Offline.Wiki
Or Zubalsky, Lee Tzu-Tung 李紫彤, Czyka Tumaliuan
Offline.Wiki is a trauma-informed activist system designed to collect and share practices centered around grieving and healing. Utilizing USBs within trusted community circles as a resilient portable library, it envisions itself as a safeguard against downtime or physical limitations faced by traditional publishers or bookstores, as well as to Internet suppression and cyber attacks. Offline.Wiki ensures the persistent preservation and accessibility of valuable knowledge and information despite challenges to security.
Concept
The Offline.Wiki project investigates the potential of decentralizing technologies and innovation in healing colonial trauma and building a constellation of sanctuaries for diverse communities at risk around the globe. Embodying feminist, grassroots technology, Offline.Wiki’s approach to design is slow, tender, intentional and people-centered. As our USB circulates within communities of trust, we convene in gatherings collectively organized with new and old participants to find hope, redemption and support from relationships that organically form.
Offline.Wiki emerged as a direct response to the team members’ personal experiences with state-sponsored censorship, algorithmic oppression, and the legacy of colonialism.
In 2016, two accompanying mechanisms were established in the Philippines, criminalizing activism in the country: the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and the Anti-Terrorism Act. These government-organized initiatives empowered law enforcement officers and security forces to arbitrarily arrest, detain, silence, and kill dissidents, especially those active on online platforms and radical spaces. Meanwhile, from 2021 until the present day, Taiwan has grappled with 20 to 40 million monthly cyberattacks, labeled “cyber World War III.” Currently, occupied territories in Palestine are experiencing unpredicted Internet blackouts while under siege, severing open communications between the region and the world.
These ongoing atrocities and violations of our basic human rights haunt us and consistently induce anxiety and fear deep in our bodies. Seeing the vulnerability of the Internet as a medium for knowledge and cultural exchange, we were moved to co-create a secure and resilient pathway for the dissemination and distribution of information and stories, while weaving circles of care and repair.
Process
Our project started as a decentralized platform that disseminates copies of an Offline.Wiki of software learning resources to radical bookstores around the world and has evolved into a secure open-source system of sharing personal stories of trauma and healing among circles of trust.
Presently, we’ve completed the network structure and interface design for the USB and website. This USB will be dispatched to three locations with the aim of gathering narratives unearthing wounds caused by imperialist structures and machineries, and the coping strategies employed to mend them. Our objective is to compile and disseminate an open-source library consisting of poems, short stories, personal essays, how-tos or excerpts from more extensive works in multiple formats within carefully curated meetups offline.
We hope that the act of articulating and sharing our narratives will not only create interconnected networks of trust, but also serve as an initial step in our healing journeys.
Constant sensing, open dialogues, and prototyping grounded our focus on understanding our shared values and experiences rather than developing “the next big thing” in the field of creative technology.
We started to reflect more about the importance of trust, flow and cultural diffusion, as it is connected to the collective dismantling of existing power structures embedded in both the online and offline worlds. The shift allowed us to root our project’s design in co-creating sanctuaries for and with communities at risk.
In the process of the collaboration, we didn’t realize that our regular discussions and co-working sessions were already shaping the sanctuary we aim to create. Once we recognized this, our goal became straightforward and simple: to make our shared space accessible to anyone looking for it while ensuring our safety.
Lessons
- Learnings:
- Sharing USBs can be an intimate physical experience for individuals to exchange knowledge.
- To initiate this sharing process, sharing personal stories can be a more effective and engaging starting point. It also creates a foundation for a deeper understanding of how to apply knowledge and technology effectively.
- Challenges:
- Coordinating team members in different timezones with diverse life obligations proved to be a significant challenge during the development process.
- Achievements:
- Establishing connections with numerous bookstores and publishers worldwide.
- Developing a poetic interface for both the USB and website
- Gaining valuable insights through user participation in our workshops, providing us with essential feedback and a deeper understanding of their needs and preferences.
