Pdf:ServPub

ServPub

Author: [Author Name]

Publisher: [Publisher Name]

ISBN: [ISBN Number]

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Foreword

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Contents

• Being Book
• Platform Infrastructure
• Networked Infrastructure
• Wiki to Print
• Open Source Design
• Praxis Doubling
• Publishing & Distribution
• Referencing
• Colophon

Contributors: Systerserver

"[T]echnologies are about relations with things we would like to relate to, but also things we don't want to be related to'" Femke Snelting in Forms of Ongoingness, 2018

Politics of networks

Systerserver, a feminist server project of almost two decades, has supported the Servpub project with their network infrastructure. The feminists involved in this project have configured their own infrastructure of two physical servers in the data room of [mur.at], an art association in Graz, Austria, which hosts a wide variety of art and cultural initiatives. The physical servers found this shelter through the networking of activists and artists during Eclectic Tech Carnival (/ETC), a self organized skill sharing gathering. Donna Meltzer and Gaba from Systerserver went to Graz to upgrade the servers' hardware in 2019. The first machine, installed and configured in 2005, is called Jean and was refurbished by ooooo in 2023 during their stay in Graz for the Traversal Network of Feminist Servers. The gathering was hosted by ESC, a local art gallery in Graz, which is affiliated with mur.at.

Both servers are running on Debian, which is a Linux based operating system and host together, Gitlab, a code repository, Peertube, a video and streaming platform, Mailman, mailinglist provider, Nextcloud, cloud storage and collective organisation, Mastodon providing a social networking platform, and Tinc, a virtual private network (VPN) software. The VPN is the most recent addition, facilitating the need for home based and self hosted servers by our peers, which in turn provide services for our feminist communities as well. Those server projects interweave into a feminist networking, an affective, socio-technical infrastructure, enabling the emergence of more trans-feminist groups and collectives like actinomy (Bremen), leverburns (Amsterdam), caladona (Barcelona), brknhs (Berlin) to host their own infrastructuresb and be reachable by the public internet. Tinc was chosen as VPN software, mimicking the setup of Rosa which made a 'jumphole' through the VPN hub of the varia server and was inspired by the network infrastructure of Xpub (Rotterdam, Piet Zwart Academy), as Mara, part of systerserver was writing together with Michael (Xpub), a Zine as a manual, how to setup a network for ambulant servers like rosa. The beta version of the zine was read, revisioned and updated by vo.ezn and deployed in the digital infrastructure of hackers and designers (Amsterdam). Systerserver also replicated the configuration for the Servpub project.

A VPN software creates virtual private networks, connecting computers and machines that are not sharing the same physical location. In contrast to the internet, though, the network between these machines is concealed, thus called private, as it only exists between the trusted machines that are added to it. They cannot be seen by Internet providers or other bodies, who are not invited, nor authenticated in the private network. A VPN can also facilitate a public entry point to private machines, making them addressable and thus allowing them to become servers. Usually, devices are assigned an Internet Protocol (IP) address that changes periodically, thus called dynamic. A home or office router, also switches its public IP regularly, because the internet service provider (ISP) distributes IP address from a given pool, which can expire and trigger an IP address change, so called a lease time. ISP do this to manage their available addresses more efficiently and for minor security benefits. Finding a machine in the Internet, by remembering their IP, would be a challenging if not impossible thing to do. Thus, domain names such as https://wwww.servpub.net need to be mapped to an IP address, so when this domain name is visited, the browser can present the service or content hosted on that machine. Retaining this IP the same becomes important for mapping it to a domain name, therefore it's also known as fixed or static IP. The translation IP to domain names and back, happen with Domain Name Servers or DNS.

Network! Ack!

So if a request is made to a domain name (for example https://wiki4print.servpub.net, which is serving our wiki) that is hosted on one of the trusted machines in the private network of Jean, the domain name request first reaches Jean, as the only server that has a public and static IP address in this network. On Jean, a web engine configuration software forwards the request to the private address of the machine, which hosts the wiki. The request is thus rerouted internally, meaning inside the concealed/private network, to the specific machine, which hosts the wiki4print website. This forwarding request is called a reverse proxy.

Systersever has configured three of these virtual private networks to reach servers which have no public and static IP address, (VPN): "internes", "alliances" and "systerserver". "Internes" is for Systerserver's internal network and it is used to reach the machine in Antwerp, which is making backup of our own servers( jean & adele) . "Alliances" is for facilitating a range of home-based server initiatives within our community, such as the Etherpad servers of leverburns which we use for technical documentation during our server maintenance work sessions, or allied communities such as Caladona and brknhouse that want to serve video content without having to commit to the expenses of acquiring a public, static IP address. There is also the network named “systerserver” which was our first attempt to install and configure Tinc for the publishing infrastructure of the ServPub project, making the raspberry-pies, which host the wiki4print and the servpub website accessible to the internet.

Ip protocol stack

Looking at the initial architecture of the Internet as a communication medium where a node can reach any other node, and the importance of a node to be authenticated by their address as a unique identifier, the current landscape has transformed to something quite different. Since the end of the 90s the development of the IPv6 protocol was conceived for enabling larger addresses, mitigating the depletion of IPv4 addresses, whose notation hasn't been long enough to cover the proliferation of devices, but also allowing more security and various methods of sending and receiving messages. The encryption protocol IPsec, introduced around the mid-1990s, provided an end-to-end security at the IP layer, authenticating and encrypting each IP packet in data traffic. It was compatible with IPv4 to ensure encryption, however it requires extra software installation and configuration steps, but it was incorporated as a core component of IPv6. Therefore, while internet communication over the web, provides encryption with the secure HTTPS certificates, other internet connections, e.g files syncing over two machines, require encryption configurations and/or VPN tunnels. One may argue whether the embedded encryption within the IP packet for every node on the Internet, it is a civil right that the industry and states' surveillance would rather avoid.

Up until now, the transition to the IPv6 protocol has been overshadowed by the tech industry's monetary need for scaling. Storage and computing became inexpensive, which saw the development of serving content through intermediaries, that are located closer to users network access, and which can cache content, known as Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) . Those providers serve most of Internet content and have minimized the factor of geographic distance from the network, as well as eliminating the need for unique addresses assigned to servers and clients for reaching each other. They have, nonetheless, utterly centralized the Internet. Moreover, the lower motivation for business to offer and maintain both IPv4 and IPv6 network stack, as other technologies such as address-sharing and CDNs have fixed the issue of handling the scarcity of IP addresses, have contributed to a decreased pace in advancement of technology that supports IPv6. This has resulted in internet service providers (ISPs) charging higher prices for a reduced number of IPv4 addresses and in some cases, legacy IP blocks of addresses can even be sold in the grey market, because those blocks were not regulated by any regional internet registry system since they were allocated before those registries came to existence.

During the translation of the VPN manuals Tunnel Up/ Tunnel Down the Chinese artist and translator Biyi Wen pointed to the art research project "A Tour of Suspended Handshakes". In this project, artist Cheng Guo physically visits some nodes of China’s Great Firewall. Using network diagnostic tools, the artist identified the geolocations mapped to IP addresses of these critical gateways, based on data published by other researchers. At times, these geolocations correspond to scientific and academic centres, which seem like plausible sites for gateway infrastructure. Other times, they lead to desolate locations with no apparent technological presence. While Guo acknowledges that some gateways may be hidden or disguised - for example, antennas camouflaged as lamp posts - the primary reason for these discrepancies lies in the redistribution and subnetting of IP addresses, as well as their resale. These factors make it difficult to pinpoint exact geographical locations. Additionally, online IP geolocation tools provide coordinates in the WGS-84 system (the global GPS standard), whereas locations in China must be converted to GCJ-02 (an encrypted Chinese standard). This further complicates geographic identification, as mapping activities have been illegal in mainland China since 2002.

