More Than a Moment: The Practice of Getting Together

Please, eat – have a seat, stay for a while; there's more here than is on the table or menu (Anonymous, 2024)

This is the third blogpost documenting the ‘Database as Book and Lively Community Archive’ pilot project. The other blogposts can be found here and here.

The gathering, or the get-together – of connected, loosely connected, or not yet connected data, stories, people, ideas, and knowledges – for ‘Database as Book’ is not just a byproduct of the book that will eventually be published as part of this pilot project. Instead, it serves as a generative metaphor, a practice-based ethos, a hands-on method, and a structuring element of the publishing process and workflow itself.

At the heart of ‘Database as Book’ are concepts such as archival hospitality (an approach to data archiving that moves beyond mere accessibility, understanding archives not just as repositories of information but spaces of collaborative engagement, exploration, and ongoing inquiry) and data as relations (the idea that ‘the production of research data establishes, builds and sustains relationships of individuals and the collective’ (Okune et al., 2024)). ‘Database as Book’ emerges from the Research Data Share (RDS) collective’s digital workspace and archive, an instance of the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE). This instance was created to support a growing network of critical STS scholars and practitioners in Kenya interested in the social and material processes of how knowledges are assembled, shared, and made meaningful. RDS itself is a space for gathering, bringing people, data, and ways of thought into conversation, while the book resulting from the pilot (and the process of making it) functions as a means for broadening connections among researchers, communities, and existing and needed public knowledge infrastructures in Kenya.

Gathering as Support Structure

From the very beginning of the pilot project, the get-together has been firmly built into the timeline and workflow as a structuring element. In addition to regular online meetings among the authors, the platform provider, and the publisher – at which OBF’s Experimental Publishing Group members Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, and myself are also regularly present – this includes two public gatherings: one community event in Kenya to ‘present the developed project and editorial workflow adaptations and garner wider feedback’, which was held on 28 November 2024; and one community event in Kenya to ‘discuss project learnings and lessons learned from editorial and review process’ happening towards the end of 2025 (Okune et al., 2024).

The gathering on 28 November has been just as important for the project team as it has been for opening out from the various communities involved and intersecting in the pilot – whether African STS scholars, advocates for public and community-led knowledge infrastructures in Africa, or those challenging Global-North-dominated epistemic hierarchies in academia. It has also been formative for the book itself. As one of the authors, Leonida Mutuku, reflected after the event: ‘By organising and hosting this event, we created an opportunity to share our work, which pushed us to articulate our ideas more clearly, structure our thinking, and advance our vision for the pilot project and the book’.

The discussions, reflections, and takeaways from the gathering on 28 November can be explored further in the recorded online conversation Simon Bowie and I conducted with members of the project team after the event. This conversation featured the author team – members of the Research Data Share collective, including the gender specialist Aurelia Munene, the contemporary archeologist Syokau Mutonga, the AI research expert Leonida Mutuku, the social scientist of science Angela Okune, and the media studies researcher and university lecturer Wambui Wamunyu. They were joined by Mike Fortun, representing PECE, and François van Schalkwyk, representing the publisher African Minds. Together, they offered deeper insight into how the gathering on 28 November unfolded, the dialogues and connections it sparked, and how bringing people, ideas, and data into conversation for ‘Database as Book’ is a core methodological approach that actively shapes both the book and the publishing process itself.

Gathering as Method, Methods for Gathering

The in-person gathering on 28 November took place at the British Institute of East Africa in Kileleshwa, Nairobi, and lasted approximately five hours. It evolved along three key social formats: the sharing of work in progress, a World Café session – a structured, rotating discussion format that encourages collaborative dialogue across small groups – and a Harvesting Activity, which focused on synthesising insights from prior discussions. Those formats helped facilitate interaction and communication among participants: be it the project team or the people attending the event. Given the diverse disciplinary backgrounds of the authors, who each compiled a list of invitees from their respective networks, the event brought together an equally diverse group of participants, among which, as author Syokau Mutonga emphasises, were mostly ‘people who are excellent at what they do (…) leading journalists, anthropologists, data scientists and such’.

In one session, the authors shared their work in progress. They took five minutes each to present their draft chapters, and then engaged in discussions about their developing ideas, challenges, and conceptual directions – both with their fellow authors and with the attendees of the event. Rather than presenting polished arguments, the publisher François van Schalkwyk observed that the session marked the beginning of a crucial process for the authors: instead of solely describing their work, they began to articulate the questions driving their research in progress, which in turn helped them start identifying thematic links between their contributions. For the authors, resistance to dominant knowledge infrastructures has been a clear unifying theme across the book chapters they currently are writing. However, Angela Okune recounted that one attendee of the event pointed out that the ways in which these individual chapters interrelate remained somewhat unclear. During our conversation, the project team agreed that this feedback underscored the processual and iterative nature of their undertaking – where moments of articulation and acceleration, such as in-person gatherings and virtual meetings, must be balanced with slowing down. As François van Schalkwyk put it, they need ‘to go away and then slowly digest and think about their chapters’.

The second structuring element of the 28 November event was a World Café session, which shifted the focus away from individual research outputs and their thematic connections to a broader exploration of how knowledges exist and are shaped within larger social, cultural, and technical systems. During this 1.5-hour session, participants engaged in a rotating discussion format, sitting in groups of six at tables for 25-minute rounds. Each table was covered with a khanga – a colourful, patterned piece of cotton fabric often worn as garment – featuring proverbs about knowledge. Additionally, each participant was asked to bring an artifact representing knowledge, using it as a starting point for dialogue. Across three rounds of discussion, participants explored questions such as: What does knowledge mean to you? How is it found, shared, and archived? What do you envision for Kenyan knowledge infrastructures – technically, socially, and culturally? The World Café was hosted by the authors and RDS members, while external participants took over moderating and documenting functions. Distributing roles, as Aurelia Munene emphasised in our conversation ‘was good because we also were sharing rather than taking over the whole process of running the café’. This helped to flatten hierarchies among the participants, while also making the boundaries of collaboration and contribution within the ‘Database as Book’ project more porous – extending beyond the core project team towards the attendees of the event.

