User:Riviera/Integrated formative assessment: proposal phase (trimester 4)/Pre-assessment

Introduction

Hello and welcome to this presentation.

The thesis outline and project proposal which I wrote are informed by reading, writing and practice I have undertaken during the course so far. The documents summarise the research I hope to conduct over the following months. In what follows I discuss the project proposal and thesis outline.

Background Information

Since October, I have been maintaining a prototype-server for Klankschool. The klankschool server is a Mac Pro computer from the early 2010s with an Intel Xeon CPU, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of disk space. I borrowed it from the department. It’s running Arch Linux and is connected via ethernet to a router located at my flat. Klankschool are a group of almost 50 people, based in and around Rotterdam, who learn from, work with and teach each other about sound. These people are gathered in a WhatsApp chat which was created in April, although not by me. Core users of the server include Joseph, Stephen Kerr, who graduated last year, and Rosa. Besides me, there are perhaps two other people who have used the server so far. By the summation of the project I aim to stabilise and entrust the server to people likely based Rotterdam for years to come.

Project Proposal

My project proposal is to collaborate with Rosa on a workshop series and write entries for a newsletter.

I will consider each aspect of the project proposal and how these relate to the server, before discussing the thesis outline.

Workshop Series

The workshop series will feature 12 workshops and run between January and June. I will lead some of these, Rosa will lead some, and some we may lead together. Rosa and I agree to pattern out a more thorough plan for the workshops during December. The workshop series converges on topics which reflect meeting points of our individual research. On the one hand, I enjoy making performances using Free / Libre and Open Source Software. For example, I practice and perform live coding on a semi-regular basis. On the other hand, insofar that I am researching servers at the moment, I am curious about ways of including the server in the workshop series. Or any material outcome that may arise from it.

Currently, the Klankschool server prototype is a background element of the workshop series. It hosts services that may pertain to the workshops including organisational components (openproject), ways of publicising the events (calendar, website) and file sharing systems (git, sftp). There is a level of responsibility on my part to ensure this infrastructure continues to run.

I cannot keep the services running on the Mac Pro forever, because the machine belongs to XPUB and I must give it back. I have set things up in view of this fact, using containers and USB hard drives to ensure a level of hardware independence. For this reason, it is not necessary to set up everything up from scratch on another machine. Approximately 8GB of RAM are required to run all the services. I might therefore look for some RAM compatible with the computer which Joseph found and gave to me at the beginning of the year. Software-wise it is perhaps initially a matter of migrating containers to this other machine and reconfiguring the DNS provider. It could be almost as simple as installing Linux on that machine and plugging in and configuring the hard disks.

Newsletter

A newsletter will accompany the workshop series. I will write in it as a way of keeping people up to date with what is going on regarding the server. The newsletter is inspired by my tendency to write about what I am doing, which is evidenced by wiki posts I wrote over the past year. It will be published online on the klank.school website every Last Quarter Moon between December and June. The primary audience of the newsletter are the klankschool community members in the Whatsapp group chat, website visitors and workshop attendees. One topic I am eager to write about is the terms of service of the server. Currently, there are no terms of service. This is a problem because it leaves the behavioural possibilities of service users wide open. This risk should not be underestimated. To that end, I am reminded of the following questions by Cristian Fuchs. Fuchs (2017) asks: “How does the community network deal with actual crime occurring in its network? How can it best minimise the occurrence of crime?” Although writing about community networks, there are comparable concerns at play in the context of running a server. A critical framework in this respect is the Digital Services Act (2022) of the European Parliament. For example, Article 14 of this act stipulates that intermediary service providers make their terms and conditions readily available. This is in the interests of “a safe, predictable and trustworthy online environment” which I value in these times (Ibid.). Besides writing about the server in newsletter format, I would also write about the workshops I hold. It is expedient, therefore, that the server should feature throughout the workshop series.

Why Collaborate?

In June 2024, Rosa and I gave a performance at Gulaschprogrammiernacht 22 in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was humorously titled Printer Jam and utilised live coding software and Arduinos to make percussive music with disused printers. People have watched the video recording of the performance 245 times. In Printer Jam, I drew on and furthered my understanding of the Tidal Cycles live coding software library. Tidal Cycles is a sort of programming language for live coding written in Haskell. I developed a better grip of how it works with the Open Sound Control protocol and how to use it differently.

Thesis Outline

The thesis I would like to write is about the maintenance and administration of servers. It concerns the knowledge practices of a group of practitioners located, mostly, in Western Europe. Specifically, I plan to research how people involved in maintaining and administering computers for others go about documenting, sharing and freeing knowledge. I plan to reach out to several collectives towards the end of December to organise some interviews on this subject. I plan to contact: diebin.at, servus.at, mur.at, irational.org, autonomic.zone, systerserver and anarchaserver amongst others. I’d like to discuss with a range of people working across servers in adjacent, arguably connected, contexts. Many of these organisations were discussed during Special Issue 23: Peripheral Centers and Feminist Servers.

Bibliography

Anon (2022) ‘Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act) (Text with EEA relevance)’, [Online]. (Accessed 25 November 2024).

Fuchs, C. (2017) ‘Sustainability and community networks’, Telematics and Informatics, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 628–639 [Online]. DOI: 10.1016/j.tele.2016.10.003 (Accessed 25 November 2024).