In the case of the Great Firewall, the combination of IP redistribution and encrypted coordinates obscures the true locations of its gateways, rendering the firewall a nebulous and elusive system. We would like to argue that for mobile (ambulant) servers, geolocating the private servers concealed behind the private network -beyond the main public-facing nodes - remains a challenge. However, unlike the Great Firewall, the mobility of such servers is not enforced through a top-down governmental control. The desire to be addressable from our home based infrastructure through a network-sharing of tunnels and reverse proxies through trusted public nodes, Community infrastructures in this case, bring about the potential to circumvent state and capitalist surveillance, such as commercial centralised CDNs, institutional and business firewalls, and turn this imposed scarcity into a solidarity action.

Infrastructure as digital litteracy

Being part of the internet, or internets, creating and maintaining our own networked infrastructures involves an understanding of the technicalities and politics of IP addresses, networks, routing and subnetting, and of an economy of scarcity and institutional and corporate control. One way of addressing the politics of networking and of relating with technology is by 'following the data'. Data is not just an informational unit or a technicality, it is how we relate to computers, both on a supra- or infra-individual level but also as something that can be incredibly personal and intimate. We need to keep asking 'Where is the data?' (as in binary information). We need to develop technical awareness and accountability in how we participate and are complicit in the existing infrastructures in which our data is created, stored/sold and analyzed. In becoming more engaged, we cultivate our sensibilities around data and infrastructure politics.

By making infrastructures visible with the aid of drawings, diagrams, manuals, metaphors, performances and gatherings, Systerserver traverses technical knowledge with an aim to de-cloud (Hilfling Ritasdatter, Gansing, 2024) data and redistribute networks of machines and humans/species. We have the potential to exchange knowledge, and to maintain and care for a space together in a non-hierarchical and non-meritocratic way - often referred to as “feminist pedagogies” in the introductions and talks about our praxis. It centers around developing tactics and approaches related to content, welcoming various and diverse experiences located in the places where we physically meet, and cultivating learning by accepting life experiences, recognizing that knowledge is socially constructed.

-->The importance of these offline-online entanglements manifested in the renovation of part of a building in an eco-industrial colony in the mountains near Barcelona, which hosted the first THF. The room onsite was transformed into a physical public interface for the practices around the feminist server: anarchaserver.org Open for visitors, it was used during system administrative work sessions, and for gatherings, sonic improvisations and radio. The door, window, ceilings and multi-levels were analogous to the functionalities of a server’s hardware-software counterparts (ports, encryption, including a repository... and even a firewall). It also had a bed,where somebody could sleep, rest and reside in analogy with the Living Data container, which hosts ALEXANDRIA for Wiki documenting and ZOIA HORN for multi-site blogging.

Home is a server

"Home is server" is a performative event which took place during The Feminist Server Summit, 12–15 December 2013 ,organised by constantvzw in brussels. "Home is a Server" is about collectively embodying a computer with some props, a script, CPU, RAM, watchdogs, triggering data, ports, kernels, hard drives. Together we follow the data flow while we install a server, send data in/out, install a wiki and publish a recipie for pancakes which we bake and eat together.

Humming bird

"Humming birds" is a performative event which took place in 360 degrees of proximity in Faqladen (Berlin) & caledona (Barcelona). Using basic feminist federation by sociometric exercises and voicing techniques we explore the Fediverse, all talking the same protocol ActivityPub.

Cryptodance - THF 2016

The Cryptodance is a performative event to familiarise ourselves with different modes of encryption.. Whilst collectively embodying issues of security, privacy, safety and surveillance, we converge on a technopolitical urgency for sovereignty and a desire for affinities with the body/machine ~ living organisms/algorithms. Cryptodance was developed in August 2016 during the preparations for THF 2016!, by a small international constellation of choreographers, hackers and dancers. They met, discussed and wrote a choreography combining dance annotations, crypto techniques and careful somatic tactics. Goldjian and bolwerK started plotting the Cryptodance project during a Ministry of Hacking (hosted by esc in Graz, Austria), where they formed a joint(ad)venture of the Department of Waves and Shadow and the Department of Care and Wonder.

"Activist infrastructures are where the messy, grinding, generally invisible ­labor of 'doing feminism' takes place." Cait McKinney in Information Activism - A Queer History of Lesbian Media, 2020

// WE WOULD STOP HERE AND TAKE ALL OF THIS OUT // I tdoesn't make sense servpub isn't a feminist networking project -

<<

Feminist networking

Feminist networking is a situated technopolitical practice that engages us in more-than-human relations with hardware, wetware and software. Networks are material, and interfaces to affective relations through protocols. Networking can be in that sense laborious, an act of care, of wielding solidarities, of sharing and of growing alliances, recognizing our precarities, identities and collective oppressions. It is a community practice, a way of staying connected and connecting anew, of looking for and cherishing those critical connections which are always already more than technical. Feminists have long recognized the power that communication technologies hold for forming translocal movements, mobilising and sharing information without moderators. But when it comes to practices of appropriating technology, and coming closer to the machines we sense hesitation, fear and structural obstacles in society and queer communities. As with Systerserver being part of this wider trans*hack, cyberfeminist network, we dare to introduce our server's activities as a catalyst to push techno-feminism into existence and announce that we are here to stay. We set out to appropriate and develop technologies for and with our network and communities, critically addressing the oppression of a techno-fascist system. Together we have a need to share ways of doing, tools and strategies to overcome and overthrow the monocultural, centralised oligopolic technologies of surveillance and control. We need to resist the matrix of domination. Stop the techno-facilitated exploitation and continuation of social and climate injustice(s).

Feminist networking prompts us into making space for ourselves and choosing our own dependencies. These prompts embrace the feminist politics of embodiment, situatedness and consensual decision making. Feminist networking is not constrained to digital technologies, or even to the particular 'network of networks' aka the internet. But when we are talking about the internet and its potential for feminist networking, we need to move away from thinking of it as something 'given' that we might 'use'. We need to shift away from the cloudy image of cyberspace serving the extension and intensification of capital, governance and data power.

Feminist networking is praxis : it means collective vision for a feminist Internet as a technopolitical way of becoming servers, that we can 'co-create', involving our bodies, materialities, networking skills and knowledges.

Networks as infrastructures of one's own

A feminist server goes beyond a technically facilitated node in the network, it is an (online) space that we enter "as inhabitants, to which we make contributions, nurturing a safe space and a place for expression and experimentation, a place for taking a role in hacking heteronormativity and patriarchy." A server is a place on the internet that we can share with our intersectional, queer and feminist communities, a place where our data and the contents of our websites are hosted, where we are chatting, storing stories and imaginaries, and accessing the tools we need to get organized (mailing lists, calendars, etherpads) Hence, serving, and becoming a server is not just a neutral relation between two or more computers. It is tied to politics of protocols, of infrastructure capacity and power, responsibilities, dependencies, labour, knowledge, and control. What are the politics of self-hosting and being addressable on the internet, by having an IP address of one's own? How can we emancipate ourselves from the techno-fascist platforms and content service providers? Which layer of the internet protocol stack we shall intervene? Who can become a server, who is being served?

As feminist servers, we refuse to be served in networks that increase our dependencies on cis male dominated and neoliberal technologies. The spacial vocabulary around having a place or 'a room of one's own' on the internet is therefore important, referencing historic feminist struggles for agency, and safe/r off- and online spaces for uninterrupted time together to imagine technological praxis otherwise.

