Hackers & Designers (H&D) is an initiative active since 2013, bringing together (h)ac(k)tivists and creative practitioners—hackers, designers, makers, artists, developers, activists, inventors—of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds to reimagine more equitable and eco-conscious techno-futures. Through workshops, summer schools, and collective publishing practices, H&D explores how tools and infrastructures can embody values of solidarity, openness, social and environmental sustainability.

A central strand of H&D’s practice has been the development and self-hosting of publishing infrastructures. H&D documents and disseminates the lessons and propositions that emerge from our workshops through various on and offline publishing formats. Beyond that, the digital infrastructures we build are themselves experiments in creating tangible alternatives to “the cloud.” By collectively building, maintaining, and sharing our own servers, we challenge the abstraction of cloud technologies and make the material/ecological, political and social dimensions of computation visible. In doing so, we reimagine cloud practices not as abstract and extractive, but as situated, grounded, and regenerative. Together, we explore what it means to build resilient tool ecologies outside the monopolies of Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

This work is continually shaped by our collaborations with activist groups. For example, with Learning Palestine we experienced how our open source collaborative publishing tools can become vehicles of solidarity, political and technical literacy. Learning Palestine is a volunteer-run initiative who translate and republish texts, and circulate pamphlets across community spaces and bookshops worldwide through decentralized networks of trust. Despite the strength of these networks, initiatives like Learning Palestine face bottlenecks at the design and editing stage, where dependence on commercial cloud services such as Adobe Creative Suite but also editing tools as Google Docs clashes with their values. Furthermore some of the tools they use are complicit with the military complex, ecocide and war crimes.

H&D collaborated with Learning Palestine to experiment with self-hosted and open-source alternatives that allow for writing, editing and designing publications collaboratively. Hands-on in-person sessions proved key: working side by side, participants could adapt to new tools, develop shared terminology, and collectively overcome the unfamiliarity of designing outside standard corporate interfaces. We learned that our tools are not “off the shelf”—they gain traction when embedded in communities and adapted to their needs. Together with Learning Palestine, we began to enrich the tool with contextual guides: information explaining on which server the tool is hosted, and what are its collective conditions, onboarding tips for less technically experienced users, and features that made using it more accessible.

One idea emerging from these sessions was the possibility for Learning Palestine to host a self-contained, portable instance of the tool on a local server, allowing them to travel with their publishing infrastructure and avoid reliance on extractive global platforms in the future.

This example illustrates the broader ambition of Clouds to Commons: to develop regenerative publishing infrastructures in dialogue with specific activist communities, letting their needs shape how tools evolve, how servers are configured and maintained, and how infrastructures remain situated, collective, and sustainable over a long time.

Over the years, H&D’s projects and collaborations made us aware of a number of unique challenges related to computing practice that we see reflected in the call for applications. The material reality of our digital habits involves deep-sea internet cables, energy guzzling server farms, precious metals mined for a large variety of chips and more “stuff” to make up what we now call “the cloud”. The tangible “stuff” is what connects computing to everyday reality. And this is largely owned, governed and designed by corporate big tech companies that make all their design decisions based on profit maximization. Sustainability, social equity and democracy are not at the center of how these everyday infrastructures are built, developed and maintained. There are alternatives, but their mere existence is not enough to guarantee uptake.

In the proposal that follows we describe how we intend to connect communities to develop, and more firmly establish alternative ways of doing technology. In short, this is the set of issues the project aims to address:

• cultural organizations and activist groups increasingly want to divest from big tech and align their tools with their values but struggle to do so;
• a wealth of potent alternative tools exist, but they often remain isolated within specialist or highly technical communities;
• knowledge of server building and maintenance is often a barrier, yet it is also key to making these alternatives accessible and sustainable.

H&D’s recent collaboration with Learning Palestine highlights the different concerns and stakes involved in self-publishing in the context of political activism, and highlighted the unique challenges when such tools are deployed in a specific context. For H&D, regenerative practice means both limiting resource depletion and cultivating infrastructures that are durable, maintainable, and adaptable by organizations and communities themselves. Here, we understand regeneration and sustainability not only as avoiding toxic materials, minimizing extraction and waste production, but also as creating socially sustainable solutions that account for the energy and effort required for people to build, use and maintain the tools they rely on. Alternative tools come with their own quirks and ask us to re-think and re-shuffle our digital habits. This raises unique questions and challenges that we propose to explore artistically and collectively in the project proposal that follows.

These insights led us to formulate the following research question and sub-questions:

How can joint artistic experiments in technological DIY practice support activist communities to realign their digital practices with their social, ecological and political commitments?

