User:Tommi/T2 Assessment

To view a nicely formatted version of this page in plain HTML, visit this page on Sergio, the server of the XPUB 2025/27 class. The HTML page is parsed with Alejandro (see the Metassessment section, below).

Most essentially, the characteristic and everlasting challenges of my (artistic, academic, professional, emotional) life constitute a perpetual multidimensional tension among different practices, obsessions, principles, stimuli, events close and far from me.

Every single daily choice I make is a step towards a greater clarity. Yet, it threatens the brittle equilibrium of my identity. This is worsened by being a curious and enthusiastic person that inhabits a burning world paradoxically full of thrilling opportunities.

The first two trimesters at XPUB have both broadened and enlightened my perspective on some of the many variables that govern the tension steering the path I choose to follow.

It is to nourish a more profound reflection that I wish to share what I learned through metaphors that relate more or less directly with instances, activities, experiences, projects carried out over the past months.

Therefore, while this page is intended to be a broad and curated list of such experiences, during the presentation of the assessment I will allow myself to be spontaneous and have this text as a reference, not a script.

🤷 The puzzle of identity

I consider my identity the summation of different variables that come together more or less mysteriously, a puzzle. Each piece falls into place or barely fits together with the others, thus forming a dynamic tension among all of them.

Over the past two months (since the 25^th January 2026, according to my notes), I annotated pairs of opposed tendencies that reveal themselves as tensions in my life, in my work, and in my practice.

listening	notetaking
advanced individual learning	collective learning
technical solutions	social practices
bodging	useful software
impulsive intuitions	long-term planning
crafting	documenting
making	absorbing
doing	reflecting
working	researching, brewing
vertical approach	horizontal “mingling”
thinking	metathinking
self-referential	meta

On Thursday 26^th March 2026, without editing or revising them, I engraved them on a slate of plywood, and laser-cut each piece in the shape of a jigsaw puzzle—please see The Making of section below for a detailed explanation of the process.

As a result, this puzzle embodies a modelised representation of my actual identity. It is a physical, very partial, abstracted, and generalised version of tommi.space, the only other public item I dare to associate to a representation of my inner self, since I call it the virtual representation of my mind.

Other tensions I thought of only after making the puzzle:

serious, thoughtful	fun, entertaining
conceptual, theoretical	practical, crafty
creativity	production/organisation
practical, effective, purposeful	whimsical, poetic

🧘 The balancing act

Marina (see below) is a meta-balance: a balance that reflects about balancing itself. The equilibrium is dynamic, not static. What this meta-balance does is the exact same of what XPUB does for me: it transforms a tension into an equilibrium.

Within the context of this master course, I am constantly re-evaluating the relationship between opposing tendencies that rarely find fulfillment in the extremes, but rather in a delicate balancing act.

---

What follows is a chronological summary of the key moments and reflections of Special Issue 28 and Special Issue 29 the linked pages gather a more comprehensive account of all my thoughts and the relative documentation.

🤖 Puzzling Machines

Since the very moment I started XPUB, I have been (over)thinking, possibly obsessing, about the making of Pöuli, and of the (currently very incomplete) website for the Special Issue 28. Wholly absorbed by my tooling hyperfocus, I lost track of time. All collective conversations passed through me. Before I could realize it, people were forming groups and started working on their project for the main event at Ubik.

So Tommi, what are you going to do?
Ehm… … … … …
 …I will build The Metathinking Metamachine!

I genuinely had no idea about what that meant. In my head, I could not picture anything beyond the face of Niklas Luhmann, the inventor of the prodigious Zettelkasten system.

The intention was to address the theme of the 28^th special issue in relation to my own obsessions:

• A Metamachine: a machine about machines, a software made to solve problems, and interact with, other software.
• Metathinking: the process of thinking about thinking, better explained in the linked article.

At that point, conceptualizing, preparing, and enacting anything that would actually do something useful, or produce a meaningful outcome was unfeasible and idealistic. So what then?

Thanks to Manetta’s and Marloes’ guidance and suggestions, I decided to base everything on irony and satire.

I was kindly allowed to light some tiny candles during the performance, to enhance the ironic spiritual factor.