In her essay, A Room of One's Own, Woolf addresses the need for women to escape from the societal pressure of fulfilling their assigned roles as care-givers, house wives and servants, and become creative without being affected by society's expectations of moral chastity on women. By earning our own means, we can claim the privilege of not sharing a room, so that we can think and write without constant interruptions from the gender based assigned duties. For many people in the feminist movement, the fight to become our own persons, with our own spaces, our own devices and ways of accessing the internet, is still ongoing in the face of intersecting, economic oppression and gender based societal roles and constraints. This can sometimes look like a practice of withdrawal, of temporarily locking the door behind oneself or of creating separatist spaces with peers whose experiences are similar to our own. Yet importantly, insisting on this room of one's own - not unlike the room of the woman who writes on the back of and in reference to other women authors (a room full of books one can presume) - is also insisting on connecting with others, of making critical connections. In terms of feminist servers, the server thus becomes a 'connected room' or even 'infrastructures of one's own', characterized by the tension between the need for self-determination and the promiscuous and contagious practices of networking and making contact with others. These practices inherently surpass strong notions of the individual 'self', facilitating instead a collective and heterogeneous search for empowerment, and partake in creating the conditions for networked socialities and solidarities. They transform to a connected room, a network of one's own, with allies as co-dependencies, attributing each other(s), interacting as radical references to evade hierarchies of cognitive capital, which are crucial for sustaining collective efforts of resistance against capitalistic logics of knowledge and cultural production.

Furthermore, the metaphor of one's own room highlights the ways in which bodies need to be accommodated in the practices of feminist servers and networking. These bodies incorporate our data bodies but also the ways in which we show up in gatherings and places outside the digital networks. Self-organised gatherings such as the eclectic tech carnival (/etc) or the trans hack feminist convergence (THF), and feminist hacklabs such as marialabs, fluid.space, mz balathazar’s laboratory, t_cyberhol, as well as (art) residencies or other larger gatherings (Global gathering, Privacycamp, OFFDEM, CCC) have been crucially nurturing and fueling the desires for our own servers. These are moments where feminist networking can materialise into feminist servers and affective infrastructures.

---

stepped back

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FLOSS Design principles and processes:

Choice of fonts, and design values/ethics/considerations, licensing, questions of openness, and federation, other ways of organising.

Link to pad that is being shared between design and computational publishing chapters. A record of meetings to get familiar with designing with wiki4print.

In-grid wiki-to-print(ing)

The design work for the book was done primarily by members of In-grid. We started to participate in the servpub project in May 2023. At that time none of us were particularly familiar with the technical setup of wikis or computational publishing with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). As design practitioners, our reliance on the Adobe suite that has a toolset tailored to print and digital publishing had to be reconsidered. Our encounter with with web to print practices has been thanks to Creative Crowds and the use of wiki-to-print, which operates on Servpub as wiki4print. In-grid has been on a journey of working with constraints, learning how to bring the modular thinking of web development into the domain of design for print.

"Calling wiki-to-print a practice indicates that it's more than a production tool" - Creative Crowds

During a converstation with Creative Crowds they expressed that it's difficult to talk about wiki-to-print in a general way, as it was made for particular situations, both technical and social. They explained that calling wiki-to-print a tool flattens the socio-technical reality of wiki-to-print as a practice. The social practice of wiki-to-print(ing) has thus become a way for In-grid to think about: the relational aspects that emerge within the Servpub project the productive frictions between FOSS Design and out of the box design software (like Adobe) the potentials for computational design

Within this chapter rather than further detail the lineage of web to print practices (as covered in the previous chapter), we will focus on the practice of working and thinking with wiki4print for the design of this book.

Social practice

We had our first workshop at CCI UAL that aimed as a knowledge sharing session from Systerserver and Varia, which we began set up the first Raspberry Pi that now hosts servpub.net. From there, we then had another two other public workshops that walkthrough the technical setup of the Raspberry Pi, network protocals, self-hosted platforms, and facilitating working session discussion.

What we used and why

Excalidraw for moodboard/ brainstorming, opensource font website for font choice (BADASS LIBRE FONTS BY WOMXN, openfoundry, velvetyne, The League Of Moveable Type etc...), riseup pad for communication and documentation, and jitsi for videocalls... All fonts used in this book are under the SIL Open Font License: https://scripts.sil.org/OFL.

(A section for talking about online x to y converters, like jpg to ASCII and the image dithering tool. As it's great part of internet history)

When we started working on this project, we had to challenge ourselves to take stock of the mainstream tools we instinctively used (Figma board for moodboard, photoshop for mockup, google fonts for font choice...etc). Although we are computational practioners who code creative software, we found that we made a division between design tools and software development tools. It sounds like an inconvenience to give up on using those designed for professional outcome softwares. We believe that using FOSS promotes collaboration and innovation within the community.

Difficulties / Observations

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Praxis Doubling

Contributors: In-grid

==

(theory*practice)*2

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. In this dance aiming to feel out how both of these approaches to bringing theory into collective action can not only make room for more accessible technical praxis, but also for their matters to become more frictious and disputed. Praxis itself being the combination of practice and theory, of code and conduct, and of docs and protocols. Praxis doubling we offer how bringing together different praxis makes room for them to permeate one anothers, to diviate actions and can animate relations otherwise.

To make-sense of these technical network relations together In-grid has built up a debugging practice around technical docs. Technical documentation is a resource that explains processes and practices of technical infrastructures.This collective debugging praxis came about when we came in touch with Serpub'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 for these methods we aimed not only to make room to make-sense of our misffiting with the inherited figures and imaginaires of network infrastructures and their technical docs, but so that this room for misfitting can disorient dialogues towards forming our own collective counter imaginaries and figures that can reshape their limits, and what is backgrounded within their praxis.

methods section?

I am wondering if we have a quick methods para to talk about disobedient action research or maybe this misfts/cripping text <- this basically says making sense of frictions and misfitting in determined relations is a way to subjectivley situate and deviate actions from their plans . . . + also Geohackers

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 facilitate that/our work. 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, usually around 4-6 members focusing on a project at a time. When a proposed project garners the interest of enough people 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 inefficient flexibility like last minute drop-outs or 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 aim 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 practices towards skill and knowledge sharing in 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 take 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.

Abundent 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 within each project. These practices stem for In-grid from the copious notes we make every meeting we have, 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, 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 -keep tagged correctly and have now been lost. But 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 in the house . 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 logistical development .

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 CC, 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 "capture" it. Not many rules for these were put in place for this process of record-keeping so they emerged as a timeline or chronology. These notes included references to documentation from other collaborating groups, and to "official" documentation provided by the makers of the softwares we used. But due to how unstructured the process was at the time we also recorded the practical steps of the alongside more affective notes and asides to each other as it reflected in more detail the context of the information recorded. This allowed us to be ourselves, to centre or 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 unweildly scattering of notes and Servpub's particular setup, needed it's own technical docs to make room for these technical practices to takes shape from the backgrounds, relations and politics around this infrastructure. We go on to share how through these critical access informed docs 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 these technical praxis of documentation with critical access praxis we made room to access the relations, figures and politics iherited from their configurations, and make-sense for ourselves of how these normalizing 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 collectivley (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 specific 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 process 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. With Miriyam Aouragh and Paula Chakravartty's Infrastructures of empire (2016), we can understood how these 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 product/tool in a specific order or 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 the specific role or category of person can access them. With Aimi Hamraie's tracing of the figure of the Flexible User (2017) it can also be understood that these inflexible flat-pack configurations actually aim to shape users and the human factor they make up into normate and generalized figures that fit within their plans.

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 normalizing 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 softwares makers, or for how they felt about these software, just what seems to be enthusiasm for the technical capactities of the VPN. Outside of this affective and political critique there is also no effort made within these docs for them to be accessible to no 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. Open source platforms will make more parts accessible but 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 configurations of how technical docs share practices and their 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 is where we make room for these sedimented technical tables, discourse and knowledge to be tested, debugged and troubled through our multiples of Praxis. These disorienting trans*praxis crossing between critical access and feminist networks to offer how these approaches in action have shaped our network infrastructures. In this section highlighting how this crossing of bounds, merging of methods and breaking down of technicalities can open up the plurality of continent possibilities for how these infrastructures can be manifested by collectives and improvised through their situated politics and practices.

