Conference

Since 2014, the platform State Of The Arts (SOTA) has been discussing, researching and promoting fair practice in the arts along five axes: solidarity, diversity, transparency, ecology and relationality. In 2019, SOTA’s almanac group published the first Fair Arts Almanac. Much of the book’s final content was gathered during a week-long summer camp in Brussels in 2018 with about 70 contributors.

When SOTA’s almanac group started to work on the second almanac in 2020, they wanted to expand the experience of the first almanac, by including more and different voices, they wanted to generate and develop the topics over a longer period of time, and they wanted to distribute the editorial responsibility among more heads and hands. In short: they wanted to expand and diversify the editorial family, with relational bonds that had time to grow deeper, allowing to nurture and contest the content collectively over time.

Since 2020 the SOTA almanac group worked with Open Source Publishing (OSP) to develop the second edition of the Almanac. OSP proposed their tool 'ethertoff'; a self-hosted, collaborative, F/LOSS design and publishing tool wrapped around the text editor etherpad. This tool was initially used to facilitate collective research sessions, and was later used to edit the material and design the publication.

Ethertoff is an example of a tool developed within the experimental practice of OSP, exploring alternative ways of making graphic design.

In our talk we want to show the publication, the tool, and we would like to discuss the process of collaboration.