- Sep 2017
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Local file Local file
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Three strategies deserve particular attention for their symbolic value: cannibalism, baroque, and creolization. Cannibalism is appropriation trough dismembering, absorption, and chemical transformation. Baroque—an infiltration strategy—is the artistic appropria-tion of spaces through filling and layering. In-between, creolization is appropriatio
through miscegenation and unpredictable mixing. While inspired by Latin American cul-ture, these prove useful in other cultural, geographical, and historical settings.
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Throughout history, Latin American populations have had extensive experience with the appropriation of objects, people, and ideas from abroad, most often in unfavorably asymmetric situations. This tradition continues to pro-duce a culture of its own, born from multiple resistance and appropriation strategies.
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Likewise, the interplay between economic, cultural, and political tensions remains largely unexplored.
En nuestro caso el interjuego entre lo político, lo cultural y lo económico, ha estado presente desde el comienzo, al menos a escala del hackerspace. El cambio de escala ha sido la principal tensión, articulando otras comunidades de activistas o generando una interlocución más fluida con el gobierno.
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Surman and Reilly (2003) focus on appropriation of networked technologies in a strategically, politically, and creatively innovative manner oriented toward social change. In this context of advocacy, effective technology appropriation includes strategic Internet use for collaboration, publishing, mobilization, and observation. Here, the delineation between the use and appropriation occurs when technology is adapted to reflect goals and culture. Camacho (2001) describes appropriation by civil society organizations at the pinnacle of a technology use ladder. In the middle of the ladder, organizations focus on adoption of conventional technology. Toward the bottom, organizations and individuals with constrained access or slow adoption rates lag behind and seek access to technology. At the pinnacle, however, pioneers and activists appropriate technology to promote causes, for instance, creating flash mobs through mass text messaging to instantaneously organize large groups of people for social protest
Desde el comienzo, el Data Week ha estado preocupado por la perspectiva de transformación social en la apropiación tecnológica al estar vinculada con la creación de capacidad en la base, modificación de la infraestructura y la amplificación de voces ciudadanas frente a iniciativas privadas o públicas.
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Appropriation considers both learn-ing-by-using and learning-by-doing as central to the development of new processes (Rosenberg, 1982). Learning-by-doing in particular assumes that knowledge emerges through bricolage—tinkering with and recombining technology elements, thus enhancing one’s understanding (Lévi-Strauss, 1966). For Tuomi (2002), learning through appropria-tion is a user-centered process whereby users meld culture with material resources to innovate.
Los principios de diseño en Smalltalk hacen que aprender haciendo sea uno de los elementos centrales de la estética de encuentro que favorece esta materialidad.
El continuo donde no hay diferencia entre el entorno de desarrollo y el de usuario, o entre usuario y hacedor, favorece el aprender haciendo. Ejercicios como los del Manual de Periodismo de Datos, son un llamado más directo a la acción y, por tanto, a aprender haciendo, particularmente acá, hemos visto mediante el ejemplo cómo cambiar la herramienta para adecuarla a las necesidades que el ejercicio mismo del manual ha sucitado, pero que se pueden abstraer para otros problemas.
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The nexus of appropriation shifts away from user empowerment through technology to users as technology developers, echoing others who view users as designers and developers (Eglash, 2004). The design perspective fur-ther recognizes that not all appropriation is successful. Notably, technological appropria-tion fails when users decide not to explore capabilities or to evaluate a technology (Carroll etal., 2002).
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Rogers (2003) defines diffusion as the process through which an innovation is communicated and spreads over time. Rogers theorized diffusion as a one-stage process, whereas appropriation adds a more detailed view of actual technology use (Fichman, 2000)
Where diffusion explains adoption and spread, appropria-tion explores the impact of use.
Esto me recuerda Uvikuo, el experimento mental chatbot, programa de mensagería y luego sitio web, que estaba enfocado en la amplia difusión. Grafoscopio, por otro lado está enfocado en la "apropiación" densa en lugar de extensa.
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Users may modify a device, download, or program new applications, invent unintended uses, or develop new practices that leverage its possibilities. This experimentation constitutes a re-negotiation of the power relationships embedded in the technology. This creative re-negotiation is the core of appropriation, the process through which users take something external and make it their own.
En el caso de Grafoscopio, la modificación en el artefacto y las prácticas alrededor del mismo trajeron nuevas temáticas a esta tecnología, como el activismo de datos.
