific projects and streams of work where approximately 4-6 members focus on a project at a time. When a proposed project garners the interest of enough members to make it feasible, we then confront the material conditions around everyones time and capacity, specifically the conditions that are a result of fractional and/or precarious work commitments. We work around that by allowing for some inefficiencies like last minute drop-outs and confirmations for joining meetings and working sessions, as well as caring for those returning after a several months break to rejoin a stream of work. We are also quite promiscuous as a collective and enjoy collaborating with a range of individuals beyond In-grid's already intersectional members. For us, this doesn't dilute who we are but brings in a wide rage of expertise and perspectives that we feel outweighs an experienced or expert individual. So while everyone has the opportunity to contribute to our ways of collaborating, we agreed early on to not silo off our different skills into roles, determined specialisms and isolated/ing processes but to make room for them to be shaped by bodies inside and outside of our collective. Not only did this orient our collective towards skill and knowledge sharing in and through practice, but it also made room for projects to be more accessible to collaborators, where otherwise there might be social, technical or capacity-based barriers. We have found that even though caring for this wide range of perspectices, practices and politics takes a lot more labour, it offers room for these approaches to multiply, for them to more than double, and for us to unfold situated praxis from specific projects and relations, such as the docs and workshops we share here.

Abundant notes, better make some room for them

During the Servpub project, we adopted an exhaustive note-taking process, not only to document meetings, but to create how-to guides and informal educational resources and relatable diagrams to inform everyone as much as possible about the contextual and technical details about each step of the project. These practices stem for In-grid from the copious notes we make every time we meet, even back to when we began working together in 2020. Many of our earlier materials are misplaced, mislabeled or duplicated as we have been trying over these years to feel out a way of keeping records outside of big-tech tools, and in a way that is accessible to our members, however entangled they are. These notes started on a series of pads, not all of which have been tagged sensically or have now been lost. The pads that we managed to wrangle were consolidated into an index pad, which we named the pad-of-pads taking after the bag of bags which we all have somewhere our home. We then moved to a shared Git repository, which some us have integrated with local text editing software Obsidian to keep a record of projects and events. Our current admin setup is on a Servus hosted suite where we have a shared calendar, notes, polls and storage space. This, however, is a more recent administrative development that we arrived at to balance the need for logistics with the need for friction, improvisation and pause .

For the Servpub project, we had notes together on etherpads hosted by a scattering of other collectives and organisations. These pads held our notes from submeetings, workshops, conversations, and saved chat logs. These notes overflowed from the working sessions we had with other feminist server collectives such as Systerserver and Creative Crowds, where they shared with In-grid their practices and politics around setting up and maintaining these types of network infrastructures. These initial training moments were an important resource and we began this project's infinite-scroll-like pages of notes, code blocks and annotations to try and contain it. Not many rules were put in place for this process of record-keeping so they emerged as a chronology. The notes included references to documentation from other collaborating groups, and to "official" documentation provided by the makers of softwares. Due to how fluid the process was at the time, we also recorded more affective notes and asides to each other in the same pads, reflecting the context of the information recorded. Often this context only made sense to us as collaborators and friends. However, even if not necessary to understand the technicalities of the work, these side notes allowed us to be ourselves, to centre our subjectivities and express moments of connection to and around the work being done through documentation that could otherwise be isolated and dispassionate. Slowly ufolding from this scattering of pads and notes we started to makes sense of what these infrastructures, technical practices and their knowledges were to us and how we desired to shape them.

Over time it became apparent that our unwieldy scattering of notes and Servpub's particular setup, needed it's own technical docs to make room for these technical practices to take shape from the backgrounds, relations and politics around this infrastructure. We go on to share how, through these critical access informed docs, we made room to question how their inherited formats for sharing technical knowledges were sedimented within configurations to dictate bodies, practices and matters into determinate infrastructures, roles and relations. By doubling the technical praxis of documentation with critical access praxis we made room to access the relations, figures and politics inherited from their configurations, and make-sense for ourselves of how these normalising relations misfitt our devious collective bodies. In making room for frictious misfitting, feeling the pressure and inflexibilty of configurations as to imagine how we desire to be collectively (dis)oriented otherwise.

