Quilt INC

Quilt Inc.

To print the page with the quilt inc stylesheet.

curl https://pad.xpub.nl/p/quilt-inc-print-styles/export/txt > print.css | weasyprint https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Quilt_INC reader-quiltinc.pdf -s print.css

Code of Conduct

How do we communicate with each other when we are not in the same physical space? Zulip

Break protocol Whenever but break is great! Flexibility with respect to taking breaks, normalising break culture. make a sleep mode for chopchop, or a wall message every hour to initiate the break

How do we make sure everyone is heard? using pads more making notes for others

How to read together/apart? (As in, slow vs. fast readers)

Read out loud or alone? It would be helpful to read in advance so we are able to discuss it Would be nice to share notes/annotations with each other then Maybe dividing a text into smaller sections and focusing on these sections?

- do we keep or throw away the , after the inc Quilt INC +1 +1+1+1+1

how do we update (about being) absentees We do not have to say in advance if we are not there, and no need to share a reason But check in with the team and see if there is anything to be done

How do we fill people in on what happened? - How do we document? Summarising the TL;DR also we are making a lot of pads, which is not helpfull. Riviera was making a padlist shell script; and can share this. From now on we will use one pad to rule them all https://pad.xpub.nl/p/editorial-team-3 but not today

(going back to the discussion from earlier) how do we create a more inviting (ChopChop) space to work in? In relation to chopchop; could it be that we add our code of conduct to chopchop? perhaps as oracle messages?

how do we know if we're on the same line of knowledge / confusion? if we are all confused we are still on different lines of confusion education = knowing how much you dont know (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETmpCWDKKlo) the dunning kruger effect/ mount stupid but text can be inaccessible

• how do we make decisions? (About code of conducts, "editorial approaches" e.g.)
• How do we divide the labour? (devide?divide?) → How do we spellcheck without being an a**hole divide i think thx+1 app. we do it this way! +1
• what is our prefered communication are na when not physically attending the space, do we stick to the groupzulip? [SOLVED]
• What changes or additions can be made to the physical or virtual workspace to make it more inviting?
• How can we ensure the Code Of Conduct stays up to date/relevant
• what are the limits of team quilt inc, as in, what do we do together, what do we not, for how long are we together? What is the afterlife of our CoC?
• how do we edit in a coherent way while "showing the seams"
• do we communicate by typing when an external being is in the same space? lol yez
• How could we make chopchop(shopshop) became a cozy neighborhood spiderman?
• how can we make the peeps outside shut up initiate closing door protocol in 3 2 1 > people still too loud sry
• How to deal with FAILURE
• What do we do about unfinished activitis?

introduction for a visitor of the Feminist Data Center

Prompt: As an editorial team, work on an introduction for a visitor of the Feminist Data Center We wrote 3 entries by each writing some lines and then swapping papers, divided by the various project groups we are in.

/var/shelf

As you can see on your right, we've now reached "The Shelf". Here, we keep our feminist administration of what happens in our datacenter (stays in our datacenter). But watch out for the emoji's. They offer insight into how the server is doing. We're taking the conventional customer experience survey and flipping it on it's head. This in order to reveal the range of emotions a server is capable of experiencing. To access FemAdmin, consider reading our code of conduct. Or open our shelve as FemAdmin. But you'll need to learn to gain access anyway. We use the administration as a method of documenting. To trace back where the server came from, and offer insights to the servers that are in our care, into their context (neighbours). You are more then welcome to join one of our admin sessions, to see how we try to maintain the documentation. Of course, the political and radical implications of administrations should not be overlooked. Administrative processes are value-laden, often bureaucratic activities wth far reaching consequences/. By opening these facets of maintenance and allowing you to have a say in the running of the datacenter we aim TO DISRUPT!!!! the mundane banality of admin-work. And to emphasize the inaccessibility, breaking open the source and to share what isn't given for granted in order to share our resources of knowledge of our bubble/or shelve.

