CASK 2026 was an online conference held over six sitting days between 5 and 14 June 2026, convened jointly by the Systems Community Alliance, the College of Exploration, and the System Modeling Institute. It deliberately coincided with International Archives Week and its 2026 theme, "Archives for Justice: Rights, Memory and Futures."
Rather than a marathon of back-to-back panels, the organisers spread short sessions across the calendar so that a small but influential audience of archivists, scholars, and practitioners could think together about how to discover, preserve, and share the heritage of cybernetics and systems science before it is lost.
Again and again, custodianship had arrived not by plan but by relationship — and with it came a shared sense of urgency.
Luke Friendshuh inheriting Len Troncale's System Process Theory office; Peter Tuddenham entrusted with W. Ross Ashby's digital archive by Ashby's dying grandson Mick; Lynn Rasmussen left holding Troncale's boxes and lost emails; Ben Wood discovering that the cybernetics he had practised for years on construction sites had a name.
The custodians are ageing and the carriers are decaying — cassette tapes, VHS, printed gray literature — even as the tools for rescue have become cheap and powerful.
Large language models can do the first ninety per cent of transcription, cataloguing, and metadata. But the last ten per cent — transparency, integrity, and ethics — cannot be delegated. A human must keep "skin in the game."
Summaries follow the order of the recorded sessions. Speaker affiliations are as stated during the event.
A pre-recorded walk through a thirty-page, AI-assisted technical assessment proposing a FRBR-compliant database organised by "canonicity" and "granularity," with Inventaire and Zenodo at its core.
The opening day: a live demo of the Confabula asynchronous archive, the "accidental archivist" surfacing in real time, and Rob Young's SCA welcome (the AAMU / "amua" framing) — plus the week's first wide-ranging discussion of repositories, digitisation, copyright, and access.
A tour of the curated register of cybernetics and systems archives — 52 archives and 25 "heroes" — and the case for a neutral, FAIR-aligned, infrastructure-level home for the community.
Forty-five years with systems and cybernetics, from the Open University to systems literacy and the ASC Archives Working Group that seeded CASK — and the "accidental archivist" doing unpaid labours of love.
How he inherited Len Troncale's life's work — seven bookshelves, eleven filing cabinets, ninety-seven posters — and a proposed hybrid "library rental space" for shared archival storage.
The WhatsApp rescue of ashby.info with Ashby's dying grandson Mick; a 44-year journal, 1,600 index cards, and the AI transcription of a 1941 manuscript, "The Origin of Adaptation."
Rescuing the James Grier Miller VHS interviews and a 1981 Frank Burns cassette: play the dying carrier, auto-transcribe, then do the decisive human work of correction, annotation, and context.
A tour of the Heinz von Foerster papers and Biological Computer Laboratory holdings, and the challenges of dispersal, appraisal, funding, and standards (DACS, Records in Contexts).
A 700-book collection turned research experiment: "distant reading" with AI, an interactive index-based network, and a candid case that the crucial question is not AI's error rate but the distribution of its errors.
Judging AI as a "regulator of memory" through the Good Regulator Theorem and Mick Ashby's "Law of Inevitable Ethical Inadequacy": effective is not the same as good.
Concrete tests where AI fabricated or miscorrected, the LOCKSS answer of posting Troncale's links and PDFs on her own site, and putting the ideas to work in a functional book.
A survey of Central/Eastern European, Soviet, French, and Latin American lineages too easily forgotten — Bogdanov's Tektology, Lange, Klir, Morin, and the Beer–Chile episode.
A neutral comparative register of unity-of-knowledge frameworks, and a lively debate over an AI "Ethicizer" — with the room insisting humans must keep "skin in the game."
The AI-assisted database proposal in full, and Paul Pangaro's caution that "data, community and values are more resilient than technology."
A fourth-generation builder's discovery of cybernetics, requisite variety on the construction site, and the call for a foundational "dictionary" translating theory to practice.
"Where do we go from here?" — modest small steps, a possible follow-up CASK, lessons learned, and more people at the steering level.
Quilting as a metaphor for preservation — keep "the stitching, not only the product" — drawn from the Gregory Bateson collection at UC Santa Cruz, with organised archival "digging" trips proposed.
Read together, the sessions formed a coherent argument rather than a loose set of talks. A working consensus emerged around three things: redundancy (LOCKSS and "multiple homes"), curated data quality (the register climbing the DIKW pyramid; FAIR and FRBR), and a realistic division of labour with AI — powerful for the first ninety per cent, but unable to supply the transparency, integrity, and ethics that only an answerable human can choose.
"The stage is set — the convergent, pragmatic work of actually doing it together remains to be done."
— a closing reflection from the final sessionThe event ended with a clear direction of travel. Concrete next steps surfaced repeatedly:
The full Event Report — with complete session-by-session summaries and synthesis — is available on request, and the session recordings are hosted on the CASK 2026 schedule.