The one thing I was sure of was that I intended on focusing on a pseudo-spiritual and grotesque setting. I based all the performance on a spiritual seance to connect with the Gods of Tooling. Furthermore, while sharing my anxiety and my doubts about the performance with Martina and Claudio, I got to the conclusion that the whole performance should have been fun: I got very excited of performing some sort of nerd stand-up comedy.

Albeit the path leading to the performance has been extremely stressful because I was terribly confused and overwhelmed by the novelty of my first Special Issue and its many inputs, I am incredibly proud of it, for a series of reasons.

• It was my first performance. I never realised that I would actually define myself as an artist and this performance marked a watershed moment in my self-identification as one. Actually, the way I comfortably call myself is pseudo-artist.
• Even though I learned it the hard way, I deeply understood the collaborative nature of XPUB. I have been doing many projects with others, but I did not commit to any collective project to develop with others. I found out that I must actively pursue an intertwining of practices with my fellow students.

• 
• 
• 

➿ Gossiping is the new self-taught

The topic of Special Issue 29 unlocked a game-changing awareness on my past, present, and future pedagogical path. I could never answer this question:

How do I know what I know?

Nobody ever canonically taught me any of the technical skills that I know, and I seldom had technically-oriented classes in my academic path. Still, I never considered myself “self-taught”, both for practical reasons (how could someone actually teach themselves something?) and for ideological ones (I refuse the individualistic and isolated narrative of learning things alone). At the same time, I am extremely chaotic and I have never studied or learned from books consistently. Hence, the question remains: where did my knowledge (especially technical) come from?

The truth is that I absorbed and processed information through gossip, that is through informal, non-hierarchical, unstructured and possibly incorrect sources.

You would not (and should not) fully trust the authenticity of a gossipy information source. When in a technological context in particular, gossip as a pedagogical tool is key, because its intrinsically apocryphal nature forces the receiver to question, re-interpret, and test the information by experimenting with it. There is only one way to test if sowtware works: to test it. Working technical solutions could be made more efficient, performant, or generally improved, but this is not the role of gossip pedagogy, as it enters the domain of productiveness/performativeness, where the value of de-constructing societal concepts is jeopardised.

• +++TTODO: Vernacular learning as the vernacular Web

🏠 Our Digital Home

This is a workshop by Youjung, Tommi and Barbs following the practices and research done during Special Issue 29. When talking about privacy and social media, we are often led to question our digital identity. Nevertheless, all identities inhabit a home, like we do ourselves. What are our digital homes? How are they and who controls them?

This workshop will be a collective exploration of where our data, our work, and our memories live. Together, we will unmask the marketing depiction of the cloud as something remote and intangible, and we will concretely see that what we call “the Internet” is just a huge amount of more or less big computers all over the world.

Using a local device, we will replicate a little cloud, and play with it by uploading pictures and show that they can be accessed locally or via the Internet. Possibly, if time allows it, we will print the webpage we made and make a little zine about it.

Our digital home is a bit like our own home, we are opening the door to invite people in and to communicate with the world, while when it’s closed we want it to be our safe place. Same thing with ports in a connection.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

🪁 XXPUB

Definitions of

XXPUB

:

Extra XPUB;

but also

XL XPUB

.

⁂ FediForum October 2025

Poster by the one and only Emanuele Arrigoni

What

FediForum is the global virtual unconference about the Open Social Web (ActivityPub, ATProto, and friends).

When

From 17:00 until 22:00 on the 7^th and 8^th October 2025.

Where

In Rotterdam, in the XPUB Studio on day 1 (October 7^th), and in Varia on day 2 (October 8^th).

FediForum requires a ticket to join, but the university covered participation for XPUB students + guests. You are most welcome to come and join us in person!

How

Open and free participation (only in person attendance)!

We will be connecting collectively to the virtual meeting. No previous knowledge or skills required: the topics discussed won’t just be technical, there will be a lot of discussions about the evolving meaning of social networks, and how open protocols can make them more human and truly social.

On day 2 we will be cooking vegan dinner all together!

FediForum Track @ SFSCON 2025

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Code as Critique

I was kindly indvited by professor John Boy to join the workshop Code as Critique: Relearning Technical Practice in the Ruins of Big Tech, followed by a keynote by the one and only Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, among many other things.

