# COMPOST ISSUE 03 Meetings + Planning

###### tags: `COMPOST`

## CONTENTS
* Issue 03 Development Call #2
* COMPOST Design - Feb 8, 2023
* COMPOST Illustration Check-in
* Issue 03 Development Call #1
* Editorial Check-in - Jan 9, 2023 (Tal, Mai)
* Issue 03 Orientation Call

## COMPOST Issue 03 Strategy
* Update
* 10 pieces to be published, 12 total accepted
* one person got busy with their work
* the other person not v communicative
* trying to position with distributed press launch
* Mai to write a piece on COMPOST + DP
* where is this going to be published?
* Sutty CMS
* Inject a little bit of CSS to make things better
* Put pressure on them -- this needs work
* This is an opportunity, major visibility!! Debuttante ball
* Managing the repo? They don't have repo-level access
* Open repo for people to tackle biggest useability problems
* Questions
* Are we good enough to say V1 is good enough for non-technical users?
* It needs to be!
* Launch
* Goals
* Nontechnical users to be adopters to use this
* COMPOST contributors
* DWeb community
* Hypha + close allies
* Fixing bugs: Would like to do a PR, to report bugs, have a system in place for that
* Video walkthrough / screen recording of how to set it up
* In English and Spanish
* List people/orgs who want to use this
* Work with them to develop their site on Sutty CMS
* Ex. COMPOST, DWeb, FFDW?
* Drip campaign of sites that are released using Sutty CMS
* Regular marketing campaigns for each one
* Success indicators
* Someone we don't know uses DP to publish their website
* COMPOST pageviews - 5k-10k
* Timeline
* Budget
* Pay contributors less if they didn't show up to the development calls?
* Doublecheck the contract
* Pay contributors to host a local COMPOST launch event
* Being under budget
* $85k of $250K from FFDW for Year 1
* Padding hours and raising rates
* Hypha overhead + staff
* "Infra costs, admin that we haven't accounted for"

## COMPOST: Musseled Out
8 March 2023

### Participants
Mai, Niall, Vincent

Tools:
* Unity, WebGL output mode
* HTML page with embed
* Game files - three folders, can be self-contained
* In WebGL, you can choose how compressed it is -- how much to make it like a zip file
* Currently 17 MB, can be smaller
* Does server accept gzip?
* Glitch.io has server settings where you can upload different sizes

Process
* Vincent is going to upload it to Sutty CMS, not sure what the settings are on their server
* They have extensive documentation
* It would be simple to reconfigure
* Fallback version: Uncompressed version should work, if you can embed WebGL context

* Send us what Niall put on their website?
* In theory to be able embed it, frankenstein style
* Yes -- give us a version that Vincent can play with
* Niall: to send a WeTransfer link, with up to date but uncompressed version, as well as full-screen option
* Full screen version: Black letterbox only looks good in 16x10 so may need to be tweaked for full screen version
* Context summary piece of writing beneath the writing -- below the canvas
** 1~3 paragraphs, links below
** Format for list of links: Name of outlet, article title, date, and url, not hyperlinked

* The visibility of "Unity / WebGL" can be removed
* Preloader with "Unity" can't be removed -- not a problem!
* Plan to make everything open source, make process transparent

* Bug - freeze at Flounder: https://imgur.com/a/CpB9DL0?

* Menu screen and credit screens
* Opening screen? https://imgur.com/BVkyH7D
* Ending credits?

## Issue 03 Website Development
* How can Vincent get in the site back end and edit things?
* Step through it so we know Vincent has access

### Issue 03 Social Media Posts

### Twitter / Mastodon

1
Our third issue, WATER BODIES, will be coming to the World Wide Web and Decentralized Web, late March 2023.

2
In Issue 03, we will feature written and interactive media pieces by .....

3
Our cover image will be designed by @lake___sleep, an illustrator based in New Orleans. lakesleep.etsy.com
https://www.instagram.com/lake___sleep/

4
Shane

5
Jayashree

6
Dolly & Niall

7
Chantal

8
Alexandra

9
Jacob

10
Jens

11
Olu

12
Marcela

Issue 03 will showcase the beta release of @dwebpress x @suttyweb CMS, which will enable anyone to publish static websited to IPFS, Holepunch, and BitTorrent as easily as publishing a Wordpress or Squarespace site.