Sedimented Norms

Technical documentation is a form of knowledge exchange that has been standardised and sedimented within institutionalised computing contexts like computer engineering and before that from electrical, mechanical and more specifically industrial engineering and design. In these contexts, the promise of technial documentation is to provide a legible understanding of how something was built and from there be able to maintain it within specific regimes and to develop it further within the particular imaginaries of the system it is embeded within. The expertise of this artefact however, also means that the docs become a compendium of standardised, abstracted and streamlined processes of infrastructuring. Jeniffer Gabrys might call this a "flat-pack cosmology" or one where technologies and their practices are configured into determined infrastructures, which hold in place specific worlds and politics. Miriyam Aouragh and Paula Chakravartty's Infrastructures of empire (2016), offers an understanding of how the promises of technological freedoms through specific determinate infrastructures, can bring with them their background and often the dominant militiaristic protocols and politics they are produced through. Technical docs through this efficient orientation offer selective points of access to their practices that dictate the reader/user to use the tool/product in a specific order or within a specific relation. The selection here orients them to give just enough information to make the tool knowable and practiced in the way it was intended to be, but also encoded so that only a specific role or category of person can access them. Aimi Hamraie's tracing of the figure of the Flexible User (2017) describes how these inflexible flat-pack configurations actually aim to shape users and the human factor they make up into normate and generalised figures that fit within their plans. This figure of the user is often whom such technical docs are made for and we will revisit the user further on in the chapter when we talk about improvised roles.

Through their encoding, encrypting and isolation of specific practices and their knowledges, technical docs configure the erasure of not only the affective and human presence from the systems, but also their backgrounds and politics. By prioritising "efficiency", these docs do not question the ways they demand bodies, communities, their infrastructures, and their practices to bend to their normalising configuration. If we take up Tinc's official technical docs for example, there is no room made to offer any of the politics of the software's makers, or for how they felt about this software, just what seems to be enthusiasm for its technical capacities. Outside of this affective and political critique there is also no effort made within these docs for them to be accessible to non experts, both in the language they use and the way they structure and offer up their matters. By design, docs do not usually reveal beyond a certain level of utility of a system. While open source platforms will make more parts accessible, they are still not annotated, documented or legible to a wide range of capacities. This orients these technical practices and infrastructures to only be accessible to anyone who already knows how to navigate technical files or code.

This sedimented configuration of how technical docs share practices and knowledges, not only limits the capacities of what these network infrastructures can do, but also who can manifest them. The isolated technical knowledges held in docs highlights how these practices are held apart from their theory, how their sociality and background are hidden from view and how this beckons for us to seduce them into devious praxis.

Servpub Docs In-Praxis

This section will dive deeper into the specifics of how In-grid puts in practice the ideas and theories with which we open this chapter. To mark this transition we are mobilising our "in-" prefix, which, following in the footsteps of trans*feminisms' use of "trans-" as a prefix, we use in- to indicate that we will be situating ourselves into the word that follows. This can mean forms of materialities and relations that we create as we work through something and what happens when we situate ourselves within the word following in-.

Here, we explore how we navigated working with the conventions of technical docs within a practice that applies the theories of access, abilities and the friction between them in the context of technical legibility. Putting the docs in-praxis. This is where we make room for these sedimented technical tables, discourse and knowledge to be tested, debugged and troubled through our multiples of Praxis. This disorienting trans*praxis crossing between critical access and feminist networks describes how these approaches have shaped our network infrastructures in action. In this section, we highlight how this crossing of bounds, merging of methods and breaking down of technicalities can open up the plurality of continent possibilities for how infrastructures can be manifested by collectives, and improvised through their situated politics and practices.

To help discuss a few of these multiplications we are including snippets from our docs to share how these disciplines of theory and practice have shaped one another. This excerpt below is a key example of our trans-praxis, where on the front page of our docs we make room for critical access praxis to multiply our technical praxis. In this section, we offer up how we have worked with Kelsie Acton's notion of semi-plain language (2023) to try to challenge these inaccessible and sedimented norms of technical docs. This approach makes room for the documentation of technical practices to be more accessible to different backgrounds, but also for their knowledges and expertise to be disputable and shaped by those taking it into praxis.

