# letter to nick

hm,
this is getting lower and lower in my busy september's todo list... i am sorry for that... i think the post i sent earlier covers a good part of what was going on with pirate care and here i would take a subjective timeline approach and hope that will cover some background stuff it didn't appear in the texts and coverage so far...

i'll try to do something less structured for you structuralist tendencies ;)

something less structured
> and this is supposed to be comment [name=Marcell Mars]

structuredless structured for you st
i like your ubu's piece.. it reminds me that contextualising what we are doing with 'pirate care' (and its syllabus) could totally link to ubu too.. here's the story...

a year after the letter 'in solidarity with libgen and sci-hub '[1] we did a letter for ubu's 20th birthday[2]
there we introduced some points/lessons we learned from ubu.. things like: "Keep it simple and avoid constant technology updates. Ubu is plain HTML, written in a text-editor." or "Even a website should function offline. One should be able to take the hard disk and run. Avoid the cloud - computers of people you don't know and who don't care about you." with the invitation to find your own ubu and "to mirror each other in solidarity." kenneth later on took that letter to open his book on ubu[3].

tomi and i started to collaborate with valeria a couple of years ago, while the three of us overlapped at leuphana university - centre for digital cultures. and at the time valeria mentioned she works on a phenomena of hashtag syllabi created by social movements. but for a few years those notes would be in her to-be-finished queue. she has been active in a few social movements herself - she was one of the founders of precarious workers brigade and around 2014 she got involved with the radical education forum in london to organize the state fo education conference [3b]. in 2018 she wrote a piece titled 'Pirate Care - How do we imagine the health care for the future we want?'[4]. we liked it. it was written for a european project on digital social innovation & supposed to reach a wide general audience, but the concept resonated with us. pirates getting in trouble for their care deeds. shouldn't surprise anyone knowing about our work with 'memory of the world'.

then we got the chance to organize the annual conference of our center in coventry on 'pirate care'[5]. tomi and i presented 'Against Innovation: Compromised institutional agency and acts of custodianship'[6] which was later on published in the special issue of ephemera 'repair matters'[7] valeria and kim trogal edited.

we totally wanted to keep up with our collaboration (one can see already how our interests intertwined more and more in time) and work more on 'pirate care'. it is rare you can say, about your project, something like:

> "We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people’s lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldn’t get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates."

and people immediately get it.

so we started to prepare the project in rijeka, as part of european capital of culture, produced by a great local organization called 'drugo more' and as part of their 'dopolavoro'[8] stream.

around the same time we managed to collaboratively write a piece 'learning from #syllabus'[9] which was published in 'state machines'[10]. 'learning from #syllabus' followed up on valeria's notes from few years earlier and covered some of our interests, but even more it stemmed from our experiences at coventry - how to address the academic collapse where everything became a corporate platform, full of menageres pretending they are doing something other than bothering teaching and research staff? so we tried to imagine the context in which the relevant knowledge produced at the level of political struggles could meet the need to learn what's relevant today. probably the best thing to do is to go and read 'learning from #syllabus' but in short our proposition was and is: political struggles, social movement, pedagogy and autonomous technology should meet somewhere. sean dockray and i share a server with few others, for years now, and we have been thinking on how to go further with shadow libraries. i knew he tried few times to start a simple way to collaboratively work on different syllabi. few attempts failed. and the last one was called 'hyperreadings'[11]. this time it was just a README file. no software. we used that text as the evidence of a certain sensibility where syllabus, as a (multiaspect) device, resonates with many. it raised its imaginary power recently. we tried to articulate that in 'learning from #syllabus'.

we decided to follow up with 'pirate care', after the conference, as a project of reading, writing and learning together. we decided the syllabus will be the device to get there.

valeria and i moved to rijeka (kind of half-half with coventry). organized a number of reading groups[12] at 'drugo more' and in november organized a collaborative writing retreat[13]. we also organized a very early test of collaborative writing of a housing struggles syllabus in 'maydayrooms' in london few months before. we wanted to explore, while it was happening, how to make it happen. i am sure you know these kind of things. there is a vague methodology. vague idea of what should be the outcome. but strong commitment to *how* all of the communication should happen. collaborative to cut it short ;)

we knew we want people coming from practices to write what they thing what we could learn together about their own insights and experiences. and we wanted to provide a setup in which learning together also happen. our plan was to finish what was written in november and finally do a learning together camp where the syllabus would be activated.

