Disorientations Weekly 2020-07-28

--- tags: meeting notes --- # Disorientations Weekly 2020-07-28 7pm EST via Jitsi JOIN CALL: https://meet.jit.si/DisorientationsWeekly (Zoom backup, if needed: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/96488511351?pwd=Y2hzVElQQW5WSGhYelVNcW03OWJkUT09) **Attending**: Casey, Emma, Katie **Facilitator**: **Notetakers**: ## Agenda - **Intros** (name, pronouns, what excites you about this project) - [5m] - Casey (he/him) excited about one place to bring these pubs together across years and campuses - future goal: owned and run by student activists! when a student had to explain/justify diso, but its an undeniable form across many decades, understudied - Matt - development of website; Emma - archive maintenance and outreach; Joanne - pandemic edition; most groups are stretched thin/don't have capacity - What are different ways people can contribute to the project? These things need to be contextualized and interlinked; a lot of room to be writing about the publication process, connecting the dots between diff. zines, what have different campuses written about health, or other issues, etc. - With archive have a reason to interview people! lowkey/generative oral history - Emma (any) in NY, recent grad, interest in self-publication, started many archive projects which never manifested - Katie (she/her) recent grad, 6 y/o diso guide, never could get a group of people together, interested in the guides and publication and writing, but also excited to think about publication ### Discussion Items - **Blog Posting (Welcome Katie!)** [10m] - Katie: Don't know what resources are already available -- but don't remember finding any when we were talking. Oral histories is cool, otherwise only happens in conversation. - Emma: First time hearing about oral history goal, really cool. Reminds me of different thoughts I've had over past month around campaign mory, counternarratives, institutional memory, institutional time. Having infinite time and access would be cool to build around the history of the form. Pandemic edition is an interesting speculative project. - Katie: OOO Can we get all the information we needed/was there something we'd miss? Limitations of writing a disorientation guideline - Casey: resonate with looking for resrouces, didn't have access to what other campuses were doing further away from those directly around us; didn't have access to history through time. stanford is putting out really good guides in the present day but thehistory goes back to the 90s. temptation to think problems just started/and are just peaking; however students have always struggled. would love to think about the form of disos (elements of a diso); what are the common things publications tend to have? (eg: timelines, maps). categories, common topics, tagging. dream archive: different ways of navigating that include the form (eg: show me everyone's timelines!), or by issue (eg: show me all the resources on antiracism). work to be done tying these things together; some things get lost on a pdf on a crappy hosting website. a lot of the times resources are stable (eg: know your rights). some elements that are static/incremental. - Katie: Fostering collaboration between schools? - Emma: Institutions are design to isolate students across and within universities. A lot in the interest of keeping students away from coalition building. How much of that mentality is seeping into collab efforts on our end? When we ask random folks to ask if they can collab and they're stretched too thin. Relateing to this project and concept of "do-ocracy" -- what are things I need to unlearn? Been asking folks from diff schools earlier this month, and got weird radio silence or we don't have time. Totally understandable. But what would conditions look like to be excited about collaborating? Overall update in terms of collaborating with students -- hasn't been super fruitful. - Katie: times where collaboration are exciting vs. times when you don't want to talk to people! - Casey: talking about longer working sessions - we've committed to our networks workshop in september, different ideas about networks for radical technologists, interesting site for this type of content. putting the materials together allow us to bring people together, disaggregated form of resistance, happening w/o much intentional coordination - what type of workshop would be interesting? - what is this group/what do we want it to be? one of the things we've all been getting out is just learning about materials but also different concepts around starting + organizing an archive outside of library science/doctorine way...different tools and language, and group structures that can work for a more activist minded group. it'll be important that it's not an oppressive space, clear decision making structures, clear ways of participating - exercise we can do around values. stories around successful/unsuccessful collaboration and the other listens for the values. (eg: value getting a clear response) build individual sets of collaboration values + as a group this is how we work together well/this is how we don't - third