About

Networks

Managing online communities is difficult as it requires a collective understanding of how we want to be together, such as how to deal with conflict and hate. These challenges motivated different groups to create and apply informal rules to their networks. They are published online as user guidelines, community rules, collaboration protocols, network etiquette, community covenants, a group pact, a collective agreement, a Code of Conduct. These guidelines aim for comfortable interactions between the members; they set expectations for users, put in evidence the values of a community, making explicit which behaviours are allowed or discouraged, possibly decreasing unwanted hate. They can help to deal with internal and exterior abuses, especially when the documents are upheld by a network of people who acknowledges the differences in privilege, power, experiences, money and time of different users.

of Care

Discussing Codes of Conduct isn't only considering the potential of text, but recognising the labour intensive routines that imply human effort and involve the community. The caretakers are essential — to write the guidelines, to manage reports, to moderate, to document, to listen, to grant support. A Code of Conduct also needs visibility and a plan for distribution. Furthermore, the desire to share different guidelines from corporate-owned social platforms requires other competencies, such as moving to other platforms, or self-hosting our social groups. Care work is highly skilled, and it needs to be further discussed, recognised and cherished.

— a field guide

This field guide will lead you through the attempts, accomplishments and missteps of moderators, writers, users and custodians of social networks. It collects and comments on existing Codes of Conduct, listens to different experiences, and proposes other projects to explore. The field guide goes through the work of groups of arts, design, libre and open software, feminists and LGBTQ users, aiming to facilitate future work for other circles. It's exciting to consider which gestures may contribute to increasing autonomy and cooperation in digital platforms, whether Codes of Conduct can be useful to reduce hate and improve interactions, or even desirable. Let's explore the networks of care generated together.

Structure

Networks of Care is divided into three parts.

Archiving — to collect and annotate Codes of Conduct, creating a collection that is possible to browse, dissect and analyse.

Networking — to interview and document the work of moderators, writers of Codes of Conduct, facilitators, community members and networks' administrators.

Linking — to point other ways forward, useful templates, resources, and experiments.

Images

The images that appear throughout this project are cyanographic prints. Cyanotype is a printing process used to reproduce notes and diagrams, as well as blueprints. This seemed the perfect technique to illustrate the project, as it allows me to further explore methods to create structures and reproduce guidelines. The printing and creation process is documented in this page.

Technical Documentation

Technical knowledge is relevant to:

• use moderation tools
• adapt, fork, customise moderation tools
• create new tools
• adapt, fork, customise social platforms
• create new platforms
• use software and hardware
• question autonomy
• experiment with protocols
• self-host
• understand tutorials
• write and send reports

These actions can be challenging. Networks of Care goes through a few of these technical hurdles, documenting along the way the experience of creating and maintaining this project.

Networks of Care is hosted on a Raspberry Pi and uses MediaWiki software to organise the content. It uses extensions such as Semantic MediaWiki and Page Forms. The main page shows a diagram that uses the API to get access to wiki features. It also uses Leaflet, a JavaScript library.

Here is the detailed Technical Documentation.

Contacts

This work has been produced in the context of my graduation research from the Experimental Publishing (XPUB) Master course at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, University of Applied Sciences.

XPUB is a two year Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design that focuses on the intents, means and consequences of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks.

https://xpub.nl