• 
• 
• 

💾 Introduction to Local-First

Where: XPUB Studio / Aquarium
When: Thursday 4^th December 2025, 17:00
Who: Guest lecturer Tobias Bernard, GNOME and Reflection developer (among maany other things)
What: Tobias will guide us and introduce us to the concept of Local-First. We’ll explore together the concept of collaborative, peer-to-peer and encrypted software. We will also play with Reflection, a native GTK app that Tobias is co-developing with the p2panda team, aimed at collectively editing text simultaneously. The app essentially consists in local, offline, and encrypted version of Etherpad.

The event is open to the public!

Notes from the session

+++TTODO Add images!

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

🧠 Federated Knowledge @ 39C3

I hosted a workshop/discussion exploring the value and meaning of federated knowledge repositories at 39C3

💕 I Love Free Software Day 2026

I Love Free Software Day is the annual celebration of Software Freedom, focusing on gratitude and appreciation towards those who work to make Free Software, be it developers, maintainers, translators, or anyone who contributes to the ecosystem.

The 2026 edition was titled Mantainers Matter, to highlight the often invisibilised work of maintaining software, not merely adding new features.

Internet Archive Europe, Amsterdam

The 2026 theme immediately made me (that is Tommi) think of Bonfire, a federated software co-designed with different communities, and recognising on maintenance work as care work.

Therefore, I invited Mayel de Borniol, one of the core maintainers of the project, to host a presentation at the Internet Archive Europe, Amsterdam, on Saturday 14^th February 2026.

We opened the event with a reading of Ada & Zangemann – A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream, both in English and in Dutch.

• 
• 
• 

Kiki was very kind by volunteering to make the fantastic poster for the event.

Snackbar Frieda, Rotterdam

On Friday 13^th February 2026 I hosted my workshop Knitting Our Internet at Snackbar Frieda, in Rotterdam.

Reticulum Workshop

For the first time in months, potentially a year, I got truly astonished and excited by a technical tool. Not just the people making it, its politics, its relevance, but the actual change it marks and potential it unleashes.

This technology is the Reticulum protocol.

I realised this by participating in the five-hours workshop hosted by the Critical Infrastructure Lab at the Internet Archive Europe on Saturday 28^th March 2026.

🏕️ DWeb Camp 2026

My main job right now is to promote and steward communications and social media for DWeb Camp 2026.

I feel privileged to be working with a team of wonderful people to something that is so close to my interests, my values, and my projects.

🪚 Tools I made/prototyped

🐙 Pöuli

Pöuli is a Python package originally conceived to upload a subset of my personal knowledge repository, the Jam, to my Personal Reader, User:Tommi/PaJamas.

My initial hope was for it to flourish beyond this specific use-case, and be helpful for other XPUB students or wiki adventurers. Nevertheless, I realised that there are many technical hurdles to make it full-featured and cover edge-cases, and I am not spending too much time on it to address them all.

The name “Pöuli” (equivalent of PoOuli) stands for:

• Practically Often Used Lovely Interface
• Petty yet Outstanding Utility Leading to Integration
• Phenomenal Optimistic Useful Lovely Idea
• Paradoxically Obscure but Unstoppable Link Ignitor

It is the anagram of Oulipo, the eclectic, mad, and maddening collective of artists formed in the ’60s.

🕺 Alejandro

(See below)

🤔 Magic words

Metaness

Perma-Hybridity

Federated knowledge

Metaphors

Piracy

Resistance

Reticulum

Quantified self

🧪 The making of

The making of my T2 assessment is also a meta-assessment (or metassessment of simplicity), because of a combination of two factors.

• In a way, it is how I assess myself. By preparing the assessment presentation I am reflecting on what I am proud of and where I failed, inevitably evaluating myself.
• Most importantly, it is about the making of the assessment

⚖️ Marina the scale

As I kept thinking about the way to best present my reflections over the first two trimester of XPUB, I was looking for a device to represent a constant, precarious, dynamic equilibrium, or better juggling with many different thoughts crowding my head. I started looking for an old-style scale, also in honor of my grandma’s passion for antiques.

I started telling this to all my classmates. In a quiet Saturday afternoon, during a walk with Lea, she brought me to De Majum, an adorable thrift shop in Delfshaven. Not five minutes since I was inside the shop, I found exactly what I needed.

