Abstract 

Keywords: Archaeology of the Present, Media Archaeology, Bottom-up Institutions, Poetics of Social Forms.

Domains, Publics and Access is an ongoing collection online of projects related to current access forms such as: open government, open design, citizen science, collaborative economy, commons, co- ops, crowdfunding, DIY, free culture, community currencies, p2p, piracy, etc. The main goal is to preserve initiatives that appear and disappear in different countries because each project is the declaration of a possible future. That’s why the project as the poetics of social forms is studied by an access archaeology that explores the hypothesis of the emergence of new bottom-up institutions. The hypothesis is latent in the work of several authors, but Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter pose it explicitly around the online organized networks. They provide the theoretical framework for the qualitative textual analysis of the accountability, sustainability and scalability of different projects. The faceted classification adapted to a MediaWiki articulates the field work as a distributed analysis process, and shows how not only organized networks but also top-down networked organizations define the poetics of access forms. The result is an online common- pool resource that displays the historic and antagonistic limits of access and that can be used to develop new research questions – in and out of academia- through the integration of new facets and projects in a simple way.

• Paz Sastre, Mexico, works as a senior research professor of the Arts and Humanities Department at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Lerma, for the Digital Arts and Communications degree. She’s been a member of Laboratorio del Procomún México and is part of Ícono14, an independent research group dedicated to aesthetics and new media in Madrid. She has worked on matters regarding archiving, information society, bureaucracy and public utility through the lens of visual studies. Most of her papers can be consulted online. She has collaborated on projects dedicated to the building, recovery and access of diferent archives, such as the Huichol people’s cultural heritage, Ana Victoria Jiménez’s memoirs on Mexican feminist activism, Laboratorio del Procomún México’s failed repository and Campechana Mental, a digital literacy project at the Rancho Electrónico hackerspace.

Full text (PDF) p.  102-111