La comunidad de Pharo es particularmente neutra a los usos de estas tecnologías y se enfocan sólo en el aspecto púramente técnico de la misma. Los artefactos que son creados en dicha comunidad, sirven a sus integrantes, como es de esperarse, que son principalmente desarrolladores de software. Temas como la visualización de datos es usada en ver sistemas de software. Lo que hace Grafoscopio es que repolitiza dichos usos y los descoloca y recoloca en contextos más políticos: visualizar presupuestos públicos, información públicada de medicamentos, silencios de políticos y en ese sentido es un acto permanente de reapropiación.
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Second, we posit that users adopt technology because it makes a difference to their lives. In the case of mobile telephony, the technology opens up new socio-economic opportunities by increasing connectedness to others. Usage, in turn, reveals the politics embedded within a technology’s configuration, disclosing who controls what
En este sentido, la pregunta sería, qué diferencia hace Grafoscopio en la vida cotidiana de sus usuarios? Esta ausencia de uso cotidiano ha frenado su adopción, si bien en la comunidad de práctica que se reune alrededor del mismo, los usos esporádicos y focalizados en el activismo y visualización de datos son suficientemente fuertes para mantenernos congregados. Dichos usos cotidianos, de los que hemos hablado con algunos miembros de la comunidad, surgirán en la medida en que la plataforma madure, como lo ha venido haciendo de evento en evento. Una ritmo apropiado de crecimiento es clave para que el proyecto no crezca demasiado como para no poder cambiar ágilmente o sea tan pequeño que se estanque. Aunque sus usos como forma de expresión personal siguen vigentes para mi y los veo proyectados a futuro.
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We first emphasize that technology is not neutral. The design of products, applications, and services embodies choices, largely made in early development stages by equipment producers and service providers, about how devices ought to be used, by whom and for what purpose. A technology’s architecture embodies power relationships between equipment makers, service providers, and users. Relationships between various stakeholders have social and economic implications
Este caracter no neutro de la tecnología era conversado entre los miembros de la comunidad de software libre local desde hace años. Para el caso de Smalltalk, la idea de que todo el sistema se puede cambiar, es consecuente con reconfigurar las relaciones de poder, si bien hay algunas fuertemente reificadas en el sistema (por ejemplo el paradigma objetual), aunque sistemas como COLA (Colaborative Object Lambda Architecture) pretenden dar los mismos privilegios al usuario, que al diseñador del lenguaje, incluso en términos de la sintaxis, la semántica y la pragmática.
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This article frames appropriation as a political process.
[...] ICTs provide unique flexibility for users to interact and re-invent. ICTs can be modified and re-programmed, whether the ability to modify is explicitly enabled through design or uncovered through hacking. Device producers, application designers, content creators, service providers, and end users can therefore engage in the creative appropriation process and insight into social, economic, and political impacts can be gained exploring appropriation modalities.
Esto se puede conectar con la introducción respecto al caracter fluído, pero paradógico de las tecnologías digitales.
Nótese acá la connotación de hacking en términos de apertura y reinterpretación.
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Users re-invent technology when they test features, tweak devices and applications to better fit their needs (Papa and Papa, 1992), invent new ways to use services, and develop novel social, economic, and political practices around technology’s possibilities (Venkatesh etal., 2012). As new practices develop, we need to better understand the dynamics of interaction between social, economic, and political influences
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For a technology to evolve in accordance with users’ needs, aiding social and economic development, the focus must move beyond mere adoption. When users appropriate technology and make it their own, new uses and innovations emerge. The appropriation process is a contest for control over a technological system’s configuration, as users, designers, and manufacturers battle over who can use that technology, at what cost, under what conditions, for what purpose, and with what consequences. This confrontation, we argue, constitutes a powerful innovation mechanism.
La adopción y la apropiación están muy cercanas en los metasistemas como Pharo/Smalltalk, pues que un usuario use una herramienta suele estar muy cercano a la idea de que esté en condiciones de modificarla.
Para el caso de Grafoscopio, la comunidad de práctica avanza, con miembros relativamente constantes entre edición y edición del Data Week y las Data Rodas y progresivamente miramos cómo modificar la herramienta. Aún así, no hay usos cotidianos de la misma (adopción) y la modificación (apropiación) aún es muy lenta. Sin embargo, el potencial de la herramienta para adaptarse a la comunidad y sus problemas, ha sido mayor que el de otras que se probaron.
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Appropriation is the process through which technology users go beyond mere adoption to make technology their own and to embed it within their social, economic, and political practices. The appropriation process is a negotiation about power and control over the configuration of technology, its uses, and the distribution of its benefits. The negotiation surrounding technology appropriation echoes earlier creative tensions in the New World regarding the appropriation of cultural objects and ideas from abroad.