I sent Nonna Gorix this picture, and I called her to ask her the maximum price she would put on this scale. She told me not to pay more than 20€, and that I could negotiate the price down to 15€. Eventually, I managed to buy it for 10€, especially because it did not have any plates. Victory!

I cleaned it and I added some pieces of wood at the bottom to calibrate it, as it was totally off-balance.

The only step left was to find a name for it. I named it Marina as my godmother and former scout chief, as historically she has been my reference point for pondering decisions and finding the right equilibrium, both spiritually or not.

🧩 Making the puzzle

+++TTODO add images!

Inkscape

I first created the shape of the puzzle in Inkscape, taking advantage of [github.com/Neon22/inkscape-jigsaw the inkscape-jigsaw extension], kindly suggested by Michael. I changed the colour of the stroke to red, because it is what the laser cutter interprets as a path to cut.

I wrote the key words in each puzzle piece, in black (what the laser-cutter interprets as path to be engraved) and I converted the text to a path, to avoid potential inconsistencies.

Engraving and laser-cutting

The thickest material the laser cutters at the WdKA Digilab can cut is 6mm. In the WdKA’s shop I could not find anything with that thickness, so I got a 5mm-thick MDF slate of 600×600mm. Big mistake, because MDF contains a loot of glue and it is not possible to cut it with a laser (probably because it would get on fire). After learning this, I bought a 600×600×5mm plywood slate.

I imported the SVG in the software, and the laser-cutter did everything by itself.

I realised that the default settings for plywood (65% power, 100% velocity) of that thickness made the engraving very light, but I wanted it more visible, so I changed the engraving settings to 100% power and 60% velocity.

• 
• 
• 
• 

Using the leftovers

The final puzzle is 600×400mm, so I had a leftover slate of 600×200mm. I used it to make a promotional banner for the Fediverse I am very proud of.

Meta-procrastination

By documenting this process and writing this very page, I am meta-procrastinating.

Meta-procrastination is to procrastinate by exploring and reflecting on the act of procrastination itself. It is the highest and most poignant form of procrastination, as it is potentially endless, and it self-reproduces.

Alejandro

Alejandro is a Bash script made to quickly and simply parse a Wiki page in a plain standalone HTML, and add some styling to it.

Actually, not particularly quickly: I planned to spend a few minutes working on it, but I ended up procrastinating and refining it for several hours.

Naming

This tool is named Alejandro because it is the title of the song by Lady Gaga I was listening to while I was creating it.

Code

#!/bin/bash

PAGE_TITLE=User:Tommi/T2_Assessment
TITLE='Tommi’s T2 Assessment'
BASE_URL=https://pzwiki.wdka.nl
WIKI_API=$BASE_URL/mw-mediadesign/index.php
PAGE_URL="$WIKI_API?action=render&title=$PAGE_TITLE"
OUTPUT=~/public_html/t2.html
STYLE="@import url('$WIKI_API?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Tommi/T2_Assessment/style.css');"
PAGE=`curl --location $PAGE_URL` # Using curl is better than wget to store the content in stdout. Nevertheless, absolute links to resources must be transformed at a later time.

# The following is a very basic HTML template from which data is read.
CONTENT="<!DOCTYPE HTML><html lang=en><head><title>$TITLE</title><meta charset=UTF-8><style>$STYLE</style></head><body><main><h1>$TITLE</h1><article>$PAGE</article></main></body></html>"

# Saving the HTML content parsed by MediaWiki to a local output file
echo "$CONTENT" > "$OUTPUT"

# This regular expression goes through the output file and prepends the wiki’s BASE_URL to all absolute links
sed -E --in-place 's/("| )\/mw-mediadesign/\1https:\/\/pzwiki.wdka.nl\/mw-mediadesign/g' "$OUTPUT"

Improvements

• Some variables should be passed as arguments, instead of hardcoded
• Some variables should be stored as environment variables, instead of hardcoded
• The HTML content template could be read from a template file

💡 Feedback

Feedback from Manetta, Marloes, and Michael:

• What do I want to get out of XPUB? What are the topics I want to dive deeper in?
• Trying to channel my energy, motivation, and projects in the class and foster activities with the others, not only starting personal ideas and bringing them forward by myself
• Addressing technical skillset differences in prototyping classes