### COMPOST Issue 03: Check in with Shreyas

* 13 stories on TerraStories instance -- place-based oral systems
* Content is there, but want it to be accessible
* Not all of it is in English, have some translation of the pieces
* Narrative told by someone
* Mix of speakers: residents from the region, farmers, civil society organization, researchers, students
* Figured out how to put it on TerraStories

Putting the data on Terrastories wasn't an issue -- simple database, can do a bulk upload

TerraStories embedding needs to be figured out -- disabled feature where entire webpage shows

Proposal: Had planned to connect with people who they hadn't able to connect with

Blockers
* Technical aspects: Resolve issue with server

### Issue 03 Website Development Checkin

#### Participants
Mai, Vincent

#### Agenda
* Overview of pieces + process
* Pieces with that need special integration
* Pen Pals - Alexandra Kumala
* https://two.compost.digital/logging-off/001/
* Crying Mountains - Marcela
* Chronological order with the titles of the assets
* Name the things and where they go
* Leeway on the page layout?
* Musseled Out (Working Title) - Dolly & Niall
* "We will be using the Unity game engine, exporting for web (WebGL). The final output will be a playable browser-based game - see Niall’s previous work for examples of this. We can optionally create standalone desktop exports for Mac/PC as well."

Questions for Sutty
* How much customization is easily done?
* How to do it? Can Sutty accept this on their backend?
* Access to the repo?
* How can we embed this WebGL game?

### TO DOs
[ ] Check in with Dolly and Niall about game format and additional resources?
[ ] Organize call between Sutty <> Vincent
[X] Email Marcela re: piece layout (see notes above)
[X] Email Alexandra re: layout

### ISSUE 03 Development Call #2: DWeb and Project Sustainability
24 February 2023

0:00 - 0:05 -- Welcome

0:05 - 0:15 -- Check-ins
Where is your water? – What is a body of water that you feel the most affinity with?

Checkins
* Mai, they/them, Arroyo Seco in LA
* Ben, her/him,
* Erin, she/they, Mississippi
* Jens, he/him, North Sea
* Marcela, she/her, tarot cards (inside)
* Chantal, she/her, Indian Ocean beach near Nairobi, now dried up streams nearby
* Jayashree, she/her, little pockets of water nearby, working to prot
* Dolly, she/her, ponds at the Heath
* Shane, he/him, nearby lake

0:15 - 0:20 -- Agenda
Recap of last discussion: DWeb publishing and collective ownership
What could collective digital publishing/creative labor look/feel like on the web?
How would distributed web publishing and collective ownership impact the communities you’re part of?
COMPOST / DP Governance
Demo of Sutty x Distributed Press
Current revenue streams
Discussion I: Promotion & fundraising strategy
Discussion II: Reflection & looking ahead

0:20 - 0:30 – COMPOST / DP Governance

0:30 - 0:35 – Demo of Sutty x Distributed Press
Q & A
Shane: Being able to see versions of issues -- will you be able to see that a website/content has been update
Marcela -- would be able to use this tool in her community!
Ben -- Jekyll allows all content to be self-contained, instead of having a website that needs to connect to a bunch of distributed databases

0:35 - 0:40 – Current revenue streams

0:40 - 1:00 – DISCUSSION PART I: Promotion & Fundraising Strategy
Overview of our social media channels
Launch party plans
>> How do we want to fundraise from this issue?
>> What are our fundraising goals?

* Jens: Fundraising for the issue itself vs. edition fundraising -- pay for a specific issue; Like BandCamp -- being able to listen to specific songs or albums
-- Printed version of COMPOST +
-- Locally rooted journalism, focused on a local area, have an impact on a place, explore community and concrete needs somewhere
-- Partnership with another organization or institution

* Jayashree: Exploring local issues but connect them to global issues, how to take local problems and solutions and link them to global scale; Learn about approaches from each other; Linking threads together

* Ben: Thinking of it as different layers
1. COMPOST
2. Issue 03
3. Individual Contributor
4. Tools COMPOST depend on
* Web monetization: Making the funding mechanism passive once you decide how you will distribute them
* Subscriber-based funding: to get to the level of funding an issue, you need 1000s of subscribers (which would be 1% of readership - 1 million)
* Local vs. global approach

* Jens: Marketing around local stories; This is global AND local.

* Jayashree: I'm not hopeful about subscribers -- they're all separate, would love to have bundled subscriptions

* Shane: We have a lot of localities here, if we were to run an event locally about the project; Local contributor hosts an event, link to the place where they're in; Love idea of printed object

* Jayashree: NFTs might not be the best way but having a way for people to participate and be part of a community; What's the end? What's the outcome of journalism, for instance? What would people join for?