Puede relacionarse con el concepto de Tecnologías Apropiadas de Thomas?
Tags
- bricolage
- data roda
- difusión
- data activism
- aprendizaje
- political participation
- usuarios
- hacedores
- asimetría
- innovación: user driven
- repolitización
- Latinoamérica
- fluidez
- tesis
- reinvención
- uvikuo
- apropiación
- grafoscopio
- politics
- reinterpretación
- hackerspaces
- negociación
- artesanía
- reapropiación
- canibalismo
- barroquización
- non-neutrality
- hacking
- tesis: resultados
- taxonomía
- idea clave
- data week
- adopción
- creolización
Annotators
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journals.sagepub.com journals.sagepub.com
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In conclusion, these articles highlight elements of a broader story of increasing democ-ratization of hacking and making. This plurality will likely continue to grow and confront global, structural, and technological challenges worldwide.
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François Bar, Matthew Weber, and Francis Pisani advocate for a cul-tural model of technological appropriation drawn from Latin America. Appropriation draws attention to how users interpret, manipulate, and repurpose technology in creative and unexpected ways. Their cycle of evolution suggests cultural mechanisms of appro-priation: baroquization, creolization, and cannibalism. This new vocabulary to understand technological appropriation un-moors the notion of “hacking” from Western modernity. It encourages us to think about how users and cultures are central to a technology’s life-cycle. Beyond just signaling difference, Bar, Weber, and Pisani suggest that innovation on the periphery is a powerful process that merits consideration.
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Richardson argues that “open design” in the maker movement encourages diversity and collective participation in the production process. Being “pre-hacked” provides an alternative way to think about participation in technological produc-tion. The maker movement tenuously embraces open design, even if they have less success in considering how these practices might scale.
Esto me recuerda los cargadores de celular, que se pierden todo el tiempo y cómo no se pueden abrir o reparar, por diseño.
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“Civic hackers” are a diverse range of individuals who improve community life by creating and modifying digital infrastructure. Policy-makers optimistically describe them as driving new economies using government data. Critical scholars note how they precariously labor for waning institutions. Yet, we may misunderstand civic hackers because they transgress established political categories of libertarianism and liberalism, and adversary and unitary democracy. Andrew Schrock charts a middle ground by argu-ing that civic hacking—and its fraught, even contradictory politics—partly emerged from a history of progressive informational practices. In the shift from “information” to “data,” the original goals of these practices became muted, even as new possibilities for civic engagement emerged. “Data activism and advocacy” describes a fraught but diverse range of political tactics of amateur experts working for change, often within the political system. He argues these remediated practices carry the impulses of political reform, even as they are often tied up with conflicting imperatives.
Mi percepción en Hackademia es que esta tercera vía en las múltiples identidades hacker era invisible.
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Hacker and maker spaces are community workshops that promote notions of open-access and equal participation. Yet, they tend to embrace a contradiction. Their egalitar-ian goals paradoxically reflect a masculine geek identity anchored by an exclusionary “meritocracy.” Addressing democratization requires questioning how power and identity in hacker and maker spaces can be reconnected and re-programmed. Daniela K. Rosner and Sarah Fox illuminate just such a rich counter-narrative in the feminist hackerspace Mothership Hackermoms. Rosner and Fox argue feminist hackerspaces emerged from legacies of craft, engineering culture, and emotional style through failure. They argue that histories of craft and domesticity don’t just undergird engineering cultures—they provide concepts for women to re-imagine maker spaces in a feminist mold.
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Critiques have emerged over how these prototypes are rarely effective or adopted in addressing the very problems they inspire. Thomas Lodato and Carl DiSalvo suggest that this disillusionment stems from a misunderstanding of the process and outcomes of hackathons. They argue that issue-oriented hackathons create “props”—material tools for thinking through issues—and cohere “proto-publics” through material participation. These implicit outcomes appear almost in spite of their explicit format and goals. Hackathons therefore provide the ability to articulate issues of shared concern and col-lectively work towards alleviating social issues.
Pero estos valores implícitos requieren una alta inversión de dineros públicos, en el caso Colombiano, que podrían ser mejor usados en eventos con dichos valores explicitos, como el Data Week en particular y las Hackatones feministas, en general.