To help discuss a few of these multiplications we are working snippets from our docs to share how this disciplines of theory and practice have shaped one another. This excert below is a key example of our trans-praxis, and where on the front page of our docs we make room for critical access praxis to multiply our technical praxis. In this section offering 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. In this approach making room for the documentation of technical practices to be more accessible to different backgrounds, but also for their knwoledges 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 collectivley manifested Servpub through semi-public and public workshops, as well as closed working sessions and independent working, these practice of copious, if atomised note taking, moved towards a pastiche of devious technical docs. These docs giving shape to how we had accessed these technical matters and made sense of them collectivley.

In this process of coalescing the servpubs techincal documentation through our trams*praxis they started to become politically implicated and entangled in the backgrounds we brough with us. The docs that we eventually arrived at are somewhere between internal notes, technical docs and DIY instructions; a simply-written, narrative-moderate, set of instructions on building a autonmiomus self-hosted server with a VPN. These deviating docs making room not only for them to be accesible in form, but also to our social relations and politics which hold this collective infrastructure together through its embrace.

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 is someways an impressive thing as we can feel the backgrounds 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 socail relations that make up these technical practises? In other ways this can make these knowledges very inaccessible to different groups and communities. This can of course be done on purspose so that their 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 to put the labor and care on the person approaching the work. Here though In-grid in praxis with technical docs wanted to form a practises of knowledge sharing that could both orient towards being legible and accessible, but also towards holding our collective background that ServPub has emerged from.

In this process of docs in praxis we met many times and of course made many notes.

These docs detail how to setup the different sections of the servpub autonomous publishing server (wiki4print.servpub.net), and where we co-authored and designed this book. This somewhat menacing setup is a reflection of how we attempted to respond to the form/conventions of technical docs. [expand on the progression of going from internal docs, to collectively hosted docs with Systerserver, to hosting them on w4p to then to including them as a reference to this chapter].

We took part in the workshops prepared by Systerserver and ourselves towards the more public events of the ServPub project, and

Expand: Articulate our response to that. How can we offer a response, why? What is the percieved gap we are trying to fill with these proposed docs?

But the process of creating something as seemingly neutral as techincal documentation, became more politically implicated as work, efficiency, transparent methods, etc became entangled in the choices we made. The docs that we eventually arrived at are somewhere between internal notes, technical docs and DIY instructions; a simply-written, narrative-moderate, set of instructions on building a self-hosted server with a VPN, set up for collective management/sysadministration.

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, In-grid reflects deeper on how we have inquired into 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 workshopsfrom these docs that we called Practicing Protocols. The name of 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 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.

These workshops came about as we reflected on making these docs, and how much of the sense-making we had made of them came from being in contact with them that made room for us to question and critique their norms. 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 the collaborations 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 - director" 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 misfitting and friction 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 and 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 to make-sense of and orient our serve as we set it up. 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, Júlia Nueno, as well as members of SHAPE. The panel presented a spectrum of community organised infrastructure, and this itteration of Practicing Protocols alongside aimed to offer up space for people to make-sense of these collective netowrk 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 instead set up a Virtual Private Server and foundational digital infrastructure for In-grid to start to experiment with and care for. In setting up this foundational infrastructure through our misfit debugging practices, we aimed to have set it up 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 excerts 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. For the workshop we oriented to aimed for it to be qute accessible technically, as to make it as barier free as possible. This being the case we were fine with people just taking part in the dialogue and not the practice, but did encourage them where possible, with one of use even lending someone a laptop to join in. Saying this the set of protocols we frictiously went through together aimed at logging onto the ervers 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 here, 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 of people we started to unravel not only how it is abelistly figured, but also how the relations it configures and holds in place are shape by a specific kind of body and background. Within the workshop at 4S/EASST this misfitting was brought up by the group when we shared the figures and metaphors of SSH, how it repressents a handshake between bodies and one that forms safe and secure communication between devices within sedimented network configurations.

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 definitley 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 misfit, 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.

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 trhough. 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.

This iteration of the Practicing Protocols workshops was held by 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 server together. In this setup making room for us to make sense of these configurations together 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 their 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 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, which is the individualised account and role that permit them specific limiting relations within the determinate heirachies of the system. 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 no existent 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 thechnical 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 character 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 starting to shape and practice the social and technical relations we desires to be together.

Praxis*∞

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 determined configurations of network infrastructures into other performcances and relations. Here specifically highlighting how the critical access praxis that In-grid is engaging more into has mutually shaped and transfromed the background and history of feminist network praxis this project builds from. Through this mutual shaping offering up how critical access can make room for prescribed configurations, infrastructures and their politics can not only become more accessible to a range of capacities, but for them to be disputed by validating these diverse forms of expertise and knowing.

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. This for us maks this publishing infrastructure to be shaped by our many approaches and politics towards collective practice.

These attitudes have have had material influence on the configuration of the tools and platforms we have used, and the form of sites like wiki4print. 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 include 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. 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 precribed path or set tool-kit. If a person can understand a process enough to make a decision about whether they want to follow that path or not, they have the capcity to make more creative choices and cobble together improvised methods and approaches. Omitting the personal and affective also obscures the experiences and perspectives of the people who made the work, and the situatedness of that work. The docs which exist on wiki4print are an intentioned to remain unmaintained at the time of publishing it more widely, 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 acts as a form of record keeping, but 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 indefinately. All this, being said, our leaving in of these more personal notes and asides do make the the docs 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.

Foot notes

References

Acton, Kelsie. 2023. ‘Plain Language for Disability Culture’. In Crip Authorship, edited by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez. New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479819386.003.0008.

Aouragh, Miriyam, and Paula Chakravartty. 2016. ‘Infrastructures of Empire: Towards a Critical Geopolitics of Media and Information Studies’. Media, Culture & Society 38 (4): 4. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716643007.

Hamraie, Aimi. 2017. ‘Flexible Users: From the Average Body to a Range of Users’. In Building Access. Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt79d.6.

Pad up to date: https://pad.riseup.net/p/PraxisDoublingChapterNotes-keep

4c. PUBlishing & Distribution ?? // needs development of idea

Initial idea is wanting to draw in and work with some of the ideas that one of my PhD student James Fox has done on cybernetic models and alternative organizing structures. But the idea would not be asking him to write about that, but rather to think through in discussion with Minor Compositions, as publisher, how a more cybernetic of organizational structure could be translated into tools of protocols for our internal organizational processes. And the idea would be thinking through those things where the internal processes would be resonant with the approaches being developed within the ServPub book project. In other words it would be trying to work through how the methods being developed in this project could shift the internal organizational structures of the publisher. It might make sense to keep developing this and see how it best fits into the ServPub project as publication, in the sense that at this point it's unclear whether it sits better as a chapter in its own right, or as materials which might be usefully integrated into other planned chapters.

(Minor Compositions, Systerserver)

Coordinator: Minor Compositions (Stevphen)

Contributors: Mara, Stevphen, James

<unicode> ‡ ※ ☛ </unicode>

Whereas a book would usually end with a ‘list of references’ or 'works cited', this book’s final chapter concerns the practice of ‘referencing’ – the reference as a verb and not a noun. This change of perspective underlines how the creation of references, configurations of authorship, indexing of knowledge, and other scholarly activities – that are usually considered mundane and less important than the actual knowledge itself – are in fact an intrinsic and important part of the constitution of knowledge: What we know cannot be separated from the formats of knowing. To use another word, academic referencing is part of creating what Celia Lury has referred to as an ‘epistemic infrastructure’ – the organisational structures and facilities by which knowledge becomes knowledge. Like other formal cultural expressions, also academic referencing follows formal properties of circulation, composed and upheld by technical infrastructures with specific features.

As also mentioned in the introduction, ServPub explores self-hosting as an infrastructural practice, the potential for autonomy in the publishing process, and not least the role of communities in this. Referencing is to be seen in the same perspective – as an exploration of the potential for social and technical autonomy in the process of making knowledge, knowledge.

