Pour and Share

Connect outward, share knowledge, renew the brew.

When a collective stabilises, the next step is connection — between cities, practices, and disciplines.

Organise workshops, events, protests, actions, moments of exchange. Write and share documentation, tools, and ideas.

Make use of the knowledge and skills of the group to support and help those in need of alternative computational systems. Whether it is to divest from Big Tech, create and moderate safer spaces, or organise activist projects.

Suggestions

• Host open activities or study sessions to invite newcomers.
• Organize cross-city visits or online reading groups with other permacomputing collectives.
• Publish your reflections — not polished results — in a zine, on the permacomputing wiki, an online notebook or on paper..
• Let members create spin-offs or parallel experiments.
• Keep your brew alive by staying porous — new people, new ideas, same care.

Quotes

Thinking about permacomputing in other regions of the world implies recognizing the vast differences in privileges and resources. Creating and maintaining groups focused on niche topics such as permacomputing or low-tech is very different in territories that have been living in precarious conditions, under occupation, imperialism, and colonialism for centuries. — Archipiélago I

If permacomputing is to be more than a blip, it’ll be because of all the people who aren’t programmers. — Brendan, Berlin

The best way to heal technology is to heal ourselves. [...] Developers often understand complexity but not communication — you need both. — Michal, Prague

I think the group will form organically, without necessarily establishing it in advance. If you decide to formalize a group, try not to have hierarchies, and avoid positions of power as much as possible. Invite people who are knowledgeable about the topic to the meetings, as well as projects that may be interested in the conversation. — Archipiélago I

In order for us to have a circular economy of computation, we need to have computational degrowth. But we cannot really do that because we don't have any notion of how to do that. All learning materials are geared towards “do it quick and use whatever materials there are.” So this is why we are looking to build alternatives. — d1 and crunk, Rotterdam

I think that will be super helpful […] if you're just starting off you can just say okay I've seen that this works in another city so I can just try this out and then you don't have to be super creative on your own to come up with cool agendas for meetings but have something as a basis to build on. — Simon, Vienna

Coming together and starting from there would be my advice, rather than imposing a lot of external ideals. It is really [about] starting from where people are at. What are people's computing habits? Let's talk about them! Do they name their hard drive? What do they name their hard drive and why? It's about embodied practice. For me it's very important to start with hardware [otherwise] you just [produce] e-waste. Use examples of things that people understand. — Nancy, Lutruwtia

[The appeal is] also, for a lot of people, that there finally is something that isn't negative, that isn't like a critique or a “we're all doomed” story but actually something positive. — Steve, Philadelphia