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Background image: Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs Background image: Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs

transparencyA collection of 3 posts

Everyone Can Wait

I have spent the week complying with deadlines, that quaint arrangement in which a date arrives and something is expected to be finished. Public writing had to take a back seat. Having finally resurfaced, I turned to the Sustainability Council’s anniversary minutes and discovered an altogether more accommodating relationship with unfinished business. In the party games of public participation, everybody can be involved without necessarily being allowed to interfere with anything. After ten years, the interesting question is what membership enables people to change, beyond their afternoon plans.

Everyone Can Agree

Ten years of planning the future. Three weeks—and counting—to put one afternoon on the record. Following Minna Hellström’s criticism on Ålands Radio, a little protokoll bingo opens onto a larger question about power, institutional comfort and what happens to criticism after everyone has been thanked for contributing. The paperwork has done its ten thousand steps. Power has not left its chair. What, precisely, is being sustained?