/var/kitchen

Hello and welcome to /var/kitchen here we are serving at a sustainable scale. Here you have the opportunity to interact with a server through a terminal interface, make digital food and sample our chickpea curry. Please don't hesitate to ask abut the Chef's special and the soup of the day. I hope you brought your own plates as we kind of ran out. But, if you're okay to wait for a bit, I'm sure we some will free up soon! We've never made curry before, but an earlier visitor made a proposal an were happy to try if this works for us. We strive not to let our services to fall to the sidelines or the sphere of the invisible. Feel free to fork your knowledge with your fellow visitors in order to grow a community after our shared dining experience. Ah, a question from the group: Yes, this dinner, is it a self-service buffet or an all inclusive dining experience?

/var/door

How do you enter? Which port do you leave? And what do you bring and take? Will you be exchanging or at least be open for exchange? Can you enter? Do you have access and know the right address? Are you only here to take or do you have something to post? are your ports open, or can we expect an access denied from you? Do you have a key? If so, what's the password? Do you want to see some random art? What will you do once you are in the space? you're standing in at the precipice, on the threshold, this place might not be for you... Get on line command in line. Browse up down left right along and on our terms. interact from multiple windows and try to localize what you see or pin point of your interest. By entering the front or back-end, you have license to enter / comply to our code of conduct, and our values. as a feminist data center, you'll be able to find the values written on the windows. Doorkeeping is a skillful craft it requires understanding who may and may not enter. It illustrates differences and offers us places to meet.

Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method and Information Technology

Membership

In Star's Misplaced Concretism, the discussion of 'membership' is sandwiched between writing on objects/communities of practice and borderlands/boundary objects. Membership is integral to Star's discussion of marginality - understood in the technical, sociological sense. But what is membership? Star reflects on Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's discussion of membership which they take to be the polar opposite of 'illegitimate, peripheral participation'. However, for Star, membership would not exist without the processual naturalisation of objects. This differs to Lave and Wenger's concept and contributes to Star's argument that membership has both individual and collective dimensions. '[I]ndividually', membership can be understood 'as the experience of encountering objects and increasingly being in a naturalised relationship with them'. 'Collectively membership can be described as the processes of managing the tension between naturalisation..., on the one hand, and the degree of openness to immigration on the other'.

Boundary Objects

Boundary objects are, as described in the Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology, 'things' that are part of multiple Communities of Practice, but have a different meaning for each community. The thing itself does not change when being passed around communities, but the way the 'thing' is interacted with or approached, (so the relationship with the thing) changes, or the reason why the thing is used changes.

Boundary objects are only boundary objects if they are acknowledged as boundary objects, when various communities of practice collaborate/intersect. If this doesn't happen, we might actually be dealing with a monster.

Coming from a programmers community of practice, the idea of a thing having various meanings has it's difficulties, as explained in the text as well. In the community of practice, we assign variables all day long, but they can only have one value. How can these various meanings be "handled" and can they even? Maybe this is the spot to show the seam, instead of trying to achieve the "seamless" experience. Are boundary objects created by showing seams, acknowledging the various interpretations and that they are open to change (use let not const)

Method(ol(atry)ogy) is a way of surviving experience

Method is a way of surviving experience. The post-coping mechanism of someone on a journey to the center of the data. How does one look. Is it the landscape of hexadecimals, binaries, flying bits or deeper digging. A mole goes into depth in a different matter than the human does.

As I kinda recalled in my 'essay'(as Rosa called my methods remark ;)), this word or experiment/experience has been quite the quilt on its own, I'm a bit confused but it also feels like the step after coping? Method on its own feels like a way to practicalize whatever the ---- I'm struggling with.

Yes, I'm currently linking this sentence to my own surviving experience as I'm trying to create my own method in how to live this

◹xpub / ◹carer / ◹own life ◹triangle◹.

...But about the text; the word first makes an entry in the title. And it introduces feminist methodology as a radical alternative.