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democracy requires space for collective action. As technologies and their communities of practice changed, new spaces were needed that reached beyond established collectivities of group, community, and organization. Hackathons and hackerspaces are two such genres of collectivity that encourage participation and collaboration towards explicitly egalitarian goals
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Inconsistencies in ideological perspective are not uncommon in activities which attempt to balance individualism and communalism. These very frictions might belie possibilities for a greater imagination or shared experience. However, we argue that it is only in the disputes and frictions between pluralities of publics that democratization emerges. Dissensus across making and hacking communities allows people to experiment, eventu-ally finding communities and processes in which they feel comfortable and can identify. These very migrations, connected by fluid narratives and practices, drive the capacity of communities to develop and innovate.
Esta idea de fluidez y confrontación también la vivimos en HackBo, con miradas encontradas sobre la gestión del espacio y la falta de apoyo colectiva a determinadas iniciativas colectivas, lo cual permitió replantear nuevas dinámicas y establecer nuevos grupos.
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Many movements have become somewhat unsta-ble and decentralized. This instability allows for fluidity and moments where cultures become complicit in neoliberalism and globalization. This complicit exploitation is espe-cially visible when we consider the relationship between maker publics and technolo-gies. In buying, creating, and re-purposing technologies, hacker and maker groups engage capitalist enterprises that span the globe.
[...] Frequently, these groups rent space, pay for electricity, buy parts, and otherwise deeply participate in highly capitalized high technol-ogy industries. In other words, they sometimes espouse open resistance to the very capi-talism that their actions support. The conflicting narratives surrounding hacker/maker cultures identify elements of their ideology that are in tension and inconsistent.
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The public has become aware of the popularization of hacking and making mostly through moments of emergency and scandal. Forgetting serves a function for the public, allowing them to get on with their own interests. Concurrently, this public forgetting allows hackers to regain their spaces of creativity and action. Maker culture, too, forgets in order to find a perpetual sense of novelty in their very existence. Forgetting, an important social and cultural project, is also part of the democratic project. Democracies forget to put aside old tensions and re-form in order for the public to sup-port them.
De ahí que las hackatones sean aceptadas y a veces cooptadas, ahora como formas de innovación ciudadana. Esta percepción pública del hacker es reinventada para aceptar la acción/estética hacker de la hackatón.
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We have framed the theme of this issue as “The Democratization of Hacking and Making” to draw attention to the relationships between action, knowledge, and power. Particularly, hacking and making are about how practices of creation and transforma-tion generate knowledge and influence institutions. These acts concentrate and distrib-ute power through publics and counterpublics. Yet, the very mutability of hacker and maker relations makes them a challenge to identify and research. Hacking and making collectives have proven capable of constituting and reconstituting themselves in physi-cal and virtual spaces. They integrate across infrastructures, collaborative systems, socio-economic divides, and international boundaries.
Tags
- periferia
- reutilización
- hackatón feminista
- cooptación
- capitalismo
- open design
- reinvención
- DIY
- hackerspaces
- tesis: hackerspaces
- lecturas pendientes
- canibalismo
- innovación
- hackademia
- data week
- diversidad
- creolización
- maker
- genealogías
- participación
- fluidez
- identidad
- pluralismo
- democracia
- reinterpretación
- artesanía
- hackerspace feminista
- hacker
- barroquización
- civic hackers
- hackathon
- techno solutionism
- idea clave
- dualismos
- proto-públicos
- globalización
Annotators
URL
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www.dropbox.com www.dropbox.com
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.Theopendatadefinitionthatemergedfocusedoneightqualitiesofdata:completeness,pri-macy,timeliness,easeofphysicalandelectronicaccess,machinereadability,non-discrimination,useofcommonlyownedstandards,licensing,permanence,andusagecosts.
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Local file Local file
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civic hackers often act as the “slow food movement” of digital political action, embracing local sourcing, ethical consumption, and pleasure of community work. Civic hackers are hardly responding to a new narrative of technological change.
[...] Civic hackers thus speak against those who propose that the application of technology to politics produces a meta-category of activist.
Interesante la comparación con el slow food y lo que se puede hacer localmente.
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The more pressing threat is that a fear of solution-ism and neoliberal connotations of “open data” together might dissuade political par-ticipation. Systemic social disparities are often intractable. The route to alleviate them has never been detachment or abandonment. Looking forward, we should pay attention to how data activism and advocacy might result in meaningful systematic change beyond the usual claims of “transparency.” To fulfill the possibilities for meaningful social change hinted at in their history, civic hackers might have to coordinate around specific mechanisms for change and articulate a deeper sense of democracy than the language of technology provides.
