Since mid-2023, we at servus have been following a process of evaluation and restructuring called reARDC (rethinking the Artist Run Data Center), the first iteration of which will be released in the fall of 2024.
The process started with the need to update the software that runs our main websites core.servus.at and radical-openness.org, which unsurprisingly opened a pandora's box of questions like "does it still make sense to host our own infrastructure?", "where is the community?" & "why are we still using Drupal?"
The project eventually boiled down to a few points about how we present and document our work, and how we make our community visible and give them a space to connect and grow. This means that we will indeed restructure core.servus.at & radical-openness.org, but mainly we'll focus on the community of members and regular contributors, who will be made visible in a community.servus.at website, including their projects.
Finally, we decided to take this opportunity to collect and document some stories that deal with the context of our work, namely those of the autonomous infrastructure, self-hosting and the set of experimental instance projects that have been realized over the years within the server cluster.
We'll publish a survey for our members and the first website draft very soon. Stay tuned!
ReARDC is funded through the grant for the Digitale Transformation of the Bundeskanzleramt.
Currently developing the project: Sophie Morelli, Federico Poni, Aimilia Liontou, Vinzenz Landl and Davide Bevilacqua.