../

My current method is just doing a quick scan through the text and react quickly and associative through the text. (Whilst making comments on the side)(to process text, this worked, to read, it didn't work

)/..

When searching for methods vs methodology;

"Methodology vs. method. 'Methodology' is not just a fancier-sounding term for 'methods' – it refers to the school of thought by which you conduct research. Method, on the other hand, is all about practicalities: surveys, experiments, observations and so on

Luckily the text goes back to the nature of method, which contextualizes it to 'normal everyday life stuff' as a cleaning habit towards radicalizing (mobilizing) in order to protest injustice. As I'm writing about Methods, I hear Victor talk about methods and I'm not sure if I'm doing this right but I'm doing it in my own method?

It mentions methodolatry; "Worship of a method that employs it uncritically regardless of ever- changing particulars and steadfastly ignoring past negative results."

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Text I'm responding to / with:

"A method is distinct from a recipe or formula, in exactly the sense that science is not embodied in a textbook and cooking is not a cookbook. It is a real-time, lived, and experiential form of ordering practice. In the words of Isabelle Stengers: Indeed, you do not follow a challenge, you do not obey it, it does not direct you. You have to invent the way to answer it, it proposes risks for your answers, but gives you no model. Thus it is consonant with my conception of science. It is consonant because our “social experience,” the moral and political options which situate us cannot become self-conscious just by a process of honest self-examination. It must be created through an active process of learning. Learning how we are situated, inventing the situations from which we can learn more about our situation does not give power to emancipation over cognition. It associates both emancipation and cognition. (1993, 46)"

"... It is a word at once stronger than para- digm, in the sense that it often crosses, both historically and spatially, most uses of the Kuhnian term. It may be part of several paradigms; it may persist after other attributes of a paradigm have fallen away. Methods considered in this fashion may have many of the features of surviving experience, depending on the values of the community using them: they can become imperialistic or monolithic (if one only has a hammer, the world becomes a nail, etc.); they can become a means of enforcing fundamentalism (reducing the world to that which can be perceived using the method); or they can become ways of encompassing multiplicity, complexity, and ambiguity. It is in this latter sense that feminism is important methodologically, I think, although we have sometimes used it in the monolithic or reductionist senses. Feminists have written some extremely powerful methodological pieces, not always recognized as such..."

"Considered formally, then, the attributes of feminist method that are particularly important are: 1. experiential and collective basis; 2. processual nature; 3. honoring contradiction and partialness; 4. situated historicity with great attention to detail and specificity; and 5. the simultaneous application of all of these points."

 

Validity

- bit of a fictional intro

Validity comes in multiple badges. It has the sacred I P R V code imprinted in its labels. These four labels stand for the four regions of the tanssgressiv validitrain. it is something to be found in the real world but could it be that Validity is also based on the journey

Ironia / Paralogia / Rhizomia / Voluptia are all areas waiting to be explored.

   - what is the keyword? our definition TL;DR

noun: validity; plural noun: validities

   - the quality of being logically or factually sound; soundness or cogency.
   - the state of being legally or officially binding or acceptable

   - annotation of text/(the reference of the source)   

"Patti Lather, a brilliant feminist methodologist, has written about this under the rubric transgressive validity ( Lather 1993 ). Her map of attributes of a feminist method, which I read after I wrote the passage above, has some remarkable resonances. She asks the question, where, after poststructuralism, can we find validity? Her answer has four points that together equal a validity which rests reflexively on the contemporary crisis"

"Her answer has four points that together equal a validity which rests reflexively on the contemporary crisis of representation: Ironic validity (which problematizes the single voice, realist representation of nature); paralogical validity (which emphasizes paradox and heterogeneity); rhizomatic validity (which undermines the taken-for-granted and keeps opening up new ways of situated seeing); and voluptuous validity (which precisely goes too far , and

joins ethics and epistemology)"