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To put Giddens in conversation with Morozov, the threat of civic hackers is not that they naively employ “solution-ism.” Quite to the contrary, they debate ethics of technology design, seek collabora-tions with local organizations, and attempt to re-think how government services might be more sensitive to resident needs.
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Might “utopian realist” be applicable to the practices of civic hackers, intertwined with particular repertoires, technologies, and affective publics? McKenzie Wark (2014) sug-gests that the relationship between utopian and realist might be mutually constitutive rather than dialectical. He re-frames utopia as a realizable fragment or diagram that re-imagines relations. From this perspective, civic hacking gets traction not because they were ever intended to be the sole “solution” to a problem, but they are ways of acting and creating that are immediately apprehensible. Prototypes capture the imagination because they are shards of a possible future and can be created, modified, and argued about (Coleman, 2009).
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Civic hackers might be most appropriately described as utopian realists (Giddens, 1990: 154), a term Giddens employed to capture how assuaging negative consequences in a risk society required retaining Marx’s concern of connecting social change to insti-tutional possibilities while leaving behind his formulation of history as determining and reliance on the proletariat as change agents. He positioned utopian realists as sensitive to social change, capable of creating positive models of society, and connecting with life politics.
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civic hackers seek to ease societal suffering by bringing the hidden workings of abstract systems to light and improve their functioning. Part of the academic discomfort with recognizing civic hacking might stem from their activities cutting across political categories that have traditionally been passionately defended: unitary and adversary, citizen and consumer, horizontalist and institutionalized, and prefigurative and strategic.
La noción de realistas utópicos se vincula con la idea del "no todavía" como utopía expresada en la tesis.
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Contesting refers to the creation of crowdsourced data or prototypes for not yet existent uses for data. It is similar to modeling but with an oppositional rather than persuasive tone.
Deploying a data-driven vision—what is missing? What can’t we see in the data and why?—was a rallying cry for participation to bring about increased accountability.
[...] The juxtaposition of rating and lack of trust highlighted an alternate definition of “safety” that was markedly absent in the previous example of using govern-ment data on crime to make residents safe. One relied on a government-sponsored vision of “safety” while the other sought to foster increased accountability among law enforce-ment officers.
Se podría decir que, por su orígenes en la gobernatón, nuestro enfoque ha sido contestatario y también hemos compartido la idea de mirar qué es lo asuente para iniciar un diálogo sobre el por qué y esto, alineado con lo que ocurre en Ferguson, contrasta visiones gubernamentales y ciudadanas de lo que es la participación.
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That “hackers” can model beneficial process disrupts the often presumed subversive nature of hacking as much as it does easy assumptions about a Foucaultian notion of governmentality. Prototypes act as working evidence to lobby for changing government process, particularly those that improve digital infrastructure or direct communication with citizens. The capa-bility of code to act as a persuasive argument has long been noted, and modeling can produce charged debates about the very meaning of “civic.”
[...] On a level of hackathons, prototypes can be speculative (Lodato and DiSalvo, in press) rather than an “outcome,” revealing conflicting notions of “civic tech” (Shaw, 2014).
Nuestro enfoque ha estado centrado más en la modelación, que es requerida para la visualización, pero también en la idea de construir capacidad en la infraestructura y en la comunidad, lo cual va más allá del prototipo volátil, que se abandona después.
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The most popular apps to date have been highly instrumental ways to request services to fix city infrastructure, such as SeeClickFix, a platform that lets residents take pictures of issues that need repair, that are delivered to the appropriate city department as an actionable item. We might think of this as a base-level civic act similar to picking litter off the ground or paint-ing over graffiti. Other activities are thicker modes of participation by generating data or metadata. The primary effort of the 2014 CodeAcross effort was to map exist-ing sources of open data. The leader of the event, D.W. Ferrell, described “our role as citizens is to complement” efforts by the government and organizations such as CfA. Contributing to data repositories served purposes for multiple stakeholders:
Esta perspectiva instrumental (en el sentido latino, no inglés) se ve en el solucionismo de crear una app para salvar el mundo. Nuestra aproximación es más crear competencias críticas, mediadas por la programación y los datos para conversar con el gobierno.
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dis-putes over community as a particular category threatens to distract from a general focus on solidarity by activating “social bases of discursive publics that engage peo-ple across lines of basic difference in collective identities” (p. 374). A mutable, popu-larized hacker identity may have this potential, capable of processing and interpreting abstract systems of regulation.
processing and interpreting abstact systems of regulation