Making Beyond Social

Author: André Castro

When Iris Schutten and Roger Teeuwen approached WdKA's Publication Station to co-develop a web-magazine for the Social Practices program's, my first thought was that a web-magazine was something not very exiting. The image that formed in my head, was of those online magazines that try to resemble their physical counterparts in every detail possible, from the glossy look, to the turning of the pages' animations, accompained by the indissociable sound "shhhs". Beyond all those forced imitations, what tends to mark them the most is their fixity – from the imutability of the words, to the perfect and still arrangement of images, text and colorfull backgrounds. All seems to be still, permanent, untransformable. They seem to exist in contraction to the digital container that hosts them. In the Web everything is fluid. Pages appear and dissapear, content appears, changes, moves, or is removed, visual elements shift position and dimension as a result of the dimension of the screen where they are rendered into texts and images. Nothing is still, so why should a web-magazine be?

How ever when Roger and Iris began to describe their ideas for this publication, it was clear that they had in mind something entirely different, at least as to how it would be developed. Its intend would be to serve as space for documenting, reflecting, and building upon the work being developed within the Social Design programs, not only within WdKA, but also in collaboration with other institutions, currently developing similar work. That got me excited! The vision of a collaborative online working space, where content is developed in a collaborative and shared manner, and ideas grow from interpretation, edits, conflicts, disagreements, sound familiar and yet exciting, at least in these parts of the woods. It sounded much like the way content is developed inside wikis, most proeminenly on Wikipedia. Not knowing yet, what was I myself into I said yes. It seemed like the perfect change to create an online publication, by having having fun experimenting with the possibility of the tools we would use and the methods we would adopt. Thankfully Iris and Roger were equality eager to begin working on the publication and didn't seem too worried about my bizarre ideas and incomprehensible terms.

Tools and Protocols

In order to start working together we had to agree upon the tools and protocols, which would help us develop the web-magazine. We had to decide before hand on the tools we were going to employ and based on the tools elaborate on the process and protocols that would allow us to arrive to a web-magazine, that could be present to an audience the Beyond Social project, and at the same time allowed changes, and experimentation into the process of collaborative writing and hybrid publishing.

We decided to work with two spaces, a wiki and a website. The wiki would become the central workspace, where content was developed.

The website was meant as an appealing and crafted outlet for the content from the Wiki.

Connecting these two spaces was the wiki's API – a programming interface, which allows other applications to be build on top of existing ones – and a series of scripts that pulled content from the wiki and place it on to the website.

As important as the technology that enabled it, were a series of protocols the team working on Beyond Social had to come up with, in order to organize and implement the workflow, which allowed content to flow from one space to another. We'd ask ourselves "how do we know when an article is ready to move to the website?" or "when can editors intervene upon an article?". After a few discussions, nearing the thresholds of insanity, we established a cycle of categories, through which an article would more from its very beginning to its completion. The categories "Write Me", "Edit Me", "Proof Me", "Publish Me", dictated the state of an article and who in the team would be taking care of the article. The last of these categories gave green-line for scripts to include the article on the website.

Wiki can be created collaboratively and transparently. Not only can articles be written by more than one by different authors, but also Inside it t would

As the blueprint for this publication became more clear, the team behind it became larger, with students, designers, and tutors starting to take part in it. All became actively involved in the development of the publication, and didn't shy away from proposing changes, finding problems, fine-tune small but meaningfull elements.

• code repository
• how does an article become published on Beyond Social:

An article from Beyond Social, such as this one, becomes published through a series of stages it undergoes on the wiki. ...

• image browsing story

How does an online publication becomes physical?

How would this magazine would become a physical entity, was a difficult questions. None of us knew exactly how. It was certain that he had to exist in paper, but how?

It's not straight forward/usual to translate online content to physical form.

• the discussion had about the physical publication:
  • epub or pdf: "why do you want to have it in another digital format when you can read it online"
  • ...
  • template's proposal

Future

It is yet to be seen if this strategy is viable on the long term. Can new editions of Beyond Social emerge on this platform of multiple parts and outputs without the need of changes and fixes to the structures and protocols that sustain it? It is also unclear if it is inviting to people that come to the project for the first time and themselves are in another physical space, with a different set of ideas for how he or she would like to develop and research contents on social design. And it is even more questionable if the same infrastructure, the same set of tools and protocols can be useful outside the specific scope of this publication.

I, for certain do not know the answers, but I begin to glimpse possibilities for opening them up to other uses and goals. One, very likely to happen in the near future, which will take place in the Graphic Design (ACTUAL NAME) department, will be the use of the front-end website as a learniing and tool; a case for further research and design of open, dynamic and complex online and offline magazine design. Students will use it as a sandbox where they can learn about essential Web technologies such as HTML markup lange and CSS style formating language, by creating alternative visual intrepretations/visual renderings for the content of Beyond Social. Our next issue might look completely deifferent!

Let's wait and see.