In-Docs

These docs unfolded from In-grid's collaboration during the Servpub project. These docs were made during the infrastructuring process to help us share and explain how to setup the back-end VPN and server infrastructure with collaborators. Through this process we questioned how the norms of docs and of sharing technical knowledge were encoded and formatted to be only accessible by certain bodies, backgrounds and knowledges. From our sense making of misfitting within these norms, we started to question how we desired to overcome these barriers through collective access making.

To counter the barriers of access within these docs and technical network practices we were informed through Kelsie Acton's framing of Plain Language For Disability. Through Acton's understanding and approach to plain language we began to question how technical language can start to move towards a plain language version. This version making room within these technical norms not only for people to access and make sense of them in action, but for their sedimented norms to be disoriented and manifested from a plurality of embodied expertise and backgrounds.

It also has to be said that these docs are not "Plain Language" in the sense that Acton's work would present it, but are instead a step towards plain language from technical docs. In this motion, similarly this was also a place to start to inform In-grid (a majority non-disabled collective) to be informed by and in touch with critical access practices and discourse. So even though these docs are not the most accessible plain language, they do describe this first contact and movement towards more accessible and disputable technical discourse within In-grid.