RFC: maintenance dinners
potluck
family meal
dinner club
food distro
to nourish is to maintain
table as gathering place
infoshop
zine share
mailing list
repair cafe
hackerspace
meeting space
(physical, virtual)
/whisper “i 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
hyperlocal mutual aid
(2025)
disrepair, abandonment,
lack of maintenance
(infrastructural/interpersonal)
weak intergroup relationships
fragmented community memory
burdened by infrastructures no
longer needed, politically unaligned
meta-infrastructures
material
🔋
🪨 📀
🚚 ✈️ 📦
relational
🧑🔧
☎️
👪
📆 📝
💌
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
things we might talk about over dinner
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?
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?
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?
⌘
written for solidarity infrastructures
winter ‘25 at sfpc
originally built using mmm.page, later hand-coded
← cubegho.st