1. Which pedagogical/narrative strategies and collective imaginaries can help negotiate regenerative approaches to digital tools and infrastructures in urgent activist contexts where speed and efficiency appear as non-negotiable?
2. How can we then build bridges between fragmented technical grassroots initiatives building alternative tools and infrastructures, and the activist communities that could benefit from these alternatives?
3. Which aesthetic and technical interventions can support the uptake of durable, socially just, and ecologically sustainable infrastructures?

The objectives of the project are to 1) connect fragmented grassroots initiatives (technical, artistic and activist), 2) to develop accessible formats for joint experimentation with alternative tools and 3) present alternative artistic forms of publishing and ways of “doing” infrastructure that embrace mindful constraints, and collective stewardship as source of abundance.

Our methodology is based on the idea that servers, networks, and publishing tools are both practical tools and narrative objects that can be unpacked by combining hands-on experimentation with collective storytelling and speculative design. H&D will develop interconnected workshops that serve as spaces for participatory prototyping, collective learning and experimentation with open-source tools and self-hosted infrastructures. Participants from different backgrounds collectively explore how technical setups, collaborative workflows, and content production intersect, making visible the material, social, and ecological dimensions of digital infrastructures. By foregrounding care, commoning and shared responsibility, the workshops will challenge dominant assumptions of universality, passive and individualized usership, fostering context-sensitive, inclusive, and socially regenerative practices. Storytelling, visual representation, and imaginative interventions surface the dependencies, aesthetics, and possibilities of self-hosted infrastructures, while attention to low-bandwidth contexts, reused devices, and free/libre open-source software highlights global inequalities in digital access and resists resource waste.

In line with the commons-based approach, one of our collaborating partners will be Humdrum Press, who research and practically implement models of publishing as a commons. Their work examines how resources, relationships, and practices of publishing can be collectively organised and sustained, grounding knowledge production in shared responsibility and equitable distribution. This project offers them the opportunity to experiment with digital tools and infrastructure more in line with their values, helping to bring their publishing practices closer to the commons-based frameworks they advance.

Following this methodology, the project moves through these phases:

Activities:

• In addition to collaborating partner Humdrum Press, the project team will connect with two additional partner organizations (see “Parties involved”), interested in more generative approaches to their digital publishing tools, to discuss relevant practices and needs.
• H&D team maps and selects relevant tools, practices and needs of partners.
• Partners are confirmed, project planning is finalized, incl. final planning, securing locations, setting up project adminstration and agreements with all partners involved.

Outcomes:

• Final selection and agreements with collaborating partners and final project plan.
• Outlines for work sessions, exercises and technical guides
• Public announcement of the project, “Save the date” for public workshops published

In the first phase Connecting to other Clouds we organise closed interdisciplinary work sessions with the collaborating partners to familiarize them with open-source, low-impact self-hosting server infrastructures, especially in contexts without conventional router, local network, or internet access. Through hands-on experiments facilitated by H&D members, participants collectively explore what “secure” means in technical and social terms, and across diverse cultural and political contexts.

Activities:

• The H&D project team will research technical and artistic affordances of the selected tools and server infrastructure, conducting and documenting small technical experiments.
• Workflow and program for the two-part public workshop series is developed in two closed work sessions with selected collaborating partners.
• The first public workshop is dedicated to hardware set-ups: participants will learn how to repurpose their old laptop or Raspberry Pi into a functioning, energy-efficient server device.
• The second public workshop focuses on networks and community infrastructures. The servers from the previous workshop will be connected using VPN protocols (such as Tinc) to form a community network that emphasizes collective maintenance, shared responsibility and technical collaboration.
• Reflection and documentation is part of the work sessions.

Outcomes:

• Visual, textual and technical documentation of workshops feeding into other phases
• Partners and workshop participants have built the foundation of their commons-based cloud infrastructure.

In the second phase we use publishing as a methodology to reimagine “the cloud” as a socially grounded and community-driven infrastructure rather than a corporate-controlled service. Running our own publishing infrastructure is not only central to our approach, but also resonates with a shared urgency and common ground we hold with many allied initiatives. We will work with the collaborating partners to develop experimental publishing workflows (web, print, and hybrid forms) using existing tools — many of which H&D has already developed, and/or contributed to (see portfolio) — that allow design, editing, and hosting roles to be decentralized and collectivized. Phases 1 and 2 are documented to enable knowledge sharing in the form of a publication that will be finalized and presented in phase 3.

Activities:

• H&D and the participating partners work together intensively during work sessions to develop experimental publishing workflows. The group of 10-15 participants engage in hands-on experimentation with open-source publishing tools such as Octomode, Chattypub, Wiki2Print and Etherpad that allow design, editing, and hosting roles to be decentralized.
• H&D project members develop storytelling and content-creation exercises around these tools, highlighting the collective, situated and performative aspects of self-hosted digital infrastructures.
• These sessions build on Phase 1 by installing instances of these tools on the DIY servers created in the previous phase.