Referencing is part of a constellation of practices such as quoting, indexing, paraphrasing, annotating, writing footnotes, selecting, etc. Inherently, they can take many forms and do not necessarily work together. For instance, if we write an email to a friend saying, “my neighbour told me the traffic has dramatically increased in the street these last two years”, We are quoting and referencing. But we are not making my reference explicit (we are not naming our neighbour) and we do not index our reference. Academic publishing, in turn, establishes fixed and formal procedures to quote, index, annotate, etc. What are the logics of referencing and formatting knowledge in academic publishing – considering social, technical, epistemic or other forms of autonomy?

Radical referencing

A reoccurring term in the collective process has been ‘radical referencing’. The notion was brought up in a collective conversation on how, what and who to reference in the making of this book; that is, in our collective practice of referencing. As explained by ooooo from Systerserver:

within systerserver we started to introduce the concept of radical referencing -- as a feminist strategy to share knowledges. Radical referencing came to us after a meeting with an artist, publisher and performer we know for years A.Frei, nowadays called https://aiofrei.net/. aio frei is a non-binary sound artist, relational listener, sonic community organizer, collaborator, sonic researcher, record store co-operator, graphic designer, experimental dj and mushroom enthusiast based in zürich.

As explained, the making of references is partly inspired by a real-life social encounter (in a bar at an event) and is therefore also situated, embodied, and even non-verbal. However, the further investigation of the term ‘radical reference’ also leads to a distributed collective of library workers in the United States, ‘Radical Reference (RR)’. An important task in librarianship is to seek and make available information, a process deeply dependent on the existence of catalogues; that is, an infrastructure of references, indexes and data. Many of the formal requirements in referencing (i.e., the stating of authors, publishers, years of publication in the correct manner) simply come from the need to build and maintain an infrastructure where one can identify and access publications.

RR questions the existing infrastructure from an activist perspective. They argue that the librarian is both a professional and a citizen, who has come to realize the activist potential of their profession. As librarians Melissa Morrone and Lia Friedman put it “RR rejects a ‘neutral’ stance and the commercialization of data and information, works towards equality of access to information services,” and therefore actively seek to form coalitions with activist groups. RR is by no means a new thing. Members of the American Library Association (ALA) also took part in the ‘Freedom Libraries’ in the 1960ies, addressing the racist based inequities in American library services. In the time of its existence, RR would assist journalists and the public in anything from finding information on the radical right on college campuses^v to providing references on cycling in London. In this sense, ‘the library’ is not just a building with shelves, but potentially everywhere.

What has appealed to many of the participants in the writing of this book, and sharing the notion of ‘radical referencing’ as a working principle, is of this wider and living library of references. There is a collective interest in situations where references are not always identifiable as objects of knowledge suitable for a conventional library (ascribed an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), for instance) – let alone listed at the end of a book. This would, for instance, include the practices of activists and others, who are not always considered ‘proper references’ in academic writing, and where the formal standards (or ‘styles’) of references can be hard to meet because the knowledge relies on collective efforts or is dynamic in nature (preserved in a wiki, or other technical system).

To some, there is also an appeal in the recognition of the librarian’s labour as an activist; or perhaps rather, the activist as a librarian. RR resembles other library projects found in grass-roots software culture, where it is common (also to the authors of this book) to use Calibre software to access and build ‘shadow libraries’. That is, for hackers and activists to become their own ‘amateur librarians’, building and sharing catalogues of publications – not only to distribute knowledge, but also to curate knowledge on particular subjects, and to preserve knowledge prone to erasure or other types of discrimination. Proper referencing here becomes a question of care and maintenance of an epistemic infrastructure, such as a catalogue or an index of references at the end of a book, in the pursuit of autonomy.

In the following, we take these appeals as points of departure for an exploration of the logic of referencing, and the potential implications for autonomous academic referencing. In other words, if referencing is a compulsory formality in the publication of research, we ask what purposes, and whose, does this formality serve? Referencing in a radical perspective is not just a matter of autonomy from certain references, or types of referencing (like the formal academic one), but rather an examination of the condition of all referencing, and potentially also an exploration of the forms that a liberation from referencing would potentially take – in recognition of other collectivities than the one that occur in a, say, a research community (connected by a network of references), and also in recognition of the various technical infrastructures (such as the wiki used for collective writing) that make referencing in the ServPub community possible in the first place.

Academic akribeia and citation styles

Writing culture extends more than 4,000 years and making reference to other manuscripts has always been practiced. For instance, Aristotle would often reference his mentor, Plato, but as scholar of Ancient Greek, Williams Rhys Roberts has argued: “The opening chapters of the Rhetoric do not give Plato's name, but I wish to suggest that they contain some verbal echoes of his Gorgias which are meant to be ‘vocal to the wise.’” Referencing does not inherently involve a direct mention of a name, and the study of ancient texts involves much debate on these intertextual relations. Not until the 19th century was there a need to specify the ways in which one speaks of others. As readers of scholarly articles will know, there are nowadays set traditions of references that all authors will need to abide by, formulated as ‘styles’ of referencing. The organization of citing, listing, and other tasks finds, in other words, its form in a pre-defined template. This template is much more than a mere formality and belongs to an academic history of knowledge governance and an intellectual history of epistemic infrastructuring.

One widely used standard for referencing within the arts and humanities is the American Modern Language Association’s standard, the MLA format. MLA, along with several other standards like the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM format) or the American Psychological Association (APA format), indicates that the act of referencing belongs to an institutional practice of ‘scholarly’ work and academic akribeia; that is, a rigorous keeping to the letter of the law of the institution (and not just its principles). With a certain ethical undertone (‘the right way’), it performs as a marker of ‘proper’ knowledge within a particular field of knowledge, serving to demarcate it, exactly, as a field of knowledge. The Modern Language Association was, for instance, founded in the late 19th century when programs in language and literature were being established at universities to promote and preserve a national cultural heritage and identity. Formatting references was a way for librarians to index reliable and useful knowledge in a field, and to provide insights into a network of scholars referencing each other, as well as into what and whose knowledge mattered the most. Such practices of demarcation and impact cannot be separated from the governance of research and are no less important in today’s austerity measures of knowledge production.

Besides librarians (as mentioned above) and academic associations, also publishers were keen to build epistemic infrastructures for referencing. The Chicago Manual of Style(used in this book) was historically the first attempt to specify clear principles for making references – quoting in a text, and listing the works quoted. It was first invented by the University of Chicago Press in the late 19th century to streamline the work of editors who had to produce books out of handwritten manuscripts and therefore drew up a style sheet and shared it in the university community. Over time, it has become one of the most widely used reference guides for writers, editors, and proofreaders. It comes in two versions: The “notes and bibliography” where sources are cited in numbered footnotes or endnotes, and the “author-date” where sources are referenced briefly in a parenthesis that can be matched up with the full biographical information in a concluding reference list. As we will discuss later in this chapter, a practice of making footnotes, and also of ‘bracketing’ references are more than anything a particular cultural practice that has become naturalized within an academic publishing world, but it also comes with particular histories and assumptions that reflect hierarchies of power, knowledge and knowledge production. For, after all, what is a reference? And under what terms and conditions does an academic reference and authority occur?

As an illustrative example, The Works, Typologies and Capacities by Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijck uses 26 different types of potatoes to visualize all the collaborations and projects undertaken by Van Heeswijk from 2001 to 2019. The installation is divided into 26 typologies with 26 specific capacities, each linked to a potato species. Consider, for example, the artist who contributes to a work or a project, but also the activist, the teacher, the cameraman, the sound man, the reporter, the curator, the musician, the actor, and so on. The choice of different potato varieties as materials symbolises those typologies and capacities in a network.

