Splinter is a small server that travels and allows local and remote access to a set of documentation tools that Constant uses in different contexts. To achieve this modular way of working we connected splinter to circulations, which is a server hosted within the constant Galaxy of virtual servers.

Circulations was started in 2023 as a space dedicated to the continuous publication efforts of Constant. This includes hosting:

• a place to store images, notes and other content coming from our collective activities
• the tools to experiment and create small publications and other outputs
• the published outputs

Constant collects the materials to be used as sources for small publications and the redaction of documentation of these activities and, in this way, they are also made available to all the participants and other interested people.

We find it important to both care for keeping these sources available in the long-term and, to redistribute them for re-use by others. They are made available under the [CC4R license] (https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html), a document which orients the way in which we approach collaboration and how we imagine and desire sharing and re-use to happen.

Why do we use local servers?

At Constant we have a long standing practice of questioning and finding alternative ways of documentation processes that are collaborative in nature. We have been working on some structures that allow multiple ways of access. One of the ways in which Constant has been doing this is making it possible to write together on etherpads, whether we are connected tot he internet or not.

Our past process on these questions can be read in the first issue of the [Networks of One’s Own](https://networksofonesown.constantvzw.org/etherbox/manual.html#episode-1-etherbox) series.

We see how useful it is for companies to use such systems to make their user experience seamless, accessible, economically efficient.
We do it instead for long-term content reliability, to open up access from/to different locations. With our local server approach we chose not to use internet cloud services and such to keep our data but, later, we also realized we wanted to make use of the internet to regain some of the agency to be able to share our content.

Splinter is a fluid entity that we hope we can continue to morph into different versions along the documentation path that Constant takes.