A Feminist Server Manifesto - A manifesto for running computational infrastructure which was formulated after meetings of participants for the Are You Being Served? workshop in Brussels and the Feminist Server Summit at Art Meets Radical Openness (AMRO) in Graz, both in 2013. According to the manifesto a feminist server is:
Is a situated technology. She has a sense of context and considers herself to be part of an ecology of practices.
Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist.
Builds on the materiality of software, hardware and the bodies gathered around it.
Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns.
Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible.
Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps.
Knows that networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice.
Is autonomous in the sense that she decides for her own dependencies.
Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; experiments with changing client-server relations where she can.
Treats network technology as part of a social reality.
Wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible.
Does not confuse safety with security.
Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity.
Tries hard not to apologize when she is sometimes not available
homebrewserver.club principles - The principles underpinning the approach of the monthly homebrewserver.club gathering for those who wish to host their own online services from home instead of using commercial and privacy unfriendly alternatives in the cloud:
Promote approaches, not apps;
Take the ‘home’ in homebrewserver.club literally and the ‘self’ in self-hosting figuratively;
Make space for learning together;
Yes, We’re Config™ (meaning we’re comfy with figuring things out and making mistakes);