I'm Anne. I've spent almost a decade in what I call the 'open ecosystem', the first five years as a lurker and participant, the second five as a researcher and facilitator. I've done ethnographic studies of OpenStreetMap, was the Community Manager of The Turing Way, and have held a variety of fellowships with organisations ranging from the Internet Society to the Software Sustainability Institute. Outside of all these things, I would call myself an artist-of-sorts, maybe to say that I make art more than I embody the spirit of an artist, per say. But I sometimes throw the title around anyway. I guess I'll say it: I'm a researcher, facilitator, and artist. I was a big 'micro' blogger in my teens, using platforms like Xanga, Livejournal, and Flickr to document my teenage life. Then I inevitably moved to Tumblr alongside many angsty and artsy teenager girls right as Facebook started to take off in parallel, before moving to Instagram (and using it as a kind of 'blog' for years). I've gone through the inevitable cycles of use then rejection, of deleting and reactivating all my social media accounts. My original Facebook account is gone now. When I started grad school in 2019, I started my blog as a method of sharing more about my life and research when I moved to Geneva. I think it came out of the joint desires for self-expression and a desire to get out of social media. We now collectively call this platform decay "enshittification", but I really felt like what I was putting online was performative more than anything else. The blog felt like shouting into a voice, yes, but it was my shout, on my own website, in a void of my own creation. There's no like button for that. I often just create a new page on Obsidian or VSCode and just start to write. Sometimes it all comes out in one go - sometimes the draft will take years to fruition (and yes - I'll often backdate that post to when it was created, not when it was published). There's actually a secret draft folder on Github that hosts all my drafts in progress. Out of all the creative processes, I find writing the most difficult, but also the most transformative. I rarely enjoy the process, but always feel better, or have more clarity, or understand something or myself better, afterwards. In parallel to writing, I'm very much a power user of are.na which feels like a more instinctual, affectual, and social form of thinking out loud. I think a lot of the nascent themes contained there eventually end up on the blog in some form or another.