Archiving

Intro

Political movements have always depended on memory: the strikes that worked, the tactics that failed, the arguments already had and won. Lose that history and every new generation refights battles their predecessors already settled. The internet age was supposed to make remembering easier, but it's made it more fragile — most of what was posted in the early web is already gone, platforms shut down and take everything hosted on them with them, and links from a decade ago routinely lead nowhere. Digital doesn't mean permanent; if anything it disappears faster than paper ever did, because deletion is a single decision away and nobody notices until it's too late.

Modes

Archiving well means paying attention to more than one thing at a time.

Data — what a service produced — memberships, decisions, discussions — is worth exporting and keeping in the open, not left locked in a database nobody can query once the service is gone. It should stay visible to the people it belongs to, not buried in a backup only a steward can reach.

Code — the code behind every project is worth keeping in a public repository, not a laptop or a decommissioned server, even after the project itself stops running. A dead project's code still has a use: as reference, as a starting point, as proof of what was tried.

Interfaces — where feasible, the interfaces themselves are worth keeping reachable, not just the data behind them. Being able to actually click through a five-year-old tool says more about what a movement built and how people experienced it than a database dump ever will.

Documentation — document everything, not only what's currently running: decisions, why they were made, and what led up to them. A project that's gone is still worth explaining.

Practice

Running as a public stack is what makes this achievable rather than aspirational. Self-hosted data means nothing disappears because a vendor shut down or changed its terms; open formats and protocols mean it can be exported and moved instead of trapped; code and documentation held by the community rather than one person's laptop means the whole thing survives past any single steward. Archiving isn't a separate task bolted onto the stack — it's the same commitment to openness and self-organisation, applied to what's no longer actively maintained.