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Praxis Doubling
Praxis doubling is itself a plural. The _ing on doubling is a process ongoing, a verb and an action that is taken in a number of different orientations. In this section we are looking at how In-grid has oriented its praxis in this coalition of collectives. Praxis itself being the combination of practice and theory, of code and conduct, and of docs and protocols. Praxis doubling being the ways in which these combinations permeate the others, to create new actions and relations. In this act of doubling praxis, we surface the ways In-grid has been encountering these promised relations in practice, and in doing so figuring out their promise to us.
To feel out these technical network relations together In-grid has built up a debugging practice of technical docs[1]. This research oriented making technical docs more critically accessible and flexible (Hamraie, 2017) to being situated through distributed embodied experitse and collective backgrounds . This methodology is meant to not only form wiggle room around technical practice and their knowledges so that they can be in discourse with their sedimented figures and imaginaires, but so that they can also orient these dialogues towards forming our own collective counter imaginaries and figures that challenge their limits, and what is backgrounded. We developed this approach informed by the concept of semi-plain language that Kelsie Acton notes in here chapter Plain Language for Disability Culture in Crip Authorship (2023). Both in the language we try to use but also in the way we are trying to practice language and the formats of technical docs as plastic, maleable and softer than they are determined to be. In this critical inquiring not only asking how we can make technical language more accessible, but also how these topics that are often encrypted into expertise can be made more disputable and improvisable by communities. Our scope of semi-plain language within technical practices orients making room for people to form impressions and make impact on discourse and to figure out other localised disputable approaches towards infrastructuring.
Background to the Docs
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 form around specific projects and streams of work, usually around 4-6 members focusing on a project at a time [^1]. When the chance, opportunity or desire for a new project arises, the most excited (yes) member will present the project to the larger group to gauge the interest, availability and capacity for everyone to join.
Most of us are fractional and/or precarious workers, so even when a project/pitch garners the interest of enough people to make it feasible, we still face the material obstacle of meeting everyones time and capacity. This includes allowing for last minute drop-outs from meetings to make space for shifts in work or other commitments.
We also allow for individuals to join projects expressly in order to learn from those more skilled in a particular area, rather than rely only on more experienced individuals. So while everyone has the opportunity to contribute to a collaboration, we agreed early on in our formation to not silo off our different skills into roles, expertise and isolated processes. Not only did this create an unofficial "skillsharing" environment, it also allowed more people to join more projects despite there being an initial skill-based barrier. After a learning curve, we usually have a stronger and more versatile community of practice on a project in comparrison to a scenario in which only the technically familiar members had worked on it.
These social conditions are important to outline a the path through which a technical output is shaped by very human realities . In order to facilitate this, we adopted an exhaustive note-taking process, not only to document meetings, but to create how-to guides and informal aducational resources and relatable diagrams to inform everyone as much as possible about the contextual and technical details within each project. We have copious notes for every meeting we have held since we began working together in 2020, although some of our earlier materials are misplaced, mislabled or duplicated as we have developed a way of record keeping and transforming our work into a common resource. We also have notes from submeetings, workshops and conversations, screenshots of collaborative softwares and saved chat logs. These docs emerged from that pile of notes as an extended note-structuring exercise which itself emerged from this tendency to create excessive records of processes.
When we took on this particular project -- an incident was wrapped up in a moment better described in the Chapter 2a: Server Issues: Platform Infrastructure -- we were three years into working together, but our outputs were mostly on computational art which was presented in art and music spaces. When we were invited to become involved in building the infrastructure for servpub, we were interested in supporting the development of a trans\*feminist collective community of practice within London, as much as we were from learning from other communities already working in these areas.
Even though our technical backgrounds and interests varied, we had enough technical knowledge between us to be comfortable learning while building this project. That is to say, even as newcomers to the realm of self-hosting and infrastructuring, we still brought more skill than the average tech-user by dint of some level of formal computing education and personal practice. This is worth mentioning not to bolster our credibility, but to acknowledge that the barrier to entry into this space is manifold and is not limited to whether or not one "knows how to code".
This was another contributor to how we approached writing the docs ; how to include the more-than-technical (social) obstacles, frictions and horizons of these infrastructure.
This project then started through a period of knowledge exchange, wherein more experienced practitioners from collectives such as Systerserver, Varia, and CC shared with In-grid their methodologies of builing and maintaining this types of infrastructure as we made it. Several interested in-grid members were not able to attend these initial training moments, and so to keep them updated we began this project's infinite-scroll-like pages of notes, code blocks and annotations. These notes included references to documentation from other collaborating groups, and to "official" documentation provided by the makers of the softwares we used. Over time it became apparent that this particular local setup, of In-grid contributing to and working towards ServPub, needed it's own technical docs to figure out and make knowable our stories, relations and practices around this infrastructure. We felt it necessary to record the practical steps of the process, alongside more affective notes and asides to eachother. This allowed us to be ourselves, and express moments of connection in documentation that could otherwise be dispassionate. This also gave us room to address some of our own desires and intentions for critically accessible and disputable technical docs.