The gathering concluded with a Harvesting Activity. On the one hand, this was a synthesis session, where the participants came together to trace patterns, connections, and emergent themes from the previous conversations. On the other hand, the activity intended to provide both the pilot team and their guests with a ‘clearer picture of what we mean by database as books’, said Leonida Mutuku. This included simulating an instance of the PECE platform, using artefacts, yarn, and sticky notes to ‘find whether there are common threads or points of discontinuity between the different artifacts and ideas and string those together’. The process of relating and ‘stringing together’ data artifacts on PECE will, in the book, be carried out through the individual essays, as the authors explained.

‘If you don’t have conventions [such as predefined word counts or standard chapter layouts] to hold on to, then what exactly are you doing?’, Wambui Wamunyu asked. The answer, she added, is ‘embedded in the entire process itself (...) And our explorations are taking us in directions that we may not necessarily have thought about’. It is here that the gathering emerges as a method in its own right – not just a byproduct of the pilot project, but a shaping force and an indispensable element of the publishing and editing workflow. Structuring the book’s development while resisting closure, the gathering helps to collaboratively create the conditions for a different kind of knowledge-making that embraces a situated and relational practice of horizontally stringing people, ideas, and data together – in different constellations, in exchange with different communities.

Gathering as a Metaphor and an Ethics of Encounter

Beyond these structured activities, the event on 28 November also made space for more informal, embodied, and relational modes of knowledge creation – those that emerge in-between, over lunch, in side conversations that often remain inconsequential, or at least invisible, in published scholarly work (Rogers, 2025; Ladhani et al., 2025). François van Schalkwyk observed that it was often in unstructured moments where clarity about the project began to take shape: ‘I think that started to happen at the lunch actually, not at the workshop. The workshop helped. But I think it was one big step in that direction.’ And Mike Fortun further expanded on this idea noting that ‘during the conversation it struck me that this project is not only about the database as book but about the book as cafe and about the cafe as a community and about the community as a parliament and about the parliament as a people. And so these kinds of equivalences are not equivalences but transferences and translations from one form into another – I think that’s what this book project is pointing us towards’.

This statement reveals the deeply material and social nature of knowledge as something that takes shape through interaction, shared spaces, and the infrastructures that enable them. The idea of transference also carries a metabolic quality – ideas, structures, and relationships do not simply move between forms unchanged but are transformed in the process. As knowledge circulates – from a database to a book, from a book to a café, from a café to a community, and beyond – it is broken down, reworked, and reintroduced in new ways. This dynamic resonates with the underlying concept of archival hospitality (‘please, eat – have a seat, stay for a while; there's more here than is on the table or menu’ (Anonymous, 2024)) – where data is not static but something that nourishes intellectual and communal life, constantly reshaped through collective engagement.

In this sense, the kind of gathering described in this blogpost itself can be seen as a metabolic process – bringing together conversations, ideas, artifacts, and relationships, breaking them down, recombining them, and generating new insights and engagements. This process also reshapes roles within the project team reordering conventional publishing and editor functions that traditionally are more hierarchical, rigidly defined, and separated. François van Schalkwyk captured this shift within the project team, observing: ‘I no longer just feel like the publisher; I feel like I'm part of the project. And I think we even agreed that I might write a chapter for the book’.

This process of transformation was not only internal to the team but also extended to the wider communities intersecting within RDS and ‘Database as Book’, shaping the project’s dynamics and evolving identity. During our conversation, Angela Okune shared the feedback of a participant recalling ‘and he said to us: “it’s rare to have a room full of Kenyan PhD holders where people don’t insist on titles – Professor So-and-So or Daktari this and that”. Usually, knowledge hierarchies and formality take over. But his feedback was that, even if just for a few hours, we created a lateral space where people contributed not because of their titles, but because of their ideas. And he said, “this is the kind of space that enables truly cutting-edge creativity and innovation.”’ Wambui Wamunyu added that the same participant also asked whether the Research Data Share collective was ‘for sisters only’ – a question that, rather than requiring an immediate answer, invited reflection on the collective’s future and its potential to expand beyond its current form: ‘The idea of people who love knowledge coming together outside the typical conventional structures, such as, you know, the academy and so on, was appealing. So that was an interesting question that we don’t have an immediate answer to, but it provoked something among the collective about actually what could happen to it: could there be other people who join us?’

Having the gathering as a central element of the editorial and publishing workflow, the ‘Database as Book’ project understands publishing as an iterative, generative space – one in which the relationships between ideas, authors, and communities are continuously negotiated, expanded, and reshaped. This approach allows new connections, questions, and forms of collective sense-making to emerge, standing in contrast to conventional publishing workflows, which often prioritise linearity, fixed formats, and individual authorship (Adema & Kiesewetter, 2022; Kiesewetter, 2022; McDermott et al., 2025). But what does this mean for the other elements of the workflow? How might a publishing process that resists closure shape the way editorial decisions are made and editorial practices are understood? How can more open-ended, collaborative, and situated editorial practices be integrated with more standardised systems of book production, dissemination, and preservation? And how do the technical infrastructures upon which this book is built support, or limit, this fluid, relational approach to publishing? This pilot project allows us to further engage with these questions, an exploration which we will keep documenting in this blog series.