* Ben: Chicken and egg problem; Building a community, but also need to have exposure and established trust

* Erin: also want to add that having a physical copy of the issues would be amazing. Even if they arent that fancy, like one color printing on cheap (recycled?) paper. I could see it being really fruitful
- Shane: +2

* Shane: Start from the cost of the issue, then ask for people to donate to support it; so much scope to do different things with the project
- Emergence Magazine funding model, physical copy of the magazine when you support it
- Each contributor having connection to networks in their place, rhizomatic connections through the issues
- We're speaking from so many different places; this is unique!

1:00 - 1:05 -- 5 min break

1:05 - 1:30 -- DISCUSSION PART II: Reflection & looking ahead

>> Has this experience matched your expectations?
>> How else would you like to be involved?

## COMPOST Design - Feb 22, 2023

### Participants
Mai, Ivan

### Notes
https://www.are.na/compost/issue-03-design

## COMPOST Design - Feb 8, 2023

### Participants
Mai, Ivan

### Notes

Design components needed:
1 - Cover image
2 - Background texture
3 - Footer background
4 - Social media assets

*** Cover image deadline: March 6, 2023 ***

## COMPOST Illustrations

Jan 13, 2023

### Participants
Mai, Erin

### Notes
* Solid on what it will look like
* Wants to chat about how to get input from people

* 700 x 350px !!

## Development Call #1 -- Collective Ownership + Digital Publishing

Jan 13, 2023

Project Overview

Distributed Press + COMPOST

Hypha Worker Co-op: 

Sutty Co-op: https://sutty.nl/en/ 

Stewards

Problems with Creative Labor Online

Finances and sustainability tensions

Discussion Part I

5 min break

Discussion Part II

Intros 

Mai (they/them): Glendale/LA. dark green

Ben (he/him): Toronto. light green

Erin (she/her/they/them): New Orleans. Yellow

Alexandra ( ): Jakarta. dark grey

Marcela (she/her): Brazil. dark yellow

Shane (he/him): southwest Ireland. mossy green

Jens (he/him): Brazil right now. blue

Tal (he/they): Queens, NY. Slippery light blue and spikey orange

Austin (they/them): NYC. space between orange and pink

Niall (pronounced 'neil') (they/them): Glasgow Scotland! hazy white-pink

Creative labor online sucks! We are expected to be our own companies yet livelihood is precarious + monopolized/greedy/surveilling Platforms profit, not us.

Sister Projects: COMPOST + Distributed Press (DP): 

Ben: Project emerged out of a desire for shared space to continue thinking/creating/developing that began at Dweb Camp. "You can destroy the printing press, but that will not destroy the copies that are already out there."

Mai: It’s like we’re handing out copies of the zine (COMPOST), as well as a tool (DP) to make copies of the zine and send it to people with different access needs (dweb protocols)

Why DWeb?

Censorship-proof

Offline access and sharing

Encourages experiments in new organizational/income models

Piracy <3

Ben: There are pros and cons from this shift from YouTube/Substack model to "printing press on the internet model" ---> gain resistance to censorship but you also lose access to your audience (you don't know who has your file) + this can be a dealbreaker (how to monetize?) When we shift to a new model, we need to think about the new problems that will come along with it.

Mai: It doesn't actually need to be on the dweb to be a cooperative, but under this system (how to enforce copyright? how to get paid) it sort of does, for us to get paid upfront + ensure artists are supported

Jens: What does this mean, more concretely? Where are these files? Where do these copies reside? Ben: They behave more or less like torrents, so whoever sees the file keeps a copy of it, and different protocols have different criteria for how long they keep the file. Infrastructure for distributing files scales up with consumption; legal problems might be, what if this is illegal content/r we liable? we still deal with copyrgith problems.

The two projects feed each other and grow off each other: DP deals with distribution problem; COMPOST deals with owernship + governance problems. 

Austin: For those interested in making work that is living (dynamic, informed in "real time" by the "living world) there is a paradox, bc in distributing content it becomes difficult to keep it in real time. How to make dynamic living content with this peer-to-peer model? Web archives. (Ben: link rot)

Financial transparency is good! 

Grant for the Web (50k for first two issues), Filecoin Foundation for the DWeb (50k for this issue), Open Collective (3.4k)

Priority is paying the people who contribute to the platform. (Shane: for sustainability, it is important core team is compensated too!)