We approached the docs questioning how these formats for sharing technical knowledges oriented practices towards sedimented bodies, norms and configurations of infrastructures. In our approach we made room to questioned what relations, figures and iherited language we felt friction with, and in doing so feeling the pressure and inflexibilty of these formats so that we can start to imagine how we wanted to orient them otherwise.
Sedimented Norms
Technical documentation is a technical form that has been standardised and sedimented within "traditional" computing contexts like computer engineering and before that from electrical and mechanical engineering . In these contexts, the promise of technial documentation is to provide a legible[2] 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 professionalisation of this artefact however, also means that the docs become a compendium of standardised and streamlined process of building . A process which, more often than not does not always follow a linear path. These docs through their efficient use give selective points of access to knowledge and practices that give the reader/user information that enables them to use the product/tool. 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 people can access them. With Aimi Hamraie's tracing of the figure of the Flexible User (2017) it can be understood as a shaping of users and experts through flexings of soft bodies towards determinate hard machines and systems.
Through this encoding, encrypting and isolation of specific practices and their knowledges is also the erasure of the affective and human presence from the work. By prioritising efficiency systems and the sedimented institutional norms, these docs do not document the ways they demand bodies, communities, their infrastructures, and their knowledges to bend to their sedimented axis of politics in practice.
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.
Similarly, documentation for computational tools are built to provide just enough information for a user[3] to be able to work with a product and fix it where needed without "costing" the production company in the form of time spent providing customer support. By design, docs do not usually reveal beyond a certain level of utility of a system. Open source platforms will make more parts visible but not annotated or documented. That would usually remain inaccessible to anyone who doesn't already know how to navigate technical files or code.
Servpub Docs In-Praxis
As we developed Servpub, In-grid's practice of copious, if atomised note taking, moved towards a pastiche of standarised technical docs. In this process of docs in praxis we met many times and of course made many notes. We took part in the workshops prepared by Systerserver and ourselves towards the more public events of the ServPub project, and tried to document the processes and procedures needed to replicate it for ourselves as individual learners, as well as share with other In-grid members and eventually wider communities.
These docs detail how to setup the different sections of the platform (wiki4print.servpub.net) 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].
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.
The servpub docs themselves exist in several forms, one on the Gitlab hosted by Systerserver, one on in-grid internal, shared Github and one on wiki4print under the Docs category. From a practical perspective, this is a nebulous and difficult setup, making sure they are all up to date it has been a challenge . . . and indeed they are not in sync. 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 amazing thing as we can feel the backgrounds of these different groups come through, what do they care about? How are they practicing these technologies and infrastructures together? and how do they contextually share and make knowable the abstract constructed relations that make up these social 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. 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.
Activating the docs
Throughout this practice of technical docs we have been questioning how we can enable them to not only work across abilities and knowledges but also open up the technical practices they document to be interpretable and localised. In this section, In-grid reflects deeper on how we have inquired into this later step, enabling the docs and the practices they describe to be re-interpretable and re(con)figure-able by non-experts. To do this, we formed a set of workshopsfrom these docs that brought people together to do some basic sysadmin together, but along the way make space to highlight and take time to question the normalised and sedimented figures and relations of these infrastructures. We developed this workshop method 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. [Needs clarification: In doing this, we aimed to make a space where people can bring their embodied knowledges people have gained from doing these things, with the situated knowledges they brought with them. ] For us this was a space for us to think how we can bring in the methods of Amoore's (ref) cloud ethics as well as TITiPI's disobedient action research to open up and collectively dispute what these systems are, how they feel, and what we would want to imagine and metaphor them as.
We ran these workshops in two sessions, one at a combined panel at 4S/EASST in Amsterdamnand the other internally starting to set up In-grid's own digital infrastructures. The workshop at 4S/Easstwas run alongside a panel we ran exploring collective infrastructures, where we presented alongside TITiPI, NEoN digital, Júlia Nueno, as well as members of SHAPE who are involved in this project. The panel presented a spectrum of community organised infrastructure, and this workshop alongside meant to make accessible to the public In-grid's practices of collective re(con)figuring. 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 VPS and foundational digital infrastructure for In-grid. In setting up this foundational infrastructure through this re(con)figuring practice, we aimed to have set it up with our own collective intentions.
Images of workshopping - more on the details of the workshopping could be good - understanding what is legible and whats not, particularly working with the docs to distribute where expertise are and to challenge normalised/violent metaphors or lexicons. Balanced against the need for the docs to be usable. [expand on this]
Annotating the Chapter with snippets from the docs
This should probably happen through out?
ref: https://time.cozy-cloud.net/
Graceful ending
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. It is shaped by our approaches and attitudes towards collective work, accreditation, labour and funding. 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. If we are understand a process enough to make a decision about whether we want to follow that path or not, we are able to make more creative choices and cobble together different methods and approaches. Ommitting 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
- ↑ Technical documentation is a resource that explains processes and functionalities of technical infrastructures.
- ↑ Legibility can be contested when we talk about language written for and by a "specialist" group.
- ↑ this is a very non-human, commercialised role that is used to refer to an asbtract consumer of a tool as a product. It does not take into the account the reality, nuance, needs or real people with a desire or need to use / make-use-of-soemthing.
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