VALIDITY DEFINITIONS, CITED AND ASKING QUESTIONS

"Transgressive validity" -> "here, after poststructuralism, can we find validity?" is validity the same as validation? searching for distinction I find that one is a verb an the other is a noun, but both seem to be tags? https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1659/what-is-the-difference-between-tags-validity-and-validation

"Ironic validity" > "which problematizes the single voice, realist represen- tation of nature)" ... "would demand that the representation of pregnancy as an illness be challenged in the encoding, and include multiple views of what in fact constitutes a pregnancy. " 

"Paralogical validity" > "(which emphasizes paradox and heterogeneity); .. "might at the same time acknowledge that for some women an aborted fetus never constituted a pregnancy at all, while for others it did, and there is no resolving that question in any simple fashion." 

"Rhizomatic validity" > "(which undermines the taken-for-granted and keeps opening up new ways of situated seeing. " ... "would seek out the range of what we take for granted about pregnancy, childbirth, and sexuality, and keep challenging us to break boundaries of what we think we know about these processes—perhaps cross-culturally, but also in phenomenological explorations of daily routines connected with them, denying the taken-for-granted “every woman feels X”: and being sure to listen for com- plex differences and similarities." 

"Voluptuous validity" > "which precisely goes too far, and joins ethics and epistemology" .. "in this sense might bring entirely other conceptions of birth and pregnancy, such as the kind of spiritual birth found in some religious cultures, or dreams and visions. From this base, feminism has some important things to say about technology, and especially information technology, in its capacity creatively and ethically to mingle people, things, and experience."

Standard(ization)

- bit of a fictional intro

Bzzzt bzzt error of approval. This bug does not have followed standardized procedure.

   - what is the keyword? our definition

From what I read / think / assume, standardization means to bring things, stuff, objects into one standard. And that to me is quite troublesome because when a norm or standard is made, there always will be conflicts with the things that are not standard. But then again, adaptation, nuance and contextualization are in place.

   - annotation of text/(the reference of the source)   

Four questions before introducing:

1. how can objects inhabit multiple contexts at once, and have both local and shared meaning?
2. how can people living in one community, and drawing their meanings from other people and objects situated there, communicate in another
3. what is the relationship between the two?
4. what range of solutions to the preceding three questions are possible, and what consequences attend each of them —cui bono?

Standardization has been one of the common solutions to this class of problems: 3 if the

interfaces and formats are standard across contexts, then at least the first three questions

become clear, and the fourth becomes moot. But we know from a long and gory

history of attempts to standardize information systems that standards don’t remain

standard for very long, and that one person’s standard is another’s confusion and mess

( Gasser 1986 ; Star 1991 ).

Noun. solutionism (uncountable) The belief that all difficulties have benign solutions, often of a technocratic nature. quotations ▼ The providing of a solution or solutions to a customer or client (sometimes before a problem has been identified).

important question:

how to preserve the integrity of information without a

priori standardization and its attendant violence

Naturalization in response to standardization:

I mean stripping away the contingencies of an object’s creation and its situated

nature. A naturalized object has lost its aura of anthropological strangeness, and is

in a sense “de-situated” in that members have forgotten the local nature of the object’s

meaning. 4 We no longer think much about the miracle of plugging a light into a socket

4

and obtaining illumination, and must make an effort of anthropological imagination

to remind ourselves of contexts in which it is still unnaturalized.

..

Objects exist, with respect to a community of practice, along a trajectory of naturalization,

which has elements of both ambiguity and duration. It is not predetermined

whether an object will ever become naturalized or how long it will remain so—rather,

practice/activity is required to make it so and keep it so.

...

Anomalies or interruptions, the cause of contingency,

come when some person or object interrupts the flow of expectations. One

reason that “glass box technology” or pure transparency is impossible is that anomalies

always arise when multiple communities of practice come together, and useful technologies

cannot be designed in all communities at once. Monsters arise when the legitimacy

of that multiplicity is denied.