Outcomes:

• Visual, textual and technical documentation, and joint reflection on how the digital publishing experiments may serve both as practical tool for activist communities and as a model for more inclusive, regenerative, and context-sensitive cloud imaginaries.
• Collaborating partners have installed instances of relevant (modified) tools on their DIY server devices and have an understanding of how they can work with them and maintain them in the future.

In this phase, H&D and collaborating partners identify the most urgent needs, knowledge gaps or desired tool modifications still lingering after phase 1 and 2. These will inform how the work sessions in this phase will be shaped: e.g. technical development sessions to implement a new feature, developing a context-specific workflow for maintenance, and/or knowledge sharing sessions to include more people from the communities and networks of the collaborating partners. In parallel, all collaborators will contribute to a publication to disseminate the outcomes of the project and considerations for the future. The resulting publication will be presented at a public launch event. KIOSK in Rotterdam has expressed interest to support the project and host work sessions and potentially a launch event. H&D has previously presented publications at San Serriffe and Fort van Sjakoo in Amsterdam or Page Not Found in The Hague, which are all venues open to continue collaboration with H&D. The final choice of venue will be decided in conversation with the participating partners.

Emergent Publication:

The publication will emerge as a collective synthesis of the project, reflecting the themes explored across all phases: self-determined publishing practices, self-hosted server infrastructures, and the cultural and political imaginaries that surround them. It will combine practical how-to guides with narrative reflections, offering multiple entry points to make the material accessible to diverse audiences—from those interested in technical experimentation to those engaging with the broader social, ecological, and cultural dimensions. Functioning simultaneously as an instructable, a storytelling device, and a process documentation, the publication will interweave personal accounts, workshop outcomes, and technical manuals. This hybrid form will not only document the tools and infrastructures developed but also trace the situated experiences, struggles, and collective learning processes that shaped them. Designed to be distributed both in print and digitally, and hosted on the very infrastructures it describes, the publication will serve as a living record and a resource for others to adapt, reuse, and extend.

Activities:

• The project team and collaborating partners break out into smaller groups for work sessions that will adress remaining questions and needs.
• Joint editorial and design work on a hybrid (printed as well as digital) publication, bringing together contributions from all partners, photo documentation and technical how-to’s.
• Mapping of a broader dissemination network in collaboration with partners — a process that both extends the reach of each initiative and allows the eventual distribution strategy to emerge collectively rather than being predetermined.
• Distribution of publication through shared dissemination network

Outcomes:

• Printed and online publication & launch event.

The project builds on H&D’s relationships with organizations and activist networks at the intersection of cultural production, digital culture, and social or environmental activism. Due to the short notice of the call and the project’s commons-based principles, we chose not to rush partnerships but instead dedicate the first two months to forming meaningful, mutually beneficial collaborations with three core organizations. HumDrum Press is confirmed as the first partner (see Methods and Intended Results), with agreements for two additional partners to be finalized during the Preproduction Phase. Together with H&D, these partners will take part in internal work sessions and help shape activities in phases 1–3. Potential collaborators include youth-led groups such as Re-Peat and De Vrolijkheid, activist collectives like Learning Palestine (in discussion) and Gangjeong Peace Village, with some based in the Netherlands and others internationally—ensuring diverse perspectives and practices. We are also engaging publishing partners, including Kiosk (confirmed), L’internationale (in discussion), San Serriffe, Page Not Found, Het Fort van Sjakoo, Bergen Art Book Fair, and others.

Knowledge sharing, reflection, collaboration and sustainability are central in every phase of the project. By combining hands-on experimentation with self-hosted servers, with collaborative publishing workflows and storytelling-based documentation, participants generate and disseminate insights about the social, ecological, and technical dimensions of digital infrastructures. Publications, digital resources, and hybrid outputs produced throughout the different activities in the project make these practices visible and accessible to broader activist, artistic, and cultural communities, fostering ongoing reflection and dialogue. In emphasizing open, context-sensitive, and regenerative approaches to technology, the project not only contributes practical knowledge but also demonstrates how alternative technological practices can support community-driven practices in a sustainable manner, while challenging dominant assumptions of passive and individualized usership.

H&D is in the lead for coordination, production and communication around the work sessions and events and is responsible for financial administration and obligations to the fund. Once partnerships are established, agreements will be made about each partners’ commitment throughout the project, code of conduct, financial compensation, and legal rights regarding the works created.

(For more detailed planning see appendix “Project Planning”)