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governance and ownership

Linked to 10 items

• from: Clusterduck (chapter)

  41:28 Speaking of tools, it’s not easy at all to understand how to share our work in a very correct way. In the beginning, we were discussing everything on chats and for example, Aria who comes from a background in activism, was very good at teaching us how you can make horizontal decisions. governance and ownershipNow we understand that even if we have many tools, decisions have to be made in a video call. Via emails is impossible to have a smooth dialogue and understand each other. We have a lot of suggestions now, if you want to start a collective, write to us at hello@clusterduck.space because we are starting to be really good at it!

• from: Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 1:02:34 Publishing is a very broad term, also if you look at books. Monoskop is not the website where you would find blockbuster books that were made as consumer products in the first place. You can probably find those on the Internet Archive, which might be why it triggered these publishers so much because maybe they were thinking in terms of pure commerce. So this is just one side of the story, that Monoskop is very kind of niche in terms of big publishing — we don’t have big publishing because it’s not relevant for this project. There’s still a difference between academic publishing, which is mostly publicly funded, and other types of publishing, which is funded by publishers not connected to university or academia. Sci-Hub mostly consists of publicly funded content coming from researchers at universities. governance and ownershipI think it’s ethically wrong in general to see what happened to the whole academic publishing field, that it ended up with five large publishers that own all journals. These university libraries, of course, need to cut down access to a lot of these journals or whole packages of journals because they just can’t afford it. What Sci-Hub does is almost a necessity today for researchers worldwide to survive, otherwise, the life of an academic is very limited, even with access to university libraries. But with other publishers who are not blockbusters and who are not academic, it’s mostly about the revenue. As I said, I think it’s a case-by-case thing. If the book is good, the free digital distribution does help the sales. There are examples such as books by Alessandro Ludovico that are openly accessible. I think his first book, “Post-Digital Print”, went through three or four editions and the book was launched on the Monoskop Log. On the day of the book launch, they gave me a USB stick, I put it on Monoskop Log and that was the first day the book was published. He did the same with these new books with MIT Press, it’s open access, and I think it does help the sales. So if the book is not good and it appears online, people might see that it’s just not good and they will not buy it, but it’s really hard to talk in general. I would say that I totally support all publishers and I don’t do it to distort them, I do this to support them and to give visibility and access to their work because maybe they can’t do it, even if they would want to, which was also a case I heard many times.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 05:58 Open Source Publishing is a collective based in Brussels, we’re a collective with different backgrounds, but mostly graphic designers, and we make graphic design using only open source tools. We started with the question of whether it was possible to do graphic design using only open source tools, but for me, the question has sort of shifted over time towards: what’s the influence of using alternative tools on your design or the web, or on the work that you make? This, for me, is best explained through the sentence coined, I believe, originally by Femke Snelting: “Practice shapes tools shapes practice”. This speaks about the relationship between the tools that you use and the work that you make, but in a way, it also speaks about the relationship between the makers of tools and the users of tools. governance and ownershipOpen Source Publishing only uses Free/Libre, open source software. This is software that explicitly permits using software but also adapting it and then publishing it in an alternate form. It can be software, but it can also be publications or fonts that you make, because of those explicit permissions, it creates or opens up the possibility for different responsibilities or for taking on a different position as a user or a creator of the tools. So if you use these tools, you do not necessarily buy them, in the sense that if you use a closed, proprietary software, you have a sort of very singular license, and the responsibilities are quite clearly defined. I think with FLOSS software there is an invitation for more responsibility but also for more freedom. The practice of OSP is exploring this process of us being users of the tools, but also making the tools as designers and questioning what is possible, or harder to do, is also part of that position.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 40:28 governance and ownershipI think there’s federation in two ways. I guess the first form of federation is not exactly federation, but it’s about a tool being used by other people or institutes; and its usage creates a demand but also creates the energy for this tool to be supported and maintained, to make sure that it keeps on working over time. Then I feel like open source is an answer to this tool — the code being distributed and allowing other people to download the new version of the code and use it. The idea of federation, where servers exchange or copy over material from each other, is a little bit out of reach for me. Software is extremely fragile, especially if you run server-side software because it means that somewhere there needs to be a computer that is continuously executing this code, it’s being maintained and it’s being kept safe. What I think is interesting about a tool like Paged.js is that it’s client-side, it’s written in JavaScript and is an extremely stable platform, with a lot of care of backwards compatibility, which in this case would mean that old JavaScript still work on contemporary browsers. The combination of HTML and JavaScript is quite stable, but also to us, sustainability, or maintainability, is important, and I think that there is a third element there which I would say is archivability. Archivability means, from the start of the project, thinking about in which states the project will be and what would this object look like in archived form, in the sense that it can mean that a certain part of it disappears. alternative publishing practicesThis means having a hybrid publication, or a publication that can have multiple forms, both a website and maybe a printed output. You could decide that you only keep the printed output and keep the PDF and keep that as a sort of file. That is sustainable. It can also be that you freeze your website in the sense that it doesn’t depend on server-side software anymore, but that it’s only HTML files that are rendered, and they’re only static files, then your website is much easier to archive in the sense that you can copy the HTML files. It includes the images, the scripts and the media files, and you can essentially put them on a zip drive or make a copy on a cloud somewhere or an existing backup service. So I think that’s the answer for me. Currently, the answer is to make it sustainable by accepting that the object in its software form is unstable, and you need to sort of think about how you can make archivable, relatively stable objects out of it.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 1:06:20 governance and ownershipYou used the word democratise and so I think I want to push back a little bit on saying that we do not want to democratise our tools. Well, I guess I want to push back because it sounds very elitist… Essentially what a piece of software does is encode a process or allow for certain things to be possible through a computer, and this is made easier by reducing the possibilities. So this means that you reduce the amount of different outcomes and make more assumptions about the kind of work that’s being done in the tools. I think we are not interested in this reduction within our practice, but there’s also an issue in understanding what the users of a tool want and then shaping the tool to fit the needs of the user. This is a lot of work because there is the development, but there’s also the testing, and asking whether our assumptions actually work. We measure our assumptions, implement and test the tools, and then do a feedback loop and our practice is too small to facilitate such a process. You also mentioned interoperability and the word ownership. Open-source has an interesting answer, which is perhaps not strictly within the realm of open-source software, but it’s open formats, which are formats that can be read by multiple tools. So you can take your information from one piece of software and bring it to the next, which can be information or data that you export in XML or JSON format, but can also be an SVG image from a browser to be modified in Inkscape, and be opened in a browser again. To reply to what you said about ownership: the longer I do this kind of work, the more I have to accept that it’s impossible to have full control. Software is often described as the stack, it’s layers of different pieces of software that are interacting, but they’re also all currents layered on top of each other, taking different directions. As an individual, you can neither control nor understand all of them.