Transparency is in theory the endpoint of the trajectory of naturalization, as complete

legitimacy or centrality is the end point of the trajectory of membership in a

community of practice. However, due to the multiplicity of membership of all people,

and the persistence of newcomers and strangers, a well as the multiplicity of naturalization

of objects, this is inherently nonexistent in the real world. For those brief historical

moments where it seems to be the case, it is unstable.

But what are the things that make objects and statuses seem given, durable, real?

Several things coalesce.

Generalization is also named in relation.as well as denaturalization

Reductionism

Reductionism, akin to a pervasive gender binary, exerts its influence across society, culture, and literature, giving rise to stereotypes amid the remnants of past homophobia. This simplifying lens distills the intricate tapestry of human experiences, confining them within rigid boundaries and perpetuating societal norms. In literature, reductionism constrains character portrayals, limiting them to narrow archetypes that reinforce pre-existing prejudices.

Against this backdrop, some resilient social movement has emerged, determined to challenge and dismantle these reductionist paradigms. These movement strives to create a more inclusive and accepting societal fabric, one that recognizes and celebrates the diverse and fluid nature of individual identities. By pushing back against reductionist thinking, it aims to cultivate a culture that appreciates the multifaceted spectrum of human experiences, transcending the limitations imposed by binary perspectives.

Articulation work

Articulation work, also known as invisible work, involves managing complexities arising from multiple memberships and naturalized objects. It is a methodological and often unseen effort that reflects on differences in methods and techniques. In symbolic interactionism and computer-supported cooperative work, the term "articulation work" describes the invisible juggling required to handle real-time contingencies and unexpected situations. It plays a crucial role in various contexts, from head nurses and air traffic controllers to everyday tasks performed by individuals.

Articulation work is essential in maintaining the flow of work by managing contingencies and accommodating unexpected situations. It becomes particularly challenging in designing complex computer and information systems where real-time contingencies constantly influence technology use. This type of work also deals with managing mismatches between memberships and naturalization, emphasizing the importance of addressing anomalies and interruptions in various communities of practice. When articulation work is overlooked or made invisible, it can lead to the suppression of voices and the formation of master narratives, hindering a comprehensive understanding of diverse perspectives and experiences.

Hello this is my (Anita) Quilt INC page for methods and the reader.

Picnic at the data center

Universal computability

A transition into a world which created a divide between communitites which are either supported and developed by computing, or are not, in which the idea of the 'Sidewalk lab' urban ricontruction program is based.

Algorithmic solidarity

According to the text, is the answer to a hypothetical question existing in a world where all profits are collectively shared deciding where to administer funds. This includes using networks as a way of trying new methods of solidarity, global outsourcing is 'turned inside-out' making geographical distance less relevant if relevant at all.

Outsourcing

Looking for labour and infrastructure elsewhere, creating structures of monumental size to store data, that create their own micro-climate in other countries. Having an 'army of programmers' being viewed as a 'good' to sell, being exploited for their skills that are used by companies or organizations to make more and more profits. What is produced is does not belong to the producer but instead to the employer.

Distributed sovereignty

A possible result of an economic model based in economic algorithms created from neutral networks, allowing for a distributed power and resources.

Feminist Server Manifesto

Situated technology

A technology that explores the interconnections between social and technological practices, considering context and human interaction.

Maintenance

Taking care of. Specifically, reciprocal caretaking of a community where the technology has a place. As the community takes care of the technology, it takes care of the it, billing and growing onto its surroundings. The maintenance might not be straightforward, as the technology is open to showing its inner workings.

Seamlessness

Hiding the inner workings of a technology, not exposing its processes and computations. A feminist technology strives to do the opposite and open itself up for observation of its operations. It does not mean that it is inaccessible to newcomers, but that it shows what is happening while it is happening, informing the community about its inner workings.

Autonomy

The ability to decide for itself, the possibility of establishing its own dependence to the different components it might need to function in a certain way. It does not ‘serve’ the community it is situated in and examines the conditions.