Access (〜￣▽￣)〜

Acton states this as:

Note on writing: This chapter is written in what I call a semi- plain language style. This means I do the following:

• Use an active voice
• Mostly use the 6000 most common words in the English language
• Use short sentences
• Use 14 point font
• Use “I” and “you”

Following Acton In-grid understands this as not trying to assimilate dialogues into dominant technical talking points. Instead, In-grid approaches this practice through critical access as to distribute where the expertise of systems are located, making them disputable from many experiences, backgrounds and knowledges.

As we collectively manifested Servpub through semi-public and public workshops, closed working sessions and independent working, this practice of copious, if atomised note taking, moved towards a pastiche of devious technical docs. In this process of coalescing servpubs technical documentation through our trans*praxis, the docs became politically implicated and entangled in the backgrounds we brought with us. The docs that we eventually arrived at are somewhere between internal notes and personal asides, technical docs and DIY instructions; a simply-written, narrative-moderate, set of instructions on building an ambulent self-hosted server with a VPN. These deviating docs make room not only for them to be accessible in form, but also to our social relations and politics which hold this collective infrastructure together.

Why Tinc?

We are using Tinc because it is inherited from the history of projects that we are working with. This setup pulls from the original work of XPub and their HUB project, which used it to form experimental server space for their students which could get passed institutional firewalls securely and let devices roam. This led to the development into other projects like Rosa and the ATNOFS project, as well as Constant's Circulations. Similarly, we used the setup to form an experimental network of servers to form this Servpub collective publishing infrastructure.

You can read more on this history at the bottom of Constant's Circulations about page under the heading Radical Referencing.

Below is a list of other resources and docs on how to set up tinc that we have worked from/with:

• XPub docs - Tinc VPN install
• Lurk docs - Tinc VPN install
• Psaroskala zines - Making a private server ambulant

In the background of servpub there are also pre-existing separate docs for the Tinc setup by Xpub, Run Your Own and the many versions and docs of Wiki4print hosted on their wikimedia instances. This diversity of docs impressive, as we feel the background and priorities of these different groups come through. What do they care about? How are they practicing and approaching these technologies and infrastructures together? And how do they contextually share and shape the abstract social relations that make up these technical practises? However, this same abundance and specificity can make these knowledges inaccessible to different groups and communities. This can of course be done intentionally, so that there has to be a certain level of intimacy given to the infrastructure, its politics, practices and technologies to manifest them. This is highlighted in en-crip-ing time (Simms and Marangoni 2025) where the work is purposfully obfuscated and en-cripped so it is only known through radical practices of intimacy and care. Here though, In-grid, in praxis with technical docs wanted to form a practise of knowledge sharing that could both orient towards being legible and accessible, but also towards holding our collective background that ServPub has emerged from.

Activating the docs

Throughout our practice of technical docs we have been questioning how we can make room for them to not only be accessible from a plurality of capacities and backgrounds, but also open up the technical practices they document to be disputable and improvise-able by those manifesting them. In this section, we reflect more deeply on how we have explored this later step, and how we approached making the docs and the practices they offer to be re-interpretable and disoriented from a plurality of embodied expertise. To do this, we formed a set of workshops from these docs that we called Practicing Protocols. The name, Practicing Protocols, itself emerges from both its feminist STS roots, but also through a crip understanding of protocols as a place to dispute expert knowledge of systems through counter protocols. Through this framing, these workshops aimed to make room for people to accessibly be in touch with technical practices, and along the way, make-sense of the misfitting we as a group felt from the normalised and sedimented figures and relations these network configurations hold in place. We developed this workshop as a way to not only make accessible the often obfuscated and encrypted practices of digital infrastructure, but to also bring them into dialogue with the operational concepts and metaphors they operate through. In doing this, our workshop aimed to make a space where people can bring the knowledges they have gained in practice together, with the embodied knowledges and expertise they brought with them from their backgrounds. To dispute, improvise and disorient these protocols in action we also turned to the methods of TITiPI's Disobedient Action Research, to inform us of how to collectively dispute what these systems are, how we make-sense of them, and how we would want to imagine, metaphor and practice them otherwise.

