PrePostPrint @ Libre Graphics Meeting (Rennes): 9–12 May 2024

PrePostPrint  a community of practices ?

PrePostPrint aims to be a community of practices, a place for helping each other, sharing experiences, tools and uses, deeply rooted in the libre / open-source movement. We are teachers and students, all learners, who have in common web-to-print practices, experimentations with print via code and text interfaces, and the production of tinkered, inefficient or simply fun tools.

Today, we feel the need to define ourselves and clarify our positioning as players in the libre / open-source movement: to define our terrain, qualify our environment (milieu), propose an horizon and open up perspectives. We are convinced that human relations are central to our community, beyond technical issues, and that one of our roles is to invite and welcome aspiring libre amateurs.

We feel the need to go beyond some of the frameworks of free software. We want to pursue the already opened path towards directions that better allow to embrace the complexity of the world. We inscribe ourselves in political issues that bring us together and which is to us a necessary continuity of free software: an inscription into the struggle against systemic oppressions (anti-capitalism, trans✳feminism, ecological crisis, anti-fascism).

In this polyphonic communication, we want to give an echo to the discussions we are having, the questions that drive us and the many voices that resonate among us. As convinced supporters of the power of open source and the commons, we invite you to understand our journey as we redefine our position as players in this movement.

Julien Bidoret, Julie Blanc, Victor Hoffner, Quentin Juhel, Martin Lemaire and Zeste Le Reste were in Rennes (together with Timothée Goguely and Yann Trividic, dear PPPeers) to give a talk based on the above proposal.

The slides of our talk can be found on https://prepostprint.org/lgm2024/.

The initial discussions that led to this proposal can be found here, and the complete albeit lengthy verbatim of the pad where we took notes during the six meetings we had before LGM is there.