COMPOST @compost@social.coop

ISSUE 01: Fertile Grounds has arrived! Our first issue contains eight creative pieces and a series of kaoani inspired animated GIFs. You can read it on the World Wide Web here >> https://one.compost.digital/

If you enjoyed our first issue and believe in what we’re doing, please become a subscriber!

We’d love to keep this project going and know that we have you, our community, backing us. ❤️🕸️ https://opencollective.com/compost

If you’d prefer to donate cryptocurrency to support us, you can donate to compostmag.eth or through Gitcoin
https://gitcoin.co/grants/1385/compost

If we meet our next goal, we’ll make COMPOST posters!

Our other goals are to create a web ring with sites of allied projects, and to host a micro-conference about solidarity-based tech, online publishing, and supporting artists on the internet. https://one.compost.digital/support-us/

We have fundraising goals for monthly paying subscribers or one-time donations, which we decided with our Issue 01 contributors.

The one we’re most excited about is to make **physical stickers** of Angelica’s kaoani anigifs from Issue 01!
https://one.compost.digital/stickers

We believe dedicated readerships can directly sustain small alternative publications, without relationships being mediated by the usual suspects.

The funds will go to our contributors, design and web development contractors, and the core team of this project, Mai, Ben, & Udit.

Why a Digital Bake Sale? We’re experimenting with funding goals, a la Patreon, but based on financial transparency & sustainability of the collective instead of an individual creator.

To do this we use @opencollect, a platform we're deeply aligned with: https://opencollective.com/compost

We currently only have our budget secured for our next issue (out in August 👀 ).

So we're boosting our Digital Bake Sale! The best way to support us is with a recurring subscription — that helps us make projections about our financial sustainability. 💫
https://one.compost.digital/support-us/

Our second issue includes a speculative sci-fi piece by Kola Heyward-Rotimi, an interactive narrative piece by Celine Nguyen, a narrative photographic essay by Margaret Warrn & Andi Wong, and beautiful photographic anigifs by @liaizon 🌻

We're excited to announce our theme for Issue 02!

🍄 Inoculate 🍄

We’re exploring ways to grow alternative networks with spores of capitalophagous fungi, to transfer nutrients from our hosts to feed the digital commons.

Lovely guide with workshop activities from Taeyoon Choi (co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation) that comes out of their Distributed Web of Care project: https://www.ctm-festival.de/magazine/distributed-web-of-care

"a game of chance that alters the ways you sense, make, and navigate public space."

Directions to Nowhere in Particular is part art project, part urban exploration, part internet challenge. Newly launched from The Bentway, From Later & Nomadic Labs.

wander outside + follow the prompts at http://directionstonowhere.com

Other free software we use include Passbolt for password management & Hugo (gohugo.io) and Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) for static website publishing.

And of course Mastodon and social.coop for social media'ing. 😁

These are just the tip of the iceberg! We hope this inspires other free software projects to back their stacks to build better infrastructure together. ✌️

We use Element by @matrix hosted by Toronto Mesh for day-to-day communications among editors and contributors. Check it out as a secure, decentralized + interoperable alternative to Slack >> matrix.org

Our newsletter uses GNU Mailman hosted at Hypha.coop It’s old school but it’s solid and it works. https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=22

So we're *backing our stack* today, naming and contributing to some of the free software that makes COMPOST possible.

First up — we rely on Meet.Coop for our videoconferencing needs with Big Blue Button. Donate to this co-op alternative to Zoom >> https://opencollective.com/meet-coop/donate

As an open source project ourselves, we recognize the immense amount of hidden labour that goes into public-benefit projects.

It’s crucial for free + open source tech projects to be mutually supportive of each other — this is the basis for a healthy digital commons. 🕸️ 💗

"Published in the midst of climate catastrophe, and on the anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, this project acknowledges that we cannot separate slavery and settler colonialism from their contemporary consequences.

So, I envision the commons as a social process where people share resources, decide how to govern themselves and those resources, and exist in common with the land and other-than human beings."
https://www.atm-magazine.com/online/plotting-liberation/