The Logo for Tinc. It has a black and white image of an Apache attack helicopter with the work "Tinc" written across it.

During the Servpub project where there was an abundance of feminist network praxis, there was also ample room made to question the figures, relations and norms of these infrastructures as we actioned them. Through our collaborations with the other collectives involved with Servpub, there had been times where In-grid members were questioned by others about our sedimented metaphor and relations, and making us reconsider if our collaborations are oriented through the "driver - navigator" pair programming hierarchies we inherited from institutions of computing, or if we wanted to reorient these relations into "conductor - finger dancer" or similar. When taking this critique away from our own sedimented norms of practice we also found depth in questioning how we could critique the other misfittings and frictions we felt within the protocols, figures and inherited relations of the infrastructures we were manifesting. This is where we started to find and make friction around things such as Tinc's logo (pictured above), which for us seemed to be one of the few political gestures of the VPN. The Logo itself pictures an Apache attack helicopter as a signifier of security and privacy, and which for us seems to situate this software as embedded within security politics. These politics are ones where safety and privacy of networks are conflated with security and militarism. This sense-making of misfitting, made room for us to collectively orient and improvise how we wanted to imagine and enact these relations of safety and privacy from our own backgrounds and politics. Here by making both the theory and practice accessible and disputable we offer up how this praxis has more than doubled.

So far we have run the Practicing Protocols workshops for two iterations, one as part of a combined panel In-grid members hosted at 4S/EASST in Amsterdam, and the other internally with In-grid members. The workshop at 4S/Easst, which is an international Science and Technology Studies (STS) conference, was run as part of a combined panel, where we presented work alongside TITiPI, NEoN Digital, researcher Júlia Nueno, as well as members of SHAPE. The panel presented a spectrum of community organised infrastructure, and this iteration of Practicing Protocols aimed to offer up space for people to make-sense of these collective network infrastructures together. The second workshop was run internally for In-grid members who were not specifically involved within Servpub and may have missed out on learning these skills or understanding these practices and their knowledges. This second workshop within In-grid also importantly moved from being an accessible representational process, like we did at 4S/EASST, to part of a working session were we set up a Virtual Private Server and foundational digital infrastructure for In-grid itself. By setting up this foundational infrastructure through our misfit debugging practices, it allowed us to more intimately have established the structure through our own collective intentions and desires <3.

Bellow we highlight two points of praxis where we emphasise the sense-making of misfitting within configurations that unfolded from the Practicing Protocols workshops. The excerpts aim to give a snapshot into how these different groups, contexts and expertise felt and made friction that aimed to improvise and deviate these network norms towards the collective bodyminds we are in dialogue with.

Misfitting Contracts . . .

An projection showing the workshop slides from Practicing protocols alongside the collective working pad we used for debugging at 4S/EASST.

During the first itteration of these workshops at 4S/EASST, we had a group of 5-6 people mostly from accademia and from a variety of backgrounds, both disciplinarily and lived experience. This workshop was at 8:30 am the day after the main conference celebration, and so everyone there was a bit hazy, and gently waking up.The workshop was designed to be quite accessible technically, to make it as barrier free as possible. This being the case we were fine with people just taking part in the dialogue and not actively practice the techniques described, but did encourage them where possible, with one an In-grid member even lending a participant thier laptop so that they may join in. The set of protocols we frictiously went through together aimed at logging onto the servers via SSH and editing a text together that was being served there.

A diagram made by In-grid to represent how SSH communicates to the server from a device.

In this section, we raise one of the key misfittings that was made-sense of during this workshop to offer up how this process made room for us to question and disorient the sedimented configurations of network infrastructures. To do this we bring focus to Secure Shell (SSH), and how when making-sense of this protocol with this group we started to unravel not only how it is abelistly figured, but also how the relations it configures and holds in place are shaped by a specific kind of body and social relation. It was through the metaphor of the 'handshake' through which SSH mobalises that this misfitting was brought into question, particularly how the 'handshake' between bodies is meant to represent an act which forms safe and secure communication between devices within sedimented network configurations.