Jeann van Heeswijk, Typologies and Capacitiess

Authorship and research ethics

‘Potato style referencing’ does not yet exist in scholarly akribeia. Instead, there is an obsession with origin in a different sense: knowledge has to come from someone, somewhere, sometime. The typical bibliography encodes limited entities: time in the form of dates, spaces in the form of locations (sometimes), people or collectives of people in the form of names, organisations in the form of publishers. Here the figure of the author, treated as a self-contained unit, plays the most central role. The scope is much broader than merely establishing ‘the letters of the law’ (to cite the formally correct way); it has to do with a more idealistic research ethics. Establishing authorship is a question of acknowledging the origins of knowledge, but it is also a scientific community’s promise of holding people accountable for knowledge, and for guaranteeing the validity of that knowledge: at all times, knowledge must be ready to be verified by others, and authors must be prepared to accept contradiction.

This type of research ethics was the topic of the acclaimed ‘Vancouver Convention’ in 1978, where a group of medical journal editors decided to establish a rule of conduct for scientists, editors and publishers, known as the ‘Vancouver Guidelines’. Although, these ethics standards were developed within the medical sciences, they have been applied within all the sciences, and also the arts and humanities. But are they easily applicable in a book such as the one you are reading now?

The Vancouver guidelines outline four criteria, by which all listed authors must abide.

1. An author is someone who has made a substantial contribution to the work.
2. An author must have reviewed the work.
3. An author must have approved the work.
4. An author is accountable for the work.

These ethical standards clearly bring a level of order to academia (letters of law to abide by), but a critique often raised is that they do not sufficiently consider the extent to which authorship, and making reference to authorship, are situated within cultural communities of practices. In some types of knowledge production, like particle physics, for instance, it will make perfectly good sense to include hundreds of authors who have all contributed with specific tasks, but who cannot all possibly have read the final proved version and therefore be held accountable. In other research traditions you would credit people who cannot read, like in some areas of social anthropology, acknowledging the productive role of local informants. In interdisciplinary research, an author within one field may have read and approved a section contributed by a researcher within another field, but with no authority to determine the validity of the knowledge.

In other words, even in the established world of research writing and research publication, the question of where an author is, and who speaks in a text, poses challenges. The complexity of enunciation points to a different type of research ethics, where one is less concerned with the validity and verification of the content, and more with the ethics of textual production itself; that is, an attention to the often unorganized patchwork that knowledge sharing is and becomes in a text (including the writing of this one). As once pointed out by Roland Barthes, text functions as textile:

“a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

Not only in literary writing, but also in research writing, one might argue that language does not always refer to some-thing, but – in the extreme – also to a commonality, something shared; a set of conditions for common ground where the question of ownership and authority remains undefined, where meanings swerve, and new sensibilities and habits arise. In similar ways, the stipulated originality in science and research (‘The Vancouver Guidelines’) is partly refuted in this publication; the wiki4print is not only a repository tool for print but contributes to a larger whole and network of voices. No authorial voice can be raised fully; rather, it is a chorus of collective voices that takes on a name – ‘Systerserver’, 'NoNames', ‘Ingid’, ‘ServPub’, ‘SHAPE’ – in full recognition of the wider ‘tissue’ of a culture’s immeasurable voices of people and collectives (including Martino Morandi's work wiki-to-pdfenvironments (TITiPI), Constant and Open Source Publishing's (OSP) work on web-to-print, and much more, mentioned in this book).

The Demonic grounds for referencing

As we have seen, scholarly akribeia is connected to the assignation of an origin which takes the form of the author’s figure to assess who is speaking as well as for verification. Rather than a fully coherent technique, this form of referencing falls short of accounting for the academic contexts in which knowledge is produced and cannot grasp the ‘textile’ dimension of discursive production. This has even stronger implications for those who produce knowledge outside of academia and those whose knowledge has been historically erased or appropriated. Indeed, referencing’s epistemic dimension cannot be separated from a larger problem of symbolic capital production. It is a key instrument in an economy of visibility central to the contemporary knowledge factory and a vector of exclusion of the subjects that are not deemed good ‘referents’.

In that perspective, scholarly akribeia needs to be challenged on a political ground as well. Katherine McKittrick’s discussion of Sara Ahmed’s intervention in the politics of referencing gives a sense of both the urgency of interventions and their complexity. In her book Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed adopts a citation policy that excludes white men. To absent white men from citations and bibliographies opens up a space for the inclusion of other scholars. It simultaneously emphasizes the pervasive reproduction of a gendered and racial canon by contrast. What is naturalized under the routine referencing of the same canonical authors as a useful procedure for attribution is revealed as a conduit for white patriarchal authority.

In her ‘Footnotes essay’, McKittrick acknowledges the “smartness” of Ahmed’s proposal but problematizes it further. Is it enough to simply replace some names by others, leaving the structure intact? And “Do we unlearn whom we do not cite?” McKittrick’s proposal is that we “stay with the trouble” of referencing, and that we suspend the urge to make the cut. Writing should acknowledge its unstable foundation on demonic grounds:

“the demonic invites a slightly different conceptual pathway—while retaining its supernatural etymology—and acts to identify a system (social, geographic, technological) that can only unfold and produce an outcome if uncertainty, or (dis)organization, or something supernaturally demonic, is integral to the methodology.”

The reason for this goes beyond a mere post-structuralist stance. An insisting question needs answering: what kinds of collectives are implied and elicited by different forms of referencing? How to relate and do justice to the kinds of collective attachments and entanglements that cannot be resolved by assigning a name? How to balance the generosity and necessity of acknowledging, expressing, nurturing one’s relations and resisting at the same time the form of interpellation that is inherent to the naming, the assignation? How to acknowledge one’s debt without any simple recourse to ‘credit’? There isn’t really one satisfying answer to these questions. In part, because there is a form of recursivity to citational practice that tries to do justice with the various levels of agency involved in a creative process. As ooooo (who is part of Systerserver and the making of this book) observed in a commentary to this text, spaces have their role to play in bringing up ideas together:

“we wanna insist on including social environments, (self-organized) gatherings of peer-to-peer sharing as 'identifiers’. The place where you were introduced to the specific author, situate it.”

Not only the quality of encounters is significantly defined by the surroundings and atmospheres. But, as they also point out, spaces are managed, sustained, and inhabited by people. This referential dimension of the space of encounter is visible in the practice of Amanda Jeicher, ooooo suggests:

“In the Adobe bookshop, the artist Amanda Jeicher started keeping track of 'readers', visitors of the local community. On the last images of the scroll (fig. 1) you see the implementation in the bookshop which was also a gathering place for reading and activities. She later when the bookshop was closing made an artwork with the documentation of the real-time roll call of names and people who were meaningful to local artist and communities (fig 2, 3).”

Each reference brings in a new entanglement. Which begs the question: where does referentiality end?

Images of the Back Room by Amanda Jeicher

Documenting the Adobe Bookshop's users by Amanda Jeicher

The Mission District's creative family

Another complicating factor is that any answer is context-specific. A strategy that works in the citational economy of academia might simply fall flat in an activist context where fluctuating forms of presence are integral to a practice. Not to mention the problem of networks of collaboration that straddle different worlds with their different citational practices. This publication is a good example of this conundrum. We opted to attach all our names to the publication as a whole rather than by chapters. We aim to emphasize the collective nature of the effort. Indeed, if we didn’t all write actual words in every chapter, all chapters are the results in some form of a collective discussion and inspiration. There is a kind of diffused authorship that permeates the publication. Nevertheless, we belong to varying degrees to worlds where citational practices are part of an economy of visibility. Therefore, we still attach our names to the publication. This form of balance is an attempt to engage with the collective who worked on this manuscript whilst acknowledging our dependencies on modes of production such as academia and building one’s CV. The part where a name points to a delimited and singular, well-bound entity. But when it comes to the demonic ground (the unstable foundation for writing this text and this book), what kind of practices do we mobilize? Before we get back to this question, we must introduce another set of agents weaving the tissue of references: the machines, networks and protocols underlying the ServPub collective.