Discussion Question #1: What would meaningful collective ownership and control look and feel like to you? 

Jens; some sort of membership

Alexandra: squiggles; flow, synchronicity, synergy, mutual benefits to all parties involved

Austin: dry-level practical terms re: labor that this sort of project requires. mindful of work that people put into it; proof of attendance and participation (validate the work that people are actually doing). how does privilege of having time— who CAN engage in lengthy convos, etc.—play into this? 

 Marcela: collective work takes a lot of time, smaller vs. bigger groups; cells (~15 people) making decisions + cells connect to each other. this is a long dream

Mai: when we scale-up too much, we lose touch of what we're doing. COMPOST is a project of building alternate visions in a small group

Jacob: on the level of an individual writer, it can be alienating for work to end up on the internet published somewhere, lost in the void; when you contribute to a collective at one phase, you remain a part of it for the rest of it. that is exciting, allows for a deeper connection to the actual work, etc. Also aware of problems of leadership, time. etc.

Ben: COMPOST: Project with scarce resources operating on a mindset of abundance 🤣 Treating people "the same" doesn't work because we're all coming from different places, capacities, etc. We talk about mutual benefits; there is also mutual risk with each project. Where do you dump the risk? Invite people are best-equipped to take on specific risk into the picture. There is an under-emphasis on the users of the platform

Mai: If you have money/resources to throw at something, you take the risk but you also get all the benefits. This is a corporate problem; how do we flip that? This is a bigger issue ("with great power comes great responsibility): instead of redistributing power, reorganizing economy for their purpose

Discussion Question #2: How would dweb publishing and collective ownership impact the communities you're part of? 

Ben: for background, DP is currently working with an Argentinian cooperative who is creating a wordpress-like interface, to connect that program with DP's publishing tool. This is WordPress for the Distributed Web, essentially

Tal: has the potential to answer the question "what would your job look like after liberation" but also dweb—like everything else—is beholden to the systems of domination we live under. Critical info re: self-defense, organizing, healthcare, etc. can be more readily available.

Austin: community-based publishing! a municipal scale publishing commons, or a bioregional scale knowledge commons. Ben: <3

Jacob: Collaboration between peripheries without mediation of the core—two bioregions with similar ecological issues communicating directly without nyc/london/wherever being the connection point

Shane: publishing is, literally, to make something public, and dweb might be doing something different. this is making something public to a selected public

Mai: "ownership" creeps back in. ~10 stewards are making COMPOST newsletter to keep thinking about these reflections. any contributor can apply to become a steward

Austin: Ty for facilitating meaningful convo<<<3 Question of ownership keeps coming up. in the framework of the commons, thinking about intermediary forms of ownership! Where are the boundaries of ownership on info (bioregions, library, location-based, expertise-based). does not need to be only my body or the sum body of bodies who occupy the universe; it's OK if it's not accessible to everyone, and OK that there is many, etc.

Marcela: under this system, when people produce something, they produce an aesthetic that follows the idea proposed by social media; in dweb publishing there would be more access to the ways people *can* express themselves

Ben: "governance is the social relations we build"

Other questions: 
How does DWeb publishing impact collective control?

How would distributed publishing address or complicate the existing problems?

How do they complicate or bring about new challenges?

What are potential use cases and audiences?

## COMPOST Editorial Check-in - Jan 9, 2023

* Participants: Tal, Mai

Review editorial timeline 

20 JAN 2023 :: Deadline to submit first draft of pieces

03 FEB 2023 :: Last day of edits and comments sent to contributors (edits will be sent to contributors as completed)

>>> 06 FEB 2023?

20 FEB 2023 :: Deadline to submit final draft of pieces

End of MAR 2023 :: Release of COMPOST Issue 03!

Distributed Press 

COMPOST Theme

“Publish to DWeb toggle”

Done by February 2023 

Cover + Overall look design?