The following transclusion from our docs illustrates how this metaphor can be used.

Security via SSH Keys

SSH Keys are user specific and are used in addition to a shared login password to make it more secure than traditional usernames and passwords. To make this method of access truly secure we will need to eventually disable password-only login.

SSH is often metaphored as a handshake between devices, but you can also think of the shared public file as the key, and the private file as the lock. Locks are non-transferrable and have to be generated per user.

To generate a key each user must execute this command on their laptop:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

This will generate a pair of public and private keys. You will then need to fill in the information requested (most of it is optional so you can leave it blank) and set a password (Also optional).

You’ll receive something like this:

$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/me/.ssh/id_rsa):`
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/me/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/dave/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
ef:69:3b:9e:3b:2d:99:0d:ac:57:4e:b2:92:82:bd:9f me@hostname
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
|        S.       |
|         .+ o    |
|     o   o.%     |
|    . o +oXo+    |
|      .+E=B*     
+-----------------+` 

The shared key is the:

id_rsa.pub

The private Key is the:

id_rsa

When accessing the servers through SSH together, we reflected on how our devices were interfacing through these sedimented metaphors and figures. As a group here we started to question what a handshake represented within this configuration. The person shaking the hand is firstly assumed able bodied, but also when we take in the backgrounds and histories of these network infrastructures, they are also predominently male and white. This con-figuration of the handshake then is a place where many of us felt we misfitt, where we did not want to be "pulled in by the hand" and into determined and limiting forms of contract-making as trust, and the frictions we had around this. The following notes emerged from our collective reflection and writing on SSH.

2. SSH

• authenticity of host can't be established. - trust issue
• hospitality; being a respectful guest & welcoming host (simultaneously)
• server playing hard to get but finally got a seat at the table
• the terminal visually looks the same whether its your local machine terminal or a different shared machine, so it feels like the same. Because you are bringing somewhere else to you instead of you going.
• there is an obscurity to the virtual
• How could an SSH feel more material, closer
• Anonymity
• temperature feels very material - what else could be included i.e. location to the server
• physically caring for it's wellbeing (plugged in)
• is the handshake appropriate? i.e. banking, trumpy handshakes, getting pulled in by the hand, whats the origin of the expression?
• is it about a manifestation of trust - and so what else could signify this
• server hugs

In dialogue around this configurational misfitting the group started to orient towards what we would rather be connecting and building trust through. How we as a group wanted to imagine and practice these networks through intimacy and care. From this sense-making of how these infrastructures have been normalised to specific bodies, we started to question how we wanted to shape and improvise them to our relations and desires. There was more in conversation but the collective notes of the workshop quoted above shared the "server hugs" that we desired together, for the soft, comforting embrace of networks we wanted to shape and be held by.

Improvised Roles . . .

An image from the workshop day and in one of the members' kitchens ready to get coding.

The second iteration of the Practicing Protocols workshops was held internally by a group of seven In-grid members. It aimed not only to share the practices and knowledges we had built up from being a part of Servpub, but also set up our first In-grid server together. This workshop was intended to leave room alongside the practicalities of implementing the server, for making sense of these configurations, and how we might want to orient and improvise them otherwise together through collective praxis. This workshop was held just after a nice lunch we cooked for each other, and as we sat thier, quite full and very comfy, we started to manifest our collective infrastructure together. The steps we took to do this were to log in to the server, to make user accounts for our members and to host a website of our workshop notes there.

A diagram describing how the users are configured within network infrastructures.

In this section here we highlight one of the main misfittings In-grid members felt during this workshop. The misfitting that was unavoidable here was that of the determined user of these servers. The user is the individualised account and role that permits specific limiting relations within the determinate hierarchies of the system. An example of this is the demarkation of a user to a user within the SUDO group. SUDO group users are members of a user group called 'Superusers', who have more access to perform sensitive commands. It is often figured as a way of elevating a users privileges, which in turn allows them to do things like update or install packages, restart or disable tasks. The term SUDO is a truncation of the phrase 'Superuser do'.