ServPub as a referencing technical ecology

To summarize, the exploration of the logics of referencing, in an autonomous perspective, implies a questioning of the authority of the text. When referencing, there are debts with credits, but also more demonic ones, without credit – exceeding the restricted economy of exchange found in academic conventions of referencing (such as the Vancouver Guidelines). However, this is only a partial answer. Textual authority cannot be excluded from the technical systems, intrinsic to the epistemic infrastructure of referencing. Referencing of text is maintained not only by authors, librarians, editors and publishers, but also by a range of software products, such as Endnote or Zotero – automating and reassuring the indexicality of the text, that quotations are formatted, their origins identifiable in the larger repositories of text, and that they are listed correctly; keeping the ledger and minimizing the risk of debts without credits, so to speak. But when it comes to the demonic ground of a text, what kind of socio-technical practices do we then mobilize?

This ‘book’ is not only printed material, but it also exists in a technical layering, or what N. Katherine Hayles would call ‘postprint’. Unlike previous publishing infrastructures, the subreptitious ’code’ of the book positions it as a product of its technical epoch and modifies its nature. This is evident in the content and skeleton of this project, where the book exists in a series of technical and social infrastructures, that afford different materialities (the server, the wiki, the html code, the pad), but it is also reflected in the social practices related to these materials. As an immediate example, Hayles foregrounds the XML code used in her own book: the code enables the cognitive assemblage of humans and machines to function by enabling communication between them.

The practice of referencing within this book is explicitly embedded in a technical ecology in a relatively traditional way, where for example a bibliography generated within Zotero both enacts the spirit of openness while encoding the information in a suitable ‘Vancouver-complying’ standard. This is not too different to the XML example: it enables indexicality and structures formats of reference. However, while in other projects these tools are merely instrumental, or even invisible, most of the technologies that make this book possible have been not only carefully selected but also built. The technical ecology of this project is very much a milieu with its own sense of accountability, verification, and ethics. A self-hosted wiki for collaboration is not (only) an instrumental endeavor, but (mainly) a political and ethical stance. In a perhaps more complex setup, the server, the online meetings, the pads, and the CSS layouts, are ‘the collective’ that this book both is and is about.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is the series of pads, where referencing practices exist but in a highly unstructured fashion: the pads (etherpad instances) traverse the whole production process, not only for each chapter, but also for coordination, planning, and communications. The post-print practice of referencing is also manifested here, yet in more subtle forms and without specific standards. Each pad brings a communal authorship (as there are no straight ids associated with the comments) and acts as a free-floating space for lineages, a variety of ideas, authors, remembrances, and even affective elements. A highly demonic ground for referencing beyond standards.

What is more, the technical layers add their own traditions and circumventions, when we refer, reuse, and remix existing technologies. For example, the project's use of tinc ,a vpn daemon played indeed a daemonic role in circumventing closed academic networks. Being tinc an open software endeavor itself, the list of contributors directs towards a long-tailed genealogy of free and voluntary labour, hosting platforms, and distributed expertise. This opens the question on how do we ‘cite’ not only software, but the ethos, praxis, and economies that come with it. As stated by ooooo in an email exchange regarding radical referencing:

The references are not mere symbolic capital but also have financial repercussions and redefine labour, and these issues stay [a] complex issue to tackle in the FLOSS environments.

Both Ahmed’s strategy for inclusion, and our negotiated relation to authorship and communal authorship, are traversed by these infrastructures and traditions, which enrich and complicate how we integrate production. On the one hand, we play with the demonic inherent to any technological system by choosing a certain ecology of systems that prioritizes care, openness, transparency, and collaboration (e.g., Calibre, Zotero, the wiki format for referencing, and the pad). On the other hand, we are aware of the perhaps inevitable ways in which larger infrastructures capture our labour as a community of authors and practitioners.

Unconsensual indexing

Embedded in networks, referencing takes place under a condition of general indexicality. If we index others (by referencing them), we are also indexed. In that way, technical infrastructures for collaboration, even if resilient, are not immune to un-consensual indexing enterprises, due to their capturable nature. There are multiple frames of reference for indexing, but the largest indexing operation is performed by search engines. Exposed to the scrapers of the likes of Google or Bing, words published online are ranked and indexed. This is the main condition through which digital texts are searchable. In this sense, the condition of referentiality cannot be limited to an economy of citations. It is also an economy of links. To the difficulty of formalizing a citational politics and its problematic assignation of names, we need to add the difficulty of formalizing a politics of the integration of our texts in a politics of search engine discovery and ranking. Once the document you are reading now circulates as a PDF with active links or as a wiki page, it condenses a network of references redirecting to other (bound) objects.

As an example, the wiki is a digital platform where the indexicality of the content is embedded. By using this system as a writing infrastructure, referencing can be automated and aggregated, allowing automated tools to extract and monitor the ecology and sociometrics of an article. Studies of Wikipedia can monitor and millions of references to understand the dynamics and temporal evolution of included bibliographic content, and compare it to other knowledge reservoirs. Interestingly, only 2% of all the Wikipedia sources (with DOI) are indexed in the Web of Science repository, showing how vastly different these two academic spaces are, just in terms of sources and validation. These are but a few examples of the index-capture relationship inherent to computational platforms, whether we talk about the neoliberal subject and the corporate software, or collaborative and open alternatives. While this allows for a better understanding of citation, trends, and knowledge in collaborative systems, embedded indexicality is also the cornerstone for highly unconsensual extractive practices.

In recent years, this condition of general indexicality created the basis for another form of textual production that culminated with the chatbots of generative AI. Indexed texts became components of datasets. Interestingly, they undergo a different process. The search engine outputs links which connect a query to an actual page whereas the chatbot mostly absorbs the referent. Here to be exposed to scrapers means being digested into a statistical model that cannot reliably refer back to its constituent pieces. To expose one’s content to scrapers means to participate (unwillingly maybe) to the production of a mode of enunciation that is controlled by those who have the means to train AI models at scale (what Celia Lury has referred to as an ‘epistemic infrastructure’, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter). In that case, writing robots.txt files becomes an essential part of a practice of referencing as much as a list of references or footnotes. And a reminder that looking for a position regarding referencing also implies looking for versatile modes of opacity.

Intimate spaces

Referencing as conceived in this book is not about metrics and exposure only. Perhaps quite the contrary, the wiki (the vpn, the server, etc) where it rests, is more of an intimate space. As such, we can ask: what do our technical interfaces (the ServPub cognitive assemblage) allow for, that more scholastic bibliography and conventional academic akribeia do not? If there is no space in Chicago, MLA or APA for an affective dimension, the collective elaboration of this publication needs an approach of referencing that allows for the expression of admiration or tension.

Approaches to a more affective approach to bibliographic production also state both the importance of a community of care and shedding more light into the emotional work associated with the labour of academic written production, as noted by Malcom Noble and Sara Pyke. While opening the space for queering textual representation, Malcom Noble and Sara Pyke organized a gathering dedicated to discussing queer tools, methods, and practices with bibliographers. Queer Critical Bibliography, notably, does not entail only a topical gathering, but also emphasizes the intersectionality of the "academic" and the "practitioner", alongside the "emotional nature of queer bibliographic work".

This emphasis on the tools for emotional labour also has wider implications. For instance, if formats are not simply thought of as practical templates, how can they be invested with other energies? Erik Satie, the composer, was aware of the limitations of formatting. His music sheets, filled with notes for the performer, deviate from the expected notation (e.g., ‘pianissimo’), and instead take a sort of emotional and highly specific instructions: "Tough as the devil", "Alone for an instant. So that you obtain a hollow", "The monkey dances this air gracefully" or "If necessary, you can finish here." While there is a dadaist humor tinge in this example, Satie's scores break with the format, even in the form of annotations, of classical music, and allow for unconventional references. Perhaps in a similar fashion, the format for referencing has to represent better the practices of referencing. Ones that reflect intersectionality, collectivism, solidarity, and invisible lineages.