Gray Area + C/Change: https://cchange.xyz/signals/

Development Call 

Discussion: Collective Ownership + Digital Publishing

NOTES
* Contributors upload their pieces to Sutty
* Cover: Key words; suggestions; collect vision; do they know anyone?
- Arena board for visual styles?
* Gray Area: 
- Tip for the cross-posts?
- Invite Tal to stewards call
* Development call
- Funding is the biggest issue: Grants, Crowdfunding, etc.
- COMPOST is in a seeming stable situation compared to other projects
- Models of leadership: Stewards
- Mission and values and political lines; crypto? DAOs?
- Editorial vision: Afro-futurism by a (seeming) white person
- What are the values of the group, and how to manage that as a group?
- Editorial standards -- standards for how the work is

## Issue 03 Orientation Call

December 16, 2022

1. Welcome! [0:00 — 0:05 / Mai]

Mai facilitating, Tal taking notes

Participants can minimize the presentation section on BigBlueButton

Video encouraged but not required

We’re taking shared notes that we will publish. 

Tell us if you’d like anything to be kept private and we’ll be sure to do that

Feel free to ask questions!

2. Intros [0:05 — 0:20 / Mai]

Everyone please share, briefly:
1. Your name
2. Your pronouns
3. Where are you calling from?
4. Something you like to do off-screen
5. Pick the next person to go

3. COMPOST / DP [0:20 — 0:30 / Mai]

COMPOST is a magazine about the digital commons

History

Idea started at DWeb Camp in 2019

We need a decentralized way to publish!

Not on big platforms like Medium

Take advantage of DWeb affordances to fight misinfo, horizontal ownership

Not funded by intrusive ads / surveillance

Stakeholder interviews: Are.na; IndieWeb, Misinformation researcher, journalists

COMPOST: A venue to explore solidarity economics, co-operatives, community networks, free and open source development, IndieWeb, and DWeb, from an approachable and human perspective

Grant for the Web funding, now Filecoin Foundation for the DWeb funded

COMPOST is also a series of experiments with each issue being project with cohort of contributors (a “collective lab” of sorts)

What does our collective lab do?

Final outcome is a published issue, outcome of PROCESS

SHARED EXPERIMENTATION - Learn and test out various publishing models, technologies, and collective decision making processes together 

Monetization - Tipping, crowdfunding (through OC), web monetization

SOLIDARITY - supportive creative environment, build relationships with each other, through chat + peer feedback sessions

Distributed Press

Build open source tools and collect knowledge, so others can experiment/build alongside us

Describe work on Distributed Press

5. Contributor Motivations [0:30 — 0:50 / Mai]

QUESTION - Tell us about your project and why you were interested in publishing it through COMPOST. Thoughts about how it relates to the theme?

*~*~* ISSUE 03 Theme: Water Bodies *~*~*
This page is brought to you by a million liters of water. Sourced from lakes, rivers, and oceans, it cools the data centers that store these bits you see. It’s boiled into steam, turns turbines for the electricity that powers your device, the router it connects to, and every whirring, beating part of the network that brings you these words. Meanwhile, droughts, contamination, and rising sea levels continue to creep us towards a boiling point of human and non-human suffering. Only through crises are we pressed to reckon with our negligent stewardship of this element of life.
For Issue 03, we are searching for the material in our networks. The water in the cloud. The way our relationship with all earthly offerings is reflected in the webs we are building.
We are interested in creative and critical pieces that explore:
* Water as an intrinsic component to digital technology and network infrastructure.
* Histories of waterways as networks of trade, communication, and sites of ritual.
* Community resilience and organizing in the face of mismanaged water systems.
* Inherited legacies of how our ancestors stewarded and cared for bodies of water.
* A focus on water as a means to process our impact on this planet and each other.
In our third issue, we want to acknowledge ourselves as, and our relationships with, water bodies.

6. Logistics [0:50 — 1:10 / Mai]
Editorial - SHARE SCREEN - Publication Guide
The Wiki
link.hypha.coop/compost-wiki
>> Publication Guide

Meetings

Required

1 - Orientation (you’re here)!

2 - Collective decision making + financial success (week of January 2 – not December 19)

3 - Promotion and Monetization (week of January 23 – not January 16)

Strongly encouraged:

Peer Feedback Group call

Launch party - Late March / early April

Optional

2+ social hangouts

Office hours for peer review

Peer Feedback
What we heard across the board from Issue 01 contributors is that they wanted to meet with other contributors and have an opportunity to do peer reviews of their pieces.
>> We will assign you into groups of 3~4 people.
Matrix chat

Join the Matrix chat if you want to be in regular touch with us and fellow contributors (instructions sent by email but also on the Wiki). 

