What is KEEP KARLSRUHE BORING?

Keep Karlsruhe Boring is an initiative in Karlsruhe that thinks that the city has a lot to offer out of baroque palaces, tribunals, and acritical technology. The people behind KeKaBo think that there are many things going on in an alternative scene in the city: especially if you value your privacy and don't use mainstream social media platforms, you may not realize that because it's challenging to get an overview. That's why we are building an autonomous agenda for cultural and political activities organized by alternative collectives: we think you will be surprise how much is going on in Karlsruhe and around. We also aim to offer to collectives a first contact with the Fediverse, a different way of doing "social media" hoping that they like it. And we also enjoy appropriating the means of production!

Kekabo is a website with an agenda, when everyone (registered user or not) may check what's going on and add information about a new event. KeepKarlsruheBoring also has a bot in Activitypub protocol, which means that you can also follow the updates of the website via the Fediverse. For people contributing often, it makes sense (but it's not mandatory) to have a user-account, so we can give them feedback or publish their message faster as we trust them. We, the moderators, check that the information is correctly displayed (sadly, it is impossible for us to do more checks) and that the events it is aligned with the goals of KeKaBo, and we publish, edit or discard them (you will be surprised, how much crab there's in internet). There's an admin figure taking care of the maintenance; finally, contributors are helping us with everything, from design to contact more collectives or institutions, or just talking about KeKaBo.

When we say an autonomous agenda, we mean that we (and not any official institution or company) are taking care (aka maintaining and moderating) this platform. We also mean that we are giving ourselves the rules (that's literally what autonomous means), so we may change that at any moment. Autonomous does not mean that we are or want to be alone: autonomy is what allows cooperation with other initiatives, maintaining their autonomous agendas. That's why we are developing gancio, the software behind Keep Karlsruhe Boring, together, everyone according to their necessities, everyone contributing according to their possibilities.

When we speak about cultural (some people may prefer to talk about artistic, we consider art to be part of culture) and political activities, we mean activities that make us happier or confront ourselves with problems or simply imagine how things could be different. Our goal is not having an agenda of all events in the Karlsruhe area, but just of events interesting to us (and let's hope, also for you). Yet, it may be difficult to clearly define what interests us because we may disagree or change our minds: as a rule of thumb, we want events that connect us to a world that is worth living in. If you want a more clear hint, we think that thoughts from ecologists, left and anarchism, feminism, postcolonialism, queer, and crimp studies made fascinating contributions (yes, we may be what some people have been calling woke). Put it from the other side, we don't want any form of fascism, capitalism disrespect with other communities, agents or environments.

When we speak of alternative collectives, we mean any group of people organizing themselves to create an alternative to the actual situation. Things got a little messy here:

some official institutions (or some people working in them) are trying to build alternatives or change things, and we are glad to announce their events here. Nonetheless, it's important to note that as official institutions they have (or they should have, but that's another discussion) more means to spread their message as non-official (alternative) institutions: in other words, they enjoy a privileged situation. Remember, KeKabo is primarily meant to help people that do not have this privileged situation, and they are and will be our priority. That said, we are sure that we will find a way in which you also contribute to KeKaBo meaningfully, supporting them or KeKaBo.

some people want to build alternatives to the actual situations, just not in the same direction as us. From our perspective, their alternatives may be even worse as the actual situation. We're sorry, guys (because we bet you are guys), but we will not publish your crab here: Your internet is big enough, and you have plenty of platforms (actually the whole system) supporting you. If you want to hear our perspective, here are our events; if you think they are all wrong, just go somewhere else, or build your own instances and have a nice day.

Why KeepKarlsruheBoring?

Short answer: because we miss a digital place where get update of what's going on and because we want to escape privative networks. Put it a little longer:

Kekabo wishes to become a place where collectives (especially politically and cultiral) can spread their activities with the people
Kekabo hopes to become a place where people get what's going on in the alternative scene in Karlsruhe.
We hope that Kekabo support collectives to discover, cooperate, and coordinate with each other
And, well, we just wanted to have an agenda to organize better our lives....

And on the technological side:

We aim to escape the privative, capitalistic, extractivist (and in some cases even fascist) logic of "social" media platforms. Really, the list of things we don't like in social media platforms is really long, so let's just say that we don't want to have nothing to do with them, and we want to build an alternative coherent with our perspectives.
We wish to break the social media loop, in which collectives "must" use these platforms because is "where people is" and people are in these platforms because is where "you can follow the collectives". We think that offering an alternative could be a first step.
We aim to achieve that using means that not contradict the way in which we would like to live.

Why this name? It's not the contrary of what you are trying to achieve?

The name is a homage to different people and projects trying to confront Karlsruhe's boredom. As far as we know, there has been three different Keep Karlsruhe Boring, but it seems to be enough boredom for everyone:

The original idea: Craig Judkins while opening the Electric Eel adapted the motto Keep Austin Weird to the Karlsruhe context. Still nowadays you can buy stickers, T-shirts and bags, at Electric Eel. They still have the domain keepkarlsruheboring.de.
One of the gorgeous plays about urban memory ever staged, and it simply deserves not to be forgotten. In this theater play, the audience, divided into groups, walked around the city centre with an actor complaining about places that closed due to gentrification, without losing the particular Karlsruhe sense of humour. Thereafter, the different groups met at the city council and were reported by an administrative worker for being too loud and funny, which triggered a demonstration or parade across the city centre.
This agenda.

KEKABO it's a prototype

We build up this instance in Spring 2025 and slowly it seems to work stable: sometimes it may be a little buggy: it's important that you understand that because our time and resources to work in Kekabo are limited, but we prefer a buggy system we control over a system that enslaves us.

We have everything covered so that Keep Karlsruhe Boring can work for a year, until 2026, where we will decide how to continue. During that time we aim to present KeKabo to people and collectives, hoping that they appropriate it and consider it is worth maintaining it. After that time, if nobody cares, KEKABO will be shout down because it means that we don't need such a tool. But we still have some time to discuss all that...

BTW: the people of KarlsrUNRUHE also had a wonderfull agenda

If you want to know more, go to the FAQ

Workshop mit Leticia Forattini Martins