We read the figure of the user here as one who is isolated within a closed system, not only through technical protocols but also through the nonexistent capacity for and resulting invalidation of any social backgrounds. By finding friction with the configuration of the user within network infrastructures, we question who these technical relations are imagined for, but also what the limits of their relations and capacities for intimacy are.

Adding Users

To make a new user, use the command below.

adduser <nameofuser>

[!note] You will be prompted to input a password and it is always better to give different users different passwords for security.`

If you want to give this user sudo access, then they have to be added to the “sudo” group. You don’t need to create this group, it exists by default and you can just add or remove users from it. The sudo group is stored in this directory: /etc/sudoers.d/

To add a user to the sudo group run the following command:

usermod -aG sudo <nameofuser>

When making our user accounts together on the server one by one, we questioned how these roles misfit our collective relations. The user role as stated above only holds the capacity for a determinate relation, one where a person interfacing with the server has to flex to specific relations and norms. When we brought this in touch with how we make room for our members to "perform" in our space, the role of the user had very defined and hard limits, and ones that could not hold the diversity of bodyminds, capacities and perspectives we wanted to embrace as a collective. In this space of misfitting we amplified this friction by starting to imagine what roles and relations we wanted to manifest within our network infrastructures.

User Protocols

Not users but:

• maintainers?
• carers?
• Member?
• Players?
• Collaborators and caretakers
• it is nice to be individuals in a collective
• characters
• Conversationalists
• persona
• Infra as another collaborator not users/using
• Fistulas

When making this room to disorient the sedimented role of the user within network infrastructures, we started to question how we wanted to be together on this server. From this point of collective deviation we started to shape and perform the user through our own metaphors and figures. These ranged from maintainers and carers, but also to characters and personas. These figures bringing a blend of In-grid's background of performances, parties and arts with those of infrastructural practices and labours. From this point of misfitting and friction making, along side many others in the workshop, In-grid starts to shape and practice the social and technical relations we desired to be together.

Praxis*∞

In-grid, and more largely the group involved with Servpub as a whole, is made up of many individuals with still more multiple practices/praxises. For us, this means that this publishing infrastructure is shaped by our many approaches and politics towards collective practice. As we have worked to build an infrastructure which tries to reflect the desires and concerns of those who have built and will use it, we have also created a way of recording that work which includes elements of our personhood. Traditional documentation ommits affective detail intentionally. On a practical level this is a useful way of keeping work succint, searchable and quick to parse and implement (ideally, anyway). What this can do however, is exclude none experts by glossing over information about why you might take a particular action in lieu of another, making steps appear arbitrary or opaque. Through learning and making this infrastructure, we recognised that if we are not able to understand the reasoning behind why a step has been taken in a set of documentation, it makes it difficult to deviate from that prescribed path or set tool-kit. One of the our aims for creating critical access informed docs is to create enough room around these technical process that allows others to make these decisions about whether they want to follow that path or not, and to build the capacity to make more creative choices and cobble together their own improvised methods.

Reflecting back on the plurality of praxis we have shared in this chapter, from the servpub infrastructure, to our resulting access informed docs, and the Practicing Protocols workshops we made with them, these entangled and overflowing layers of praxis offer up how we have brought together disciplines and methods in action that unfold the predetermined configurations of network infrastructures into other performances and relations. Here we highlight how the critical access praxis that In-grid is engaging has mutually shaped and transformed the background and history of feminist network praxis from which this project builds. Through this mutual shaping we offer up one way of how critical access can make room for prescribed configurations, infrastructures and their politics to be made more accessible to a range of capacities, and also to be disputed by validating the diverse forms of expertise and knowing that we bring to meet them.

The docs which exist on wiki4print are intentioned to remain unmaintained at the time of publishing, as a record of the place and position we were at when the platform was made. A version will be hosted in a way where others can contribute to maintaining it, but the choice to create a static version both provides a record for memory-keeping, and also reflects the fact that they were written by a group of precarious and fractional workers who can't commit to keeping them up to date indefinitely. Leaving in a frozen stage with personal notes and asides included does make them more vulnerable, and more deeply entangled with our own partialities and politics. However, we welcome this complication, as we are happy to leave our practice entangled with our theory, and our code knotted in our conduct.