Chat uses: events; resources; ideas; status updates; brainstorming

We will still use email for any important communication

Draft Deadlines

Peer feedback meetings - First two weeks of January 2023

90% rough draft - January 20, 2023

Not a final draft, but your main ideas and sections should be there

We need to know your intended layout at this stage. We have a standard layout for textual pieces with images/gifs (each piece is a single page, with single column text and images that break up the text)

If you have any specific requirements around navigation (e.g, your piece requires multiple pages), we need to know this at the 90% rough draft date

If you have any multimedia files, we need to know how many and their file sizes, formats, and resolutions

Feedback given back to you by February 3, 2023

Final draft - February 20, 2023

Including teaser (~2 sentence piece description), cover image, and short author bio (~4 sentences)

Issue 03 Release - End of March 2023

6. Questions? [1:10 — 1:30 / Mai]

Meeting notes: 

INTROS

Mai (they/them): Glendale, CA. Loves food and cooking! 

Jacob (they/them): Vancouver usually, currently northern CA. Likes to walk + nature-finding (mushrooms!)

Dolly (she/her): London. Knitting, getting into chainmail weaving

Erin (she/her): New Orleans. teaching herself how to tattoo

Alexandra (she/her, in gendered languages ! ): NY + Jakarta. Learning to cook more

Chantal (she/her): Kenya. Knitting and crocheting and new sewing maching 

Niall (they/them): Glasglow. Skateboarding

Olu (they/them): London. Sewing

AWS / Austin (they/them): NYC. Sewing, flying kites

Shane (he/him): Northwest Ireland. 

Shreyas (he/him): Bangalore. Busy with collective :) Visit places and learn from the people of that place

Marcela (she/her): Brazil. 

Jens: Brazil, from Netherlands. Plays music, guitar, writes songs

Malini (she/her): Bangalore. Likes to sing, listen to music

Jayashree (she/her): Guargon. Gardener, likes to sign! 

Tal (he/they): Queens. Knitting!

***

COMPOST emerged from 3 folks at DWeb Camp. The way we compensate and treat each other is a problem-- Atomizing! Limits creativity! Enables censorship! Distributed Press emerged to take advantage of web protocols to use the web differently. COMPOST is a use-case of the tool Distributed Press; and it is a serious magazing in itself.

Central issue of this is to get to know each other. This is a **collective lab** and the final outcome is a shared project. What does it mean for people who are from primarily offline communities to shape a tool that works for them? How do we create artifacts of this endeavour— A newsletter? On Arena? A way to start a conversation around our own questions... how to have this conversation more publicly? 

Mai also leads project management of tool Distributed Press, which is a tool of Hypha Worker Cooperative, which is a tech-worker organization in Toronto (so is COMPOST). Also partnered with Suti, in Buenos Aires, which has made a content management system for bookstores, people of marginalized identiites, new DWeb protocols.

We want contributors feedback + criticism. Why does this matter? What is a community network?

Contributors can become stewards of the project itself, who have helped select these pieces. Ideally we can all meet in a future optional call.

***

ABOUT THE PROJECTS

AWS: came across Hypha's work in job life, interested in what collective governance looks like in publishing space. interested in eco-psychological questions: "what isn't a body of water?" "all that people are are functionalized bags of seawater" blurriness between self and environmnet, and how water bodies disturb that! wants to weave ideas around the commons into the piece + has done work around feral servers (i.e. you can only read the piece when it's raining, the project floods, etc.)

EJayashree: has been working on water for years in an urban context— engaging gvts. and people with water scarcity problems and also water excess, and to bring solution if it exists. used to use very basic interent protocols and came to COMPOST bc we must reach out more; there is so much within the web and water solutions are going to be very important in the coming years. how to distribute these solutions across the internet? 

Tal: First issue of COMPOST; Piece on lithium and how it powers our digital life; Came on as an editor for Issue 02 to shape each piece; Background in magazine and book publishing, works at a publishing house currently; Really exciting how this theme relates to their COMPOST piece

Olu: background as developer and labour work! invested in writing + critical POV of tech. connections between water and tech and how they relate. interested in materiality of this; inmaterial vs. material... this is an annoying idea... it all exists everywhere.

Jacob: comes to this from the water side of things, trained as an ecological scientist. eDNA-- a tool for bioversity and monitering various forms of ecological investigation. what lives where? who lives where? has been working in academic lanes and frustrated around norms of data storage, etc. the way revolutionary potential is trapped in the strictures of scientific academia. how can promise of technology be moved towards potential of technology? feels ineffectual to criticize from within the structures, and excited to do it.. outside the club :)

Niall: working on a webgame looking at a border enforcement agency greenwashing marine systems in the mediterranean in the same way they surveill boats + people moving across the water body there.