Exposing insecurities

Showing all inner workings, even the ones it is unsure about. This can mean taking a rest as it exposes vulnerability.

Transparency

A feminist server is skeptical about transparency as it could be a signal for hidden or invisible infrastructure. It instead shows its seams, infrastructure and inner workings.

Availability

A feminist server, doesn't always have be ready for use, and does not apologize for it. It analyses the relations between clients and serves, challenges them and experiments with what it means to be a server and serve.

Marginality, nauraliation and membership

Marginality can have multiple different meanings. In the text, Star refers to it not as sitting on a margin being limited in significance, far from the centre of a group, but as a person belonging to more than one community, having more than one identity they can recognize. According to Webster dictionary, the term can apply to an individual who assimilates habits from multiple cultures in an incomplete way; an interpretation could be holding a sense of belonging to communities that feel different from each other, who perhaps share commonalities but remain very distinct.

In the text, the term is closely related to naturalization and naturalization of objects in diverse groups and communities of practice. This meaning not finding an object strange or ambiguous any more, taking it for granted and already knowing its use inside of a specific community of practice, not challenging its purpose or inquiring around its function.

Invisibility

Star (1999) writes that ‘infrastructure as a system of substrates … is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work’. In other words infrastructure ‘is an often taken for granted part of everyday life until it breaks’ (Chetty, 2011). When it breaks, infrastructure becomes visible. Is this a feature of infrastructure specifically or tools more generally? Is every tool which ‘becomes visible upon breakdown’ (Star, 1999) an infrastructure? Marc Weiser, a scientist who ‘prefigured the critique of seamlessness’ (Inman and Ribes, 2019) wrote that ‘[a] good tool is an invisible tool’ (Weiser, 1994). Is infrastructure, in its visibility, a bad tool? Did it ever really function as it was supposed to?

Infrastructure

What is Infrastructure? According to Martin Brauch (2017) ‘Infrastructure is the underlying system of structures, facilities and services that are essential to the functioning of an economy’. Brauch’s definition is commonsense following Susan Leigh Star’s statement that ‘[p]eople commonly envision infrastructure as a system of substrates’ (Star, 1999, p. 380). Such a perspective resonates with the definition of ‘critical infrastructure’ detailed in the Sendai Framework Terminology on Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR, 2017). Nevertheless, Star casts doubt on the usefulness of an everyday understanding of infrastructure in the context of the production of ‘large-scale technical systems’ (Star, 1999). Instead, she foregrounds the relational quality of infrastructure; that it appears differently to different people based on their relationship to it. In concordance with Star, the adequacy of the commonsense understanding of infrastructure is reiterated by Lauren Berlant. Berlant writes, ‘[i]nfrastructure is not identical to a system or structure …. It is the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure’ (2016).

Bibliography

Berlant, L. (2016) ‘The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 393–419 [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/0263775816645989 (Accessed 14 March 2024).

Brauch, M. D. (2017) Sustainable Infrastructure: Definition and Co-Benefits, International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) [Online]. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep14773.4 (Accessed 14 March 2024).

Chetty, M. (2011) ‘Making Infrastructure Visible: A Case Study of Home Networking’, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Inman, S. and Ribes, D. (2019) ‘“Beautiful Seams”: Strategic Revelations and Concealments’, Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow Scotland Uk, ACM, pp. 1–14 [Online]. DOI: 10.1145/3290605.3300508 (Accessed 13 March 2024).

Star, S. L. (1999) ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 377–391 [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/00027649921955326 (Accessed 13 March 2024).

UNDRR (2017) ‘Critical infrastructure’, http://www.undrr.org/terminology/critical-infrastructure [Online]. (Accessed 14 March 2024).

Weiser, M. (1994) ‘The World is not a Desktop’, ACM Interactions, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 7–8.

Colophon

/var/reader SI #23 Peripheral Centers and Feminist Servers Spring 2024 Anita, Lorenzo, Rosa, Riviera, Wang