Dead Archivist Society

We live, we write text, we publish it on our own sites, on wikis and blogs, and then we die. Such is the fate of all humans. We do not want our words be lost. Even if we run an "everything and nothing" site, where the words we write are everything to us and probably mean nothing to anybody else, we want to send them into the future, to be read not just by friends and family but also by future historians. We want help them understand the past. How did we feel? How did we decide? What the hell happened while we were alive?

It is hard to send our words into the future. We don't have the means to burn clay tablets and we don't print paper books to be sent to the archives of our time. We have to create our own electronic archives while we're alive. The goal of the Dead Archivist Society is to take these archives and preserve them for the future. The means will vary over time. Right now, we'll use the Internet and BitTorrent to distribute static copies of our personal sites. Dynamic sites, hosting, domain names, databases, all of that is currently out of scope. Think of it as "one zip file of your homepage per member".

Since our goal is preservation, our association knows three kinds of members:

• active members, involved in the preservation effort
• former members who left the association for one reason or another
• dead members whose words we attempt to preserve

The Dead Archivist Society is a Swiss association based on Art. 60– 79 of the Swiss Civil Code.

Associations: Another type of business structure is a web page by the Swiss government explaining the various uses of associations.

Associations: Model Articles of Association is a PDF with a model articles of association.

Status: We haven't formulated our articles of association, yet.

• Articles of association (work in progress)
• Technical requirements
• List of members
• List of torrents
• List of previous meetings
• Preparations for the next meeting

The following pages are temporary notes. If you're trying to follow along, there's a blog feed RSS to subscribe to.