What follows is an attempt to capture what has happened in recent months (from October 2022 to April 2023) that has led to a renewal of PrePostPrint activity. Our collective writing is still struggling to find its tone, so we let shine the multiple colors of our pad to reflect the various voices that express our common desire to share what is happening.
In October 2022, Varia held a *Publishing Partyline*, a two-day session to “make space for collective learning, with a specific focus on the relations between individuals, groups and tools working on/with web-to-print design practices”. Manetta Berends and Simon Browne opened a call for those interested in such questions, to come share their practices, tools, thoughts, tips, tricks, projects, relations… Coïncidence or not, a good number of French people close to PrePostPrint took up the invitation. A lot was going to happen during these two days, but after our first morning, the collective pad recorded a note:
> Notes after lunch
> "From the outside it is a bit blurry to *read* the french web-to-print scene"
That’s how a part of us there got involved in a collective conversation around PrePostPrint, and the relations between the members of a larger web-to-print scene, throughout the two days in Rotterdam.
Let's keep the long story short: when we met in Rotterdam, PrePostPrint (or PPP in short) was kind of stuck in a [blizzard].
From one end, at the time, PPP was mostly a website, containing a difficult to curate list of resources and projects plus a contact page, a quite silent chatroom, a couple of social networks accounts relaying events or projects, and an ongoing but rare serie of workshops.
On the other end, since the early events in Paris, [we’re working on a timeline!] a lot of people working in this scene [mostly from France and Belgium] already knew PrePostPrint and more and more people were starting to have heard of it: a lot of students coming from french and belgian art schools, people who participated in some workshops, listened to some lectures, met some of the founders or early adopters, digged within the resources list, tried the tools or shared around the practices… Each of us had a perception of PPP, even if *what it is* and *how it works* was not fully clear to us.
So we discussed. And somehow the whole conversation bended towards existential questions: What is PrePostPrint? What should it be? Is it needed, necessary? Should we end it? Is it a label? Or do we prefer it to be a network, that can extend in multiple unexpected directions? Who can make decisions? Why is it already midnight and why do we need to go home?
> Should PPP exist?
> We need PPP because we prefer not to be alone.
> It feels important to go back and check in with our needs and
> PPP is super important as a community of practice.
> We don't agree with each other and have different understandings about eg. “good” or “experimental” design, but that is fine great.
> Collective work is hard but worth it.
(↑ a snippet from the Publishing Partyline notes)
To us, the answer was certainly positive, so we decided that putting an end to PrePostPrint existence wasn’t necessary, and with a bunch of raised hands, some of us have committed to being part of a group of maintainers for the next 6 months, with the exciting task of re-imagining what PPP would be, at least for that period of time.
# Maintaining PrePostPrint, eh? How do we do that?
We left Rotterdam in October with energy and enthusiasm, but not really with actionable tasks to make things happen, so we decided to start with a very first collective decision: how do we stay in touch? How do we continue this conversation?
Making a reality of something like PPP needs time and space for trials and errors, experiments either in what we do and how we do it. We opened a couple of private PPP maintainance chat rooms on Matrix/Element and started exchanging thoughts on what we want PPP to be, how we organise ourselves and what things we need to change in terms of website, social media account, etc.
The first 6 months maintenance work were over before we knew it. One thing we realised is that it was extremely hard to make decisions in the online chat rooms, if you don't meet up together from time to time. So we decided to meet up, find a location and date, and continue the conversation from there.
# First PPP maintainers meeting in Paris
Flashforward to a sunny weekend in Paris, March 18/19, at la Générale.
[HERE IT MISSES A BRIDGE TO THE NEXT PART]♪ ♫ ♫
We met on a Saturday morning and spent the whole day talking and working together. We did a health check, wrote notes and collected texts, cooked salads, reorganised the Matrix/Element channels, started a timeline, went for a walk in springtime Paris, drank beers, met friends, slept for a while before starting again on Sunday, then ended by sharing taks before leaving.
## The maintainers group
Some might already have read the blue part just below:
The idea is that the maintainers group takes care of PPP for a period of 6 months. What the maintainance group does is up to the people who are part of it for that period of time. After each 6 months, a health check is done during a real life meeting and a call is made for inviting people to be part of the maintainers group for the next 6 months (the next one will be in October). During this meeting, current maintainers can step down and leave room for other maintainers who would like to join. It's a moment to hand over the experiences, ideas but also practical things such as login credentials. A documentation of these meetings (what you’re reading right now) is published and shared on this mailing list.
From March 2023 to October 2023, the maintainers are: Quentin Juhel, Julien Bidoret, Zeste Le Reste, Manetta Berends, Julien Taquet, Raphaël Bastide, Martin Lemaire and Simon Browne. A few weeks ago, in a sunny weekend in March, we met each other again in Paris, reflected on how this all could work, and set ourselves some tasks for the upcoming months.
We feel that the main task of maintaining the PPP involves taking care of its infrastructure: the website and its server, the Element chat, the e-mail exchanges and the mailing list, the Mastodon (and Twitter) account, and any other tool that we would like to add to this list that can support PPP.
Next to the infrastructure, the maintainance group also tries to reflect and think about possible orientations and politics of PPP as a community of practice. Such reflections will hopefully help the group to understand how to support the practices that PPP brings together.
Obviously, these ideas come from a specific group of people, and we need to figure out if it works, allow for failures and make space to try something else again ;). We’re currently working on all this; it’s an ongoing process.
## Questions that have arisen but for which answers are still being sought!
* PPP as a space to think differently about publishing?
* How do we (can we?) define our practices, our core values?
* What is PPP role? Does it have one?
* PPP is not a studio, not a physical space?
* PPP is tool agnostic, provided they are free/libre/open source?
* How to, and should we, maintain and curate a list of resources?
* What are experimental/alternative approaches?
* How to level out some of the hierarchies that exist in our art & design schools
* How to open F/LOSS, to make sure it doesn’t only belong to white males eating pizzas?
* Do we need institutional support?
* Questions of technical vs political endeavours, how to combine them?
* Politicizing design and publishing practices, how can we keep politics close to our practices?
* How an international network around F/LOSS design tools could work and grow?
In 6 months we will call for new maintainers.... Meanwhile we chew on these to these questions, and open new ones, let’s keep in touch: join the Matrix/Element channels, where conversations take place; subscribe to the mailing list to ensure not missing important announcements, and follow our Mastodon account while lurking on the Fediverse.