Praxis is a fuzzy cloud, a portal to the stars, an epic twirl in the middle of the dancefloor.

Praxis has taken many forms over the past 6 years – book club, design collective, queens of the scene, think tank, and more – and as the year closes, we wanted to use this space to muse a bit about what we’ve been up to over the past year and where we are trying to go in the next.

Designers Amongst Designers

While some of us are more traditional web and graphic designers, others of us are working on service design within the civil society and government space. Though we might not understand the specifics of each other’s work, over the past year we found that we have been able to support each other and be valuable pairs of eyes and ears to help each other through sticky design challenges or even decide that a certain project is not worth the time and effort.

We formally rolled out our Soundboard practice in the summer and we look forward to sharing it with you more in the new year. We think other groups will find its lightweight structure a useful tool for soliciting feedback and testing the viability of an idea.

Exploring The Fediverse

Most of us have been experimenting with Mastodon for the past few years while also continuing to educate ourselves about the ills of corporate social media. The sudden and rapid devolution of Twitter this year gave us the push we needed to start working on creating our own Mastodon server so that we could eventually extend a landing pad to our friends and like-minded folks. With the help of Hugo from Mastohost, we were up and running fairly quickly.

While a few of us are on the Praxis Mastodon already, we want to spruce the place up before we “open the floodgates”. Over the next few months, we hope to:

• create and publish a code of conduct;
• start receiving and approving signups; and
• create an OpenCollective page to collect donations to cover server costs

After we are able to stabilize our Mastodon server, we’d love to explore more fediverse tools like Pixelfed and Peertube. We have actually already started a Lemmy (alternative to Reddit) instance that we also want to open to more people in the new year.

Current Projects

• Nicholas has been putting a lot of work into the Commons Garden, a project that aims to enhance our knowledge commons by sponsoring initiatives through facilitation, consulting, and documentation
• Camille has been working on building up The Wind Down, a “conscious closure” consultancy focused on helping people close down their projects and organizations with celebration and care.