Conclusion

This book started with the desire to publish in solidarity with others. In echo, we end by addressing the problem of referencing in solidarity. The question of referencing has led us to consider how referencing is not simply a list of sources, but a practice that can be considered in ‘radical’ and ‘autonomous’ ways. We have tried to outline what this means and the complex implications of this, also when it comes to the underlying dependencies on tools, software, infrastructures and affective labour.

One needs to understand that academic referencing, or akribeia as we have referred to it, also expresses a form of solidarity, but a very different one that underlines the ethical and almost religious undertone of academic accuracy, accreditation and authority. A style of referencing is a technical and organizational epistemic infrastructuring that reflects the ways academia indexes knowledge in order to build authority. This authority may be of an emerging field or a publication system, but also of other authorities, such as gendered, social, or racial ones. How does one build and ‘infrastructure’ other forms of solidarity?

Of course, one can choose to question and unlearn one’s own routines of referencing (and their compulsive gendered, racial or other preferences). However, an objective has also been to question the underlying principles of referencing on which all writing relies; that is, to reference in recognition of more affective and situational relations, to point out a commonality in writing and in the tools for writing that serves as a shared set of ‘demonic’ conditions where ownership of meaning and authority is less defined. To paraphrase ourselves and Jeanne van Heeswijk, to explore what a ‘potato style of referencing’ might be in an academic text that is otherwise dependent on a Chicago Manual Style. Therefore, radical and autonomous referencing within this project also includes a criticism of the power structures embedded in bibliographical conventions such as the Chicago style, of the role of authorship within a neoliberal political economy of publications, and of the infrastructures that mediate and regulate new digital formats of old traditions. That is, a political stance which is not limited to topicality within library studies that conventionally takes care of the practices and tools of referencing.

Finally, we have also considered the tools and technical infrastructures for radical and autonomous referencing, and how they are built into the ways referencing is practiced. On the one hand, the technical ecology of this project unfolds as a living milieu, self-built with its own accountability and ethics. The self-hosted wiki, pads, CSS Layout, and so on, far from being a mere tool, are a quiet declaration of political intent. Yet, one should also consider how this form of referencing and indexicality that lies within these tools inevitably are also part of a much wider one – a more general indexicality that nowadays underlines the textual production of both search engines, chatbots, generative AI, and the like. Choose your referencing and its dependencies carefully.

Questionnaire

Dear ServPub book’s contributor,

We, Christian, Pablo and Nicolas are busy writing the chapter on referencing. You can see its current version here.

In the discussions that prepared the writings of this chapter, the term radical referencing was used many times. In the text, we start with a genealogy of this concept and its connection to the figure of the librarian activist. We attempt to address the condition of referencing in recognition of other collectivities than the one that occur in a, say, an academic research community (connected by a network of references), and also in recognition of the various technical infrastructures (such as the wiki used for collective writing) that make referencing in the ServPub community possible in the first place. We discuss the various tensions inherent to mechanisms of attribution, the role of authorship and the need for transparency as well as for opacity traversing the practices of referencing and indexing. We would be very interested to weave into the chapter some examples of your practices of (or thoughts about) referencing. Could you look at the following questionnaire? Your contribution would be highly appreciated. (And don’t forget to tell us how you want it to be referenced :-)

Consider the following questions and answer in one or two (or three) lines:

• What does the term ‘radical referencing’ mean to you?
• How do you make ‘radical referencing’ visible in your text?
• How do collaborative infrastructures relate to referencing?
• How to refer to a text that is behind a paywall? Should we also engage in absenting our references using that criterium?
• How to refer to transient and conversational content that doesn’t have an identifier such as a stable URL?
• How to refer to content hosted on hegemonic platforms without feeding them traffic and therefore offering them value? (Think about X where you need to create an account to access content)
• When you are writing a text, when do you make your reference? Do you begin with a list of references in mind? Do you think of different degrees of referencing? Are you looking for references along the way?

Misc

the reference list is here: https://wiki4print.servpub.net/index.php?title=References

 Infrastructure Colophon

Pad for working https://ctp.cc.au.dk/pad/p/infra_colophon

Coordinator: Winnie & Geoff

Contributors: Everyone

Our book is derived from the larger project ServPub which uses wiki-to-print, a collective publishing environment based on MediaWiki software, Paged Media CSS techniques and the JavaScript library Paged.js, and which renders a preview of the PDF in the browser [1]. It builds on the work of others and wouldn’t be possible without the help of Creative Crowds [2], who themselves acknowledge the longer history which includes: the Diversions publications by Constant and OSP[3]; the book Volumetric Regimes by Possible Bodies and Manetta Berends[4]; TITiPI's wiki-to-pdf environments developed by Martino Morandi[5]; Hackers and Designers' version wiki2print that was produced for the book Making Matters[6]. As such our work is a continuation of a network of instances and interconnected practices that are documented and shareable[7].

Similarly the server infrastructure includes VPN server and static IP which are provided by Systerserver, Free and Open source software Tinc [8], VPN Server provided by Systerserver, Raspberry Pi mobile servers set up by In-grid, Domain registration and DNS management via TuxIC [9] based in the Netherlands.

For our communication and working tools:

• Monthly group meeting and discussion: jitsi, hosted by Greenhost [10];
• Etherpads hosted by riseup [11] and Critical Technical Practice (CTP) server from Aarhus University [12];
• Mailiing list provided by Systerserver;
• Poll system for meeting times by anarchaserver [13] and Framasoft [14];
• Git repository by Systerserver

This infrastructure colophon is adapted from the publication entitled "Infrastructural Interactions: Survival, Resistance and Radical Care" (2022), edited by Helen V Pritchard, and Femke Snelting.

Notes:

1. https://www.mediawiki.org + https://www.w3.org/TR/css-page-3/ + https://pagedjs.org

2. https://cc.vvvvvvaria.org/wiki/APRJA_Content_Form_-_Wiki-to-print

3. https://diversions.constantvzw.org + https://constantvzw.org & https://osp.kitchen

4. http://data-browser.net/db08.html + https://volumetricregimes.xyz, see https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org & https://manettaberends.nl

5. http://titipi.org + https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Wiki-to-pdf

6. https://hackersanddesigners.nl + https://github.com/hackersanddesigners/wiki2print + https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Publishing/p/Making_Matters._A_Vocabulary_of_Collective_Arts

7. https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/CC/wiki-to-print

8. https://tinc-vpn.org/download/

9. http://tuxic.nl/

10. https://meet.greenhost.net/

11. https://pad.riseup.net/

12. https://ctp.cc.au.dk/

13. https://transitional.anarchaserver.org/date/

14. https://framadate.org/

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Soon, Winnie, and Geoff Cox. Aesthetic Programming. London: Open Humanities Press, 2020.

Singh, Harshdeep, Robert West, and Giovanni Colavizza. ‘Wikipedia Citations: A Comprehensive Data Set of Citations with Identifiers Extracted from English Wikipedia’. Quantitative Science Studies 2, no. 1 (8 April 2021): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00105.

Sumi, Denise Helene. "On Critical 'Technopolitical Pedagogies': Learning and Knowledge Sharing with Public Library/Memory of the World and syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care." In APRJA 13, forthcoming 2024.

Udall, Julia, Becky Shaw, Tom Payne, Joe Gilmore and Zamira Bush, “An unfinished lexicon for autonomous publishing.” ephemera 20(4), 2021.

Weinmayr, Eva. "One publishes to find comrades." Publishing Manifestos: an international anthology from artists and writers, edited by Michalis Pichler. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2018. 

White, Daley. Historical Trends and Growth of OA (2023), https://blog.cabells.com/2023/02/08/strongopen-access-history-20-year-trends-and-projected-future-for-scholarly-publishing-strong/.

W. Rhys Roberts “References to Plato in Aristotle's Rhetoric” Classical Philology, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Oct., 1924), pp. 342-346 (5 pages), p. 344