workshop: specifically around the site and the archive, what are we trying to build? omeka, barely any customization, how do we imagine what we want the site to be? joanne: rather than moving text boxes around, what if it were a physical space/dream space, what does it feel like to be here? how do you enter/exit, who's here? more abstract way to interact w/ the collection. designer friend -- would be down to help us figure out and run a workshop like that...updates TBD - Emma: Onboarding document for folks joining our calls? The way our group moves through projects and focuses. This is what we're thinking about now -- rather than this is what happened on July 14. Katie, any questions? Or things you'd want a primer on? - [Onboarding](/oz2jaiJET5KODKzlcW_y2Q) and [For Collaborators](/Le4jHjaxTDWXRco_-bNjlg) -- we can add a "now" section to the onboarding doc, current projects and focus areas, links to find out more. - Katie: Rambling convo is a good way to learn. still trying to compile the project; interviews are cool, documentation is interesting, how the work continues in archiving! - Emma: Found this group 2 months ago on a random Slack, was around when Joanne had joined and had just submitted Eyebeam application. What was helpful for me then was reading everything on Zulip and HackMD but that's not realistic. Note transcripts are long to get through. One thing I've felt that's tricky is all of the threads. Really appreciate but it was helpful to have next steps. Felt hard when I first joined to align my goals with the project, wasn't sure if the goals of the project weren't clear or were so multi-faceted -- or if it was difficult to place myself in what was prioritized. I was thinking it'd be a good way to practice web dev and practice archives on a theoretical level, but never got around to do that. Offered myself up as someone closer to university students to navigate collaboration -- not stressful but very unclear. - Casey: weekly meeting feels like a lot, trying to figure out what the rhythm of our work is, we do know guides come out in september so we can import, but there are other things that can happen. can we make things more comfortable and explicit? setting up things so people can come and go, how do we set up an inbox/communication of labor, thinking about flexible and resilient systems. a question that we can start asking more is what do you want to learn? a project like this can be a chance to reach out to people (eg: interview w/ consortio ?? university activists) - in late july 2020 what's the experience of trying to enter this group? - Emma: What do you want to learn? I want to lurk. What would it take to make our project lurker friendly? What are ways to enter in, build trust and coherence. I didn't feel confident until I thought: I know I have friend that. - Emma: Haven't actually read disos besides ones I worked on. - Being explicit -- avoid trap of being ambiguous and that being confusing, stressful, harmful. OK waiting for workshops for next steps! - Katie: thinking further + creating a better idea about what functions the blog could play. makes sense w/ the blog, writing is often solitary, coming from an entity - Casey: reading so much on governance! our group is small; Clear agenda, clear next steps. where is my energy most useful? spent exactly where you can make the most "you" contribution vs. doing grunt work. put really ambitious ideas out and walked them back, that's totally fine; for me it's a side project, we can think of it as an hour a week commitment. say something when you are compelled to speak but you're not necessarily assigned a thing - Emma: I feel very affirmed when you're like "this is a low commitment project!!" I get stressed when people are very much working and I am not doing it. Hate to be a twitter normie but normalize doing nothing or learning more as a next step -- would love to explicitly put somewhere. - Mindful that if there's anything you want not published edit here! Bump to Sunday - **[Working Session: OurNetworks](https://hackmd.io/CggdgrujSriY06lB_t2tGQ)** - [45m] - Moving to Sunday meeting 4-7pm - Can co-create/prioritize agenda for this on the spot, but dropping in some ideas on format -- if needed: - Schedule longer weekend worksesh? - Refresher on context, proposal, and goals - Any goals not in the proposal that people want to add? - Constraints (limited time, etc.) - Roles (I see myself doing X...) - Generate X number of ideas as a group - Round Robin for X minutes - Writing to self for X minutes then sharing - Focus on generating ideas, not winnowing down/critiquing (Yes, and...) - Jamboard (or something like a post-it wall?) ## Notes ## Decisions - Use Zoom > Jitsi - Work session on Sunday 4-7pm - Our Networks - Checking in - Alternate Tuesday evenings working on the website or the our networks workshop, taking us through the rest of the summer -- decide if we want to move Tues to Sun and make longer ## Next Steps - [ ] Casey - add "Now" section to the onboarding doc -- current projects and focus areas, links to find out more - [ ] Emma DO NOTHING!! intentionally - [ ] Katie map out some ideas related to the blog