2025

V6 –– (Complete) Every WP template has been reworked, simplified, and redundant pages removed. We’ve added fun new ways to customise your reading experience, save and share your favourite projects, explore metadata, and navigate the CAN Archive with interactive visualisations. You can now generate shareable images of your favorite projects, filter views your way, and browse faster with a (smart and fast) quick search.

Archive –– (In Progress) We continue to update articles, including but not limited to galleries, links, videos, etc. We have also optimised our tags, from 6,000 down to 1,800 however there are still many that need consolidation. In addition all projects now attributed to their creators we are still working on adding short biographies and external links. The new Tools taxonomy has been completed and is growing.

Knowledge –– (Complete) Our Books section is complete, listing the latest releases and relevant reading material. We have also built a real-time data export for articles, members and people with some examples of how data can be used. CAN data can be accessed via URL or downloaded as .csv. We hope researchers and those interested in analysing and visualising CAN archives will find this useful and fun. Special features (widgets) for long form articles have been added including ability to save progress, font size, etc.

Community –– (Complete) In addition to our Discord (now a year old) which has been steadily growing, and we are pleased that all our members now have profile pages on CAN. If previously covered, they can now also link their profile pages to their People pages. These do not only include basic profile info, but we have also added badges and more. We now also have Event listings, a whole new section dedicated to calls, exhibitions, conferences and more. Subscribe with your calendars or download per event dates. Member submissions have also been on the rise, and besides being pleased to have these new voices and work to CAN, we will continue to build features that foreground work produced by our community. You can also now add your city in edit-profile and see other members that live in your city or events. Finally, and the largest undertaking for us yet, is Activity –– a whole new way to interact with content, ideas, and each other on CAN. It builds on the ideas from the early web and focuses on what matters most—the community and our interaction with each other. Learn more about Acitivity here.

Features –– (Complete) We now have a new front page featuring member submissions, books and jobs, improved search with people, tags, categories and members listed, a new edit profile page, updated member submissions forms, people pages and so much more––way too many to list here. We have also launched a full content RSS feed for our members. We are constantly updating and improving CAN—all thanks to your support!

Access –– (Complete) Articles are no longer locked. If you have a direct URL, you can read it (logged-in or not). This means that anyone can also share articles with everyone else. This has been something we wanted to do for a very long time and finally found a good way to do it. What is managed (gated) is the way you get to those articles (archives > 2 years) but not the articles themselves. If you are a Member, you can make any article available to everyone by simply sharing the URL directly or via the Saved feature. It has always been important to us that as many people as possible have access to CAN content. Amazing work has been done in the last 16+ years, too easily forgotten, then repeated, but now accesible to all.

2026

V6+ –– (In Progress) New features and improvements to the site need to continue, including bug fixes, refinements and optimisation. There are many things that don’t work the way we want them to, including ocasional Gateway Timeouts. We tend to fix these as we go but they are extremly time consuming and we need help + skill.

Archive –– (Pending) Adding historical projects that have been influential and shaped the discourse throughout the 2000s and 2010s. This has been our plan for a long time, but we simply don’t have the resources to do it. In addition, new and old content needs better metadata; thus, we need to re-do many of our tags to provide a better and more resourceful search experience. Counting now over 1,800 tags, our aim is to optimise these to 1,200.

Knowledge –– (Pending) In addition to tags, tools and people, we require a new thematic classifications/taxonomy. For example Robotics (current), Objects (current) are all currently used as tags and you can see some of them on the front page. We would like to add a new Thematic taxonomy whereas the making (process) methodologies will continue to be used in tags. Here is out current list, yet to be finalised.

Automation and AI, Computer Vision, Simulation, Futures and Fictions, Data Mapping, Generative Systems, Environment and Ecology, Body and Biomorphology, Social Media, Popular Culture, Alternate Realities, Culture and Politics

Perspectives –– (Pending) Bringing a––much needed––new team member (part-time) to provide support and help out with the archive. CAN already has many collaborators (you often see their names in the blog) but we’d like to offer a more permanent position, a regular contributor.

Community –– (Pending) Build more community initiatives, including but not limited to meetups, lecture series, workshops, show & tell sessions and more. This requires funding, and help, and we can’t do it without meeting our goal first. It is also very likley we will abandon traditional social media platforms in the next few months and focus solely on Discord + Activity.

Features –– (Pending) As member submission numbers grow so will the features that serve and foreground them. Our submissions forms need to be re-vamped to allow for more diverse type of content to be submitted. We have recently launched new submission form including “news” for short-form content. We want to do more, including but not limited to giving our members more control over how their content appears before it is published.

Access –– (Pending) If/when we reach our goal, it is our intention to remove all restrictions to archives. We do have a number of concerns how that will affect AI scrapers/bots so we may need to introduce some human/robot checkers, akin to Anubis. For now, even though we are struggling with them, it is good to know that they can’t go further than 2 years. If you would like to know why we are against AI Scrapers, please read this and this.

Support

Your support is critical to sustain this platform and its rich community archives. By becoming a member or donor, you not only aid us in reaching the objectives outlined here but also pave the way for a more open and resilient CAN in the future. We understand the journey ahead is challenging, but we are absolutely committed to achieving it with your support.

By supporting CAN, you also become part of something bigger—you actively help independent publishing thrive and inspire others to build much-needed communities like this one.

You can support CAN in two ways: by becoming a member of our community or by donating. With an individual membership starting at only $20 per year, billed annually, you unlock a plethora of features. Alternatively, your generous donations go directly to CAN, aiding us in keeping this platform alive and growing for years to come.

Thank you!