the whole project was noticed, among others by our long time comrades and collaborators whw[14], and invited for their exhibition '… of bread, wine, cars, security and peace'[15]. we were invited for the residency where we planned to work and write further the syllabus, among few others with sea watch[16] and women on waves[17]. we were supposed to open our own 'pirate care' exhibition in june in rijeka too. the opening in vienna was march 08. that was the last public event before the lockdown. due to covid19, in its own slowmotion, everything was cancelled.

our writing/publishing workflow[18] was developed during the retreat and made fully functional some time after the retreat. the workflow integrates together git[19], for collaborative writing and distributed versioning system, hugo[20], for converting markdown plain text inputs into html website, and 'memory of the world' standalone webapps maintained with accorder[21]. our goal with the platform was to allow people to create a library catalog of their references, integrate it with a documents collaboratively written and then rendered into a web site which should also work offline from usb disk, with nothing but the web browser, if needed. and to have an opportunity to have the whole web site printed as a nice paginated publication[22]. that's what we imagined earlier in 'learning from #syllabus' and we managed to do that ;)

in a very early days of a lockdown we managed to organize online and start with the new contribution to the syllabus: 'Flatten the curve, grow the care: What are we learning from Covid-19'[23]. in many ways it seemed that 'pirate care' as a concept and pirate care practices were ready to act in the crazy time of global pandemic. in a matter of days we got dozen of contributors, translators and volunteers who joined the facebook and telegram groups. it also helped us to develop further our software platform which is now in its phase of covering a bit more than "just a syllabus". we gave it a name Sandpoints. i am finishing the generic layout and at the moment there are a number of tests we run for the future projects. our syllabus is structured so syllabus has topics and topics has sessions as one could find it on https://syllabus.pirate.care/. but we decided to address a number of other "triads" like: book>parts>chapters, journal>issues>articles, library>repertoriums>books or just slightly different names like: curriculum>topics>lessons which sean, who joined the development recently, develops and test here:
http://machinelistening.exposed/curriculum/

just for a flavor this new layout renders 'pirate care' syllabus as syllabus>topics>sesions here:
https://pages.memoryoftheworld.org/SandpointsLayoutDraft/syllabus/
but if that was a book with its parts and chapters here is how it would signal that structure:
https://pages.memoryoftheworld.org/SandpointsLayoutDraft/book/

so, as you could follow in our blog post:
https://pirate.care/blog/2020/08/03/summerupdate/
a lot of things happened with 'pirate care' after the pandemic started.

at the beginning of october we will launch the 'pirate care' exhibition in rijeka. unfortunately we didn't get a chance to run a camp where the syllabus was supposed to be activated.

sandpoints should allow for some of the topics to become a syllabus on its own. quite few people expressed the interest to join and develop their own projects (be it syllabus, book, journal..)

we want to continue with an approach we developed for pirate care and keep working with social movements and political struggles.

here the technical aspect prevailed as that's where i invest most of my productive time. if valeria was to write this you would hear much more on pedagogy, theory and politics. tomi would probably do his own take. i hope there's more in the links which you would pick up and correct my biases :)

best
marcell

[1]: https://custodians.online/
[2]: https://custodians.online/ubu
[3]: https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/f1280214-1e28-4db0-b61f-c90896feff9d
[3b]: https://stateofeducation2014.wordpress.com/
[4]: https://medium.com/dsi4eu/pirate-care-how-do-we-imagine-the-health-care-for-the-future-we-want-fa7f71a7a21
[5]: https://pirate.care/pages/conference/
[6]: https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/5da81c85-8273-4aed-b076-fd1e78aa6284
[7]: https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/fa99af52-9821-435e-9d07-0e17eb7c8954
[8]: https://rijeka2020.eu/en/program/dopolavoro/
[9]: https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/a894e139-cb18-41cc-9c77-ffdbc5134728
[10]: https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/554b2e43-8d05-489e-aff6-4a6215edfa7a
[11]: https://hyperreadings.info/
[12]: https://pirate.care/blog/tag/readinggroup/
[13]: https://pirate.care/blog/2019/11/11/pirate-care-a-syllabus-collective-writing-retreat/
[14]: https://monoskop.org/WHW
[15]: https://kunsthallewien.at/en/exhibition/of-bread-wine-cars-security-and-peace/
[16]: https://sea-watch.org/en/
[17]: https://www.womenonwaves.org/
[18]: https://git.memoryoftheworld.org/PirateCare/Syllabus
[19]: https://git-scm.com/
[20]: https://gohugo.io/
[21]: https://gitlab.com/marcellmars/accorder/
[22]: https://syllabus.pirate.care/library/BROWSE_LIBRARY.html#/book/7ea7d419-a6c0-40a4-98f1-05fbcb7442bf
[23]: https://syllabus.pirate.care/topic/coronanotes/