RFC: maintenance dinners

RFC: maintenance dinners

Source: abmz

collective maintenance as knowledge sharing

maintenance & care

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food not bombs logo
Source: Holler Studios
dark photo of a nighttime park potluck with some mutual aid organizer friends

potluck

family meal

dinner club

food distro

πŸ“Œ

infoshop

zine share

mailing list

to nourish is to maintain

table as gathering place

repair cafe

hackerspace

meeting space

(physical, virtual)

/whisper β€œi often place myself in the role of digital infrastructure and maintenance because little else is physically accessible to me”

transition from crisis response to sustainable mutual** organizing

disrepair, abandonment, lack of maintenance

hyperlocal mutual aid

(2025)

(infrastructural/interpersonal)

weak intergroup relationships

fragmented community memory

burdened by infrastructures no longer needed, politically unaligned

meta-infrastructures

πŸ”‹

πŸ§‘β€πŸ”§

πŸͺ¨πŸ“€

☎️

πŸ‘ͺ

material

relational

πŸššβœˆοΈπŸ“¦

πŸ“†πŸ“

Source: Joi Fulton

πŸ’Œ

maintenance dinners

for mutual aid infrastructure

shared meals form the basis
of communal maintenance. we’re maintaining our bodies and our relationships.

we can work towards our own technical infrastructures by first forming the social infrastructure and practicing maintenance in all its forms.

maintenance dinners can be a time and place where we learn, share, hack, debug, code, connect, salvage, repair...

irl is always special, but sometimes meeting online is more accessible.

there are ways to hang out and collaborate in cyberspace beyond a zoom meeting!

virtual worlds, text-based games, doing puzzles together, spatial audio, infinite drawing canvases, to name a few

Source: Lucas Nova
Source: γŠγ‚γŒγ‘γ‚ƒγ‚“

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πŸŒ™

things we might talk about over dinner

πŸ’«

  • who are we? what skills and knowledge do we bring? what perspectives? what do we want to learn?

    ✨

    what resources do we have access to?

    what is our capacity?

  • what are our shared principles? how will those guide how we select technologies?

    ⭐️

  • how will we make decisions? deal with conflict?

    πŸ’«

    what kind of power dynamics are at play?

  • who should access our infrastructure? who is it for? how do they participate?

    ⭐️

  • what infrastructures are we already using? which do we rely on?

    ✨

    do alternatives exist that align with our principles?

    what’s good and bad about them?

  • what is practical for us?

    what is aspirational?

    πŸ’«

    how available do we need a server to be?

  • do we have enough trust to share servers?

    ⭐️

    what is our threat model?

  • where will our physical infrastructure live?

    ✨

🌎

Source: Asian Civilisations Museum

bonus content

photo of a lan party, a person is duct taped to the ceiling in the background, leaning down to use a raised desktop computer
photo of a lan party, a person is duct taped to the ceiling, eating pizza from a tall computer desk

nostalgia is a trap but i’ll always love these iconic LAN party pics

silly catchphrases

let’s...

> break bread and fix phones

> connect with each other and connect a mesh network

screenshot of PalaceChat, full of colorful dollz-style avatars

places to hang out on the world wide web

Source: AnimatedText

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built by cubeghost using mmm.page
as part of solidarity infrastructures winter β€˜25