Hosting Letter
Context, pertinence and relevance
This documentation has suggestions from research and experiences from specific social contexts.
They are not, on any level, universal suggestions or impositions about specific ways to act and behave.
They're not models that must be followed, but models that can be adopted, adapted or even criticized and improved, as long as they can be useful, helpful and make sense.
Incomplete document
The documentation that follows is in an initial stage, very incomplete and may not make sense outside it's original context.
Additional work is still needed to bring it to a minimally useful and comprehensible state.
$collective Hosting Letter
$collective is part of an intersection of various groups that discuss politics and technology in different ways. We work with internet servers turned to various cooperative goals. Then, our ideia is to colaborate with groups/projects that are part of mutual and multiple aid and support.
$collective is an autonomous project kept by a collective of volunteers. One of our main goals is the collective creation of public spaces, common areas with projects and groups that intend to enforce and straighten coexistence.
Our intention is not just offer a "hosting service" and then we're not available for groups that just want such thing. We want that groups we host colaborate with the construction of a neighborhood, a rhizome, meaning that technology doesn't have to be a barrier, but exactly the opposite. As technology is also a social construction, its purposes, its configurations and the processes it interferes with can't impose themselves independently of the choices made by the social groups where it's used.
The internet is not only an environment of cooperation, but also of apropriation and exploitation of common goods. We understand that it just turns essentially into a public space when people can control their production and access means, things that don't happen on corporate and governmental spaces. Because of this we try to create public spaces, non-corporative and non-governmental and we hope that groups we host colaborate to the construction of such spaces.
During the construction of these kind of spaces, we make discussions where we try to discover themes such as culture, society, technology, activism, social change and many others. Such a research, when possible, is shared pubicly.
We research the political implications of technology and develop systems and instruments using different political values. We also keep a political dialogue in the logics of theory/practice.
So, one of our proposals is to collectivelly establish a network of mutual support among groups and individuals interested in sharing the same physical structure to share their knowledges, activities and researches.
We attempt then to break the relation between service provider/clients, because we're not service providers and the groups/individuals we host are not our clients. We both make part of the same collaboration network where diverse interests converge towards mutual empowerment. And who knows if such way of organizing things won't spread to other parts of society.
Thinking about knowledge distribution and with an incentive to new groups interested in keeping their own server infrastructure, we try to share the most of our organization scheme.
And remember: for us, $collective is not just a hosting system or a service provider.
Interesting links:
- Researches available: http://wiki.$domain
- Configurations and operational procedures: http://padrao.$domain
In solidarity, $collective Group