What is the anarchive
Our "anarchive" can be defined in many ways. An autonomous place for the Relearn community to dialogue without words. As the traces of our collective thinking-out-loud. A collective warm up exercise familiar to the materialities of the everyday group chat. A clutter of information that is not the documentation of a past activity but of something that evokes the not yet known. An unhierarchical accumulation of images, documents and links to spark the tracks that perhaps will run through Relearn.
+How does it work?
-The anarchive is populated using a bot inside an XMPP chat.
-How to contribute
-Join our XMPP chat here relearn2021.vvvvvvaria.org
+The anarchive can be experienced as a group chat: it is open for anyone to join, without registration and accessible through a regular web browser. It is a place to meet other relearners and share thoughts, images, PDFs, texts etc.
+However, it is also a place to meet and interact with our friendly logbot. The logbot is a project which was created within the context of Varia as a way to support our modes of organisation and our need for on-the-fly archiving. It is Python program, written and maintained by Varia members, which sits in our group chats when invited and acts as a helpful co-anarchivist with us. This mode of ad-hoc digital archiving between friends is something we want to bring to the process of documenting our experience at Relearn this year.
+The logbot responds by name and takes as input your submissions for the Relearn anarchive. It can also guide you in the ways of working with the anarchive using a special @help message. Once the logbot accepts a submission it will then make them public on a generated static web page: relearn2021.vvvvvvaria.org.
How to contribute
+If you are thinking through the loose ends of Relearn 2021 then please become a fellow anarchivist! You can visit the group chat via relearn2021.vvvvvvaria.org, choose a username and then it is possible to upload texts, documents, images etc. Once you close the browser window, you will be "logged out". This is more temporary mode of interacting with the archive.
+It is also possible to log into the chat in a more permanent manner. The group chat is hosted on a server located in Varia and uses community-run open source chat software. You can create an account and login using a client on your computer or phone. To learn more about how to do that, see this getting started guide. If you would like to have a Varia server account, please let us know and we can facilitate that.