Dolly: working with Niall! has written for teach in the part of ecosystem of lefty-tech critical magazines but also limiting; COMPOST has ability to actually build something.

Erin: coming from visual artist POV. series of illustrations to work with other pieces & wants to integrate visuals into ideas of other pieces. work has been at intersection of water and tech lately

Alexandra: approaching this from the water standpoint, not so much the intricacies of the web. piece about Jakarta, the fastest sinking city in the world. Jakarta + islands of Indonesia traded for NY by the dutch (am i getting this history right????? mind blown). experimented with epistolary form, two machines writing to each other, with experimental prose + some poetry

Shane: came across COMPOST around issue 2. about rivers dammed in west Wicklow, SE Ireland, the areas of Poulaphuca, to create new hydroelectric power stations. (read pieces, and i just loved this part so writing it down: trees the only thing not uprooted! cut down w/ roots...)

Chantal: personal project in the works for awhile now, diving into identities of a "non traditional background." the tribe she is part of is a "dying tribe"— losing culture + language passed down for thousands of years. has been reading more African lit, esp from Kenya, and finding there isn't a lot in terms of fiction. has been ghostwriting for the past two years or so, and so this piece merges fictional writing with her exploration of tribal identity. through the eyes of a fictional character, contending with the Indian Ocean slave trade, which is not brought up in active ways a lot and has led to erasue + forgotten histories— both shame about participating and also having been a victim.

Shreyas: has been working with COMPOST since Issue 1, Technofutures from Bidar, an illustrated site with annotations that captured voices of different members of the team reflecting on experience of project. (group concerned with data security concerns, working to have collaborative project and asking what was learned from that experience/conversation.) worked on Issue 2 too, on the Killjoy Cooking network. now working on issues related to water in Bidar— has experienced droughts, water related crisis but not water scarce!— and so are working with water infrastructures that the region does have. since ~2017 have been gathering info from farmers, well-diggers, scientists, ppl who hold a certain type of scholarship about the place. want to use this opportunity to bring both the narratives and lives experiences from the region along with using an open-source platform that is a place-based oral history archive to share/collect/archive these testimonies in an interactive media. interested in what servers can actually be used and how these communities can access them (this is really removed from these communities + their families) 8 to 10 people involved in this project— questions about co-authoring and how to bring in citations.

Malini: working with Shreyas! 

Jens: good to be in shared space, feel energy of network. part of Commons Network in Netherlands which works on questions about community governance, commons, etc. learning about pre-capitalist way of organizing around water bodies, around collective using water, around maintenance, from Dutch traditions in pre-modern times.

Marcela: part of Community Network in Brazil, talking about how the internet should not be center of work, internet can be supportive but there must be other common goals + have been thinking about waters there as part of this. how to write a piece collectively? decided to gather and walk through river, to bring reflections of our common good, bringing the flow of the river and the flow of the network to the communities.

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PUBLICATION GUIDE: useful to check out as you are writing/working on your pieces. Please submit draft in a format that we can use. All pieces need a cover image— text-based pieces can work with Erin, find a photo, draw something yourself, etc. Please look at our citational best practices. We will need a bio.

The tone of COMPOST is approachable, no matter your background. Explain terms, what technologies you are acually using and how they operate, etc. And we want it to be intimate— what is the drama, the stories of the characters you are sharing with us, the crux of the story. Our audience is generally digital natives, people who understand the basics of network infrastructures, artists, academics. You don't have to overexplain, but we want accessibility within reason.

This will all be published on the decentralized web, which means that ideally this will be copied and shared across the world.

Required meetings:

Collecive decision-making and financial success (what would you like to see within a collectively-owned magazine? this is collective dream-making.)

Promotion + monetization

Peer feedback groups

Launch party

Completely optional is some social hang-outs, maybe some readings, office hours to talk through issues with pieces.

We have a matrix channel, a decentralized chat channel, so that we can work asynchronously while working.

We have an Arena board too, to keep up with notes, inspo, etc.

Want to confirm that everyone is OK with contracts.

*A suggestion to ask again by email if everyone is happy for their proposals to be shared. Sometimes in a group call, consent may be implied or politely given but may not be explicit – I expect we're all comfortable but think this would be a better way to confirm please. And thank you for the wonderful intro call. *