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 process that generates it is explained in the Metassessment section, below.

The everlasting and all-encompassing challenge of my (artistic, academic, professional, emotional) life boils down to a perpetual multidimensional tension among different practices, obsessions, principles. Most essentially, every single daily choice poses a threat to a brittle identity equilibrium, especially being a curious and enthusiastic person in a world that is full of opportunities but also burning at the same time.

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

It is to nourish a more profound reflection that I choose 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, curated, and scripted list of such experiences, I will allow myself to be spontaneous and not read this text during the assessment itself.

🤷 The puzzle of identity

I consider my identity the summation of different elements, a puzzle. Pieces falling into piece or barely fitting together, and in a dynamic tension among all of them.

🤖 Puzzling Machines

For the final event of Special Issue 28, I performed a seance questioning the fictional Gods of Tools about the nature of the ultimate machine I would ever need. The Metathinking Metamachine has been the result of a lot of confusion and alienation caused by my implacable obsession for tools, and the sudden realisation that I was not part of any group to make the final project, thus ending up alone.

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.

🏠 Our Digital Home

Threads

Recurring thematic threads

Metaness
Knowledge management and interoperability
Tension of creativity vs organisation
gossip unlocking
Metaphors
Pirate

XXPUB

XXPUB: Extra XPUB, but also XL XPUB.

39C3 federated knowledge
DWeb and DWeb Camp

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!

💾 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!

💕 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.

The tension → The equilibrium

This is a meta-balance: a balance that reflects about balancing itself. The equilibrium is dynamic, not static.

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

What did not make it into the puzzle (because I made the puzzle before thinking of these):

serious, thoughtful	fun, entertaining
conceptual, theoretical	practical, crafty
creativity	production/organisation

🧪 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