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Archiving Our Online Communities
On the closing and archiving of Hi.co
We’re closing Hi.co on September 1, 2016. But, paradoxically, there’s never been a more meaningful moment to join. We’re making a “book.” We’re printing — using a microscopic ion-etching process — the entire website upon a 2" × 2" nickel plate, giving it a fire- and saltwater-resistant shelf life of 10,000 years.[¹] At least five plates will be produced, to be held by five stewards — museums and libraries — around the world. A seed bank of our moments as connected to place. We met with the collections director and preservation specialists at the Library of Congress in early April of 2016, and the Library has agreed to be our first official steward. (More on that sorcery and stewardship below.)
First: What is Hi.co? We assume most of you have never heard of it. It’s a location-aware publishing platform for writing stories about places. It’s built on the open web and is completely free and optimized to work on almost any smartphone in the world. We call the output “narrative mapping,” and you can read extensively about it in our overwrought obligatory manifesto.
