* Engage with history

** Actively seek out the histories you depend on, are a part of, and contribute to. Some histories will inspire pride, and others will try to invoke shame, guilt, and pain. Consider these histories at personal, group, and institutional levels of abstraction.

** Personal

*** You have a unique history (maybe several) that determine who you are, what your perspective is, what you care about, what your priorities are, etc. Rather than trying to minimize, ignore, or elide the historical narratives you are a part of, feel empowered to engage with those histories if you so choose.

*** In other words: you are not a replaceable tool suddenly birthed from the aether with the sole purpose of building (in this case) a people’s open network (as many for-profit institutions might have you believe, in the name of efficiency). You are a historical and contemporary being, and you have influenced and been influenced by various social and economic forces. Some of these forces can be usefully identified with common stereotypes (like race, class, gender, etc.), and others cannot yet be identified, perhaps for lack of language.

** Group

*** Just like you, the sudomesh group has a history and identity that has shaped its artifacts and operations for several years. It has habits, likes and dislikes, modes of working that come easy and others that come less easy. The history of the group is largely the result of the past and present decisions made by its members and the communities with which the group has worked.

** Institutional

*** Sudomesh/People’s Open Network engages with several institutions/technologies that have extremely long and causally important histories. We meet in the Omni Commons, a re-purposed building, on colonized land in Oakland, California. We organize ourselves to connect and empower local communities with computer networking technology closely related to the internet. We (historically) coordinate our efforts on a volunteer basis, co-operatively and democratically.