• from: Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Of those 44 subscribers, 11 of them are universities, and they pay a lot more. I’ve also been surprised, actually, at how much revenue I can get from advertising. And then as Errant grows there are (big) organisations reaching out and saying they’d like to collaborate. I have to see how to handle that, because I want to remain independent. governance and ownershipBut I sometimes feel the ways of moving forward are endless. So, I don’t think these models are fragile just because there’s little money or its irregular. We have been taught to think like this because that’s the neoliberal, capitalist way; always more and bigger. As you were talking, I was also thinking about how banks are not considered precarious or fragile at all, and yet governments have to save them by billions every couple of years. So, who’s the fragile one? Obviously, there are differences, I’m not a bank, but you know where I’m getting at: it is a perception of how you see precariousness or fragileness in business structures. So I resist that, as I do with many other things.

• from: Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Irene 49:28 Well, there’s growth of course, the sales of Errant are going well. But I think we should be careful of using growth as a goal or a measure of success. I think that’s the road to possible exploitative structures. At the moment, it is just me and the designer and I will not hire anyone else until I know that I can offer them fair pay. I had an editorial assistant for four issues because we had a subsidy. So then, from the beginning, I just communicated that she was paid fully, she was paid more than I have ever paid for that kind of job for those four issues. governance and ownershipI will not work with interns even though I’ve had a few interns who came to me by themselves and sort of begged me. I find it very problematic because, so far, all interns and voluntary assistants who said they want to have experience in publishing have all been white. They’re all people who, for one reason or another, can work for free. Sometimes I will agree to that, because they want to gain experience too, but I still find it problematic. I’d rather do all the work myself than exploit someone, that’s just the basics of it. Unfortunately, I see how many other organizations work with interns and it’s so exploitative. I come from a working-class background, I was never able to do an internship because I had to work to pay my rent. I always saw my fellow students do internships, and they all have very good jobs now at big museums. So, this is a very exploitative model that I refuse to engage in. Unless people sort of throw themselves at me, then it’s hard to say no, but still, I’m trying to be cautious.

• from: Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

  Silvio 24:17 I have some ideas. I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to express them in the way I would like, but I will try. I will try to put it as bluntly as I can. Scenes exist, groups exist, conformation and other-than-individuals exist, but, at the end of the day, who is the actor that pays rent, that has to pay the bills, is an individual. In most cases, especially when it comes to writing, most people write as individuals. We shouldn’t forget the individual from a practical existence point of view. governance and ownershipI’m all for the idea of nourishing communities, but this shouldn’t become a sort of romantic veil in front that hides the fact that, after all, this sustainability question is about individuals. This is even more clear nowadays if you consider that many of the association forms of the so-called “scene” — I would say that I belong to various groups of people — are very weak. communityCollectives are formed and destroyed in a couple of years. So, what is more substantial? I think that the individual wins, not because I like individuals or “the genius” idea, but simply because of a realist understanding of how practices work in this sense.

• from: Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

  Silvio 27:45 Wonderful reflection. I’m very much in this line of thought in the sense that I appreciate a lot of people who have taken on this kind of idea of abandonment, jumping ship not only from the art world but also from academia. governance and ownershipOne positive side of this is that many people have lost reverence towards institutions. They realize that in most ways they don’t work. They don’t work for them. Academia, for example, and I speak again from my experience, if you want to put down ideas, is the worst place. I’m not the first to say it. conditions of workSusan Sontag already said back in the day that the best writers of her generation were destroyed by academia. What’s the concrete reality of abandonment?

• from: Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

  governance and ownershipInstitutional critique, to a certain extent, is paying homage to the institution, believing in its power and its value. And we go back to the fact that people don’t even take the time to write the institutional critique, because they don’t believe in its relevance anymore. I’m going to say something a bit controversial: I think that, to a certain extent, things that change, that have an effect, are based on something that traditionally has always been powerful — and that’s culpability. Generally, when you make the critical statement, you don’t mention names, you speak of the institution, you speak of the system, while a lot of examples of what you would call “call-out culture” ostracize the toxic actor. I can give you examples, such as the Excel sheets with terrible internship situations within the design world. And then the studio, even if it’s small, has to take action and say, “Hey, I’m going to change this and that”. communityShame is a powerful source of change, it acknowledges the partial autonomy of one of the actors. It’s a dangerous path, but I think it could be useful in certain instances.