In this third trio we're in pretty complex territory. But it matters: 'the digital coup' has its foundations here? Largely we're out of the domain of single 'apps', and even explicit toolstacks. The essentially **practical** rather than technical nature of necessary responses becomes pretty obvious: initiatives that are strongly cultural or political, rather than predominantly technical.
- **Maps** - We need to add our own meaningful mappings on to what exists in the digital sphere, and to share them. Contact lists are a basic old fashioned, pre-digital way of doing this. Literal geographical mapping of 'what matters' in relation to 'here' can be powerful: again, pre-digital. Tagging of digital media content is a need much less frequently dealt with.
- **Analytics** - With so much digital content and digital traffic - especially through centralised corporate servers like Google and the predominant social media - 'scraping' and powerful analytics on data and metadata is now big business and goes on mostly under the radar of most users' awareness (who regard the service as 'free'). 'AI' - a terrible misnomer and a label that aggregates a whole array of distinct technologies -is just the most powerful, most recent frame on this kind of practice. This kind of capability is utterly digital. It results from the public exposure and centralised handling of a huge amount of digital traffic, and a capability to 'scrape' it with bots (whose activity now is compromising the behaviour of many websites globally). *Affordances that **show 'us' what 'we' are doing**, in digital space - the shape of our evolving relationships, beyond immediate peer-to-peer connection and awareness - are much less easy to come by. We call this 'Mirrors'; mirror affordances are the *contra response* to extractive practices of Big Tech and state intelligence agencies*. - **News** - of course! Reporting 'news from elsewhere' matters enormously. But feeds are a complex mix. And if we include news from the past and the future too - historical perspective, imaginiative visioning - the situation becoms very complex. Making adequate provision for 'news from elsewhere' is a big challenge for active communities, and affordances for this are not easy to assess and 'install'. *We should note how much significant development in this area has come from radical media organisations in the past decade - following on Occupy and the Battle of Seattle for example. We also should note the 'old' movements for community radio. and the 'new' movement in podcasting This helps us see that while digital means can be critical, we're basically looking at cultural practices here, and 'tools for conviviality' in Ivan Illich;'s sense, rather than any simple kind of app or digital tool.*
Here we identify a number of kinds of tooling that may support digitally mediated organising, collaborating and facilitating in civil society and in the real economy. We refer to this framing as a 'gang of nine'; the categories are grouped in three trios.
The 'gang of nine' is a revised name for an 'extended trinity'. This framing evolved from the 'trinity' proposed by Rich Bartlett & Nati Lombardo of Enspiral, and was expanded via the DisCO toolstack and DisCO deck. It ended up containing THREE 'trinities'. Extended trinity
This framework here is particularly relevant to the 'Toolstack' layer of a 'real full stack' approach to digital contra-infrastructure(ing). Toolstack layer
Here we describe the tech layers of the full stack. We refer to them collectively as 'the tech region' of the real full stack.
# Tooling, affordance, tools for conviviality Rather than let the focus fall into 'tools' - which might reify a *social* relationship; a **practice** - we try to work in terms of: - **'tooling'** (an active, attentive, practice of designing and contextualised, evolutionary making) - the availability of **affordances** in practical settings that include material 'stuff', and - an active cultural engagement with the cultivation and protection of **'tools for conviviality'** in the cultural commons. All these terms - tooling, affordance, tools for conviviality - call for further clarification.
‘Tools for conviviality’ is a construct put to work by Ivan Illich, which promotes the principle of vernacular knowing in communities.
To be clear: we're working here with affordances furnished by tools in practical settings of **collaborative social relationship and mutual oreintation**, and in combination with other material elements: other tools, operating systems, devices and their interfaces, physical and geographical spaces, physical capabilities of users; etc. Affordance is here Affordance - *to be added xxx*
> We won't be creating shopping lists of apps. One consequence of this plurality is that a single 'function' within the Gang of Nine may not be furnished by a single 'tool' or app, in isolation. What's in question is the whole **constellation** of perceptions and actions that are afforded to a person at a given moment: its elements might arise in various discrete apps - separate windows on a desktop or in browser tabs - and some arise in the device's operating system (like 'search', for example; or 'drag'). Thus in this page we won't be creating shopping lists of apps that perform distinct functions. We'll go into shopping lists in other pages where we explore tooling within a particular layer of a 'stack' of digitally mediated fields of practice. A real full stack
We find ourselves needing to work not only with an extended trinity of tools, but also with a pretty extended notion of UX too. We get into this under Toolstack look and feel.
# Three trios of tooling
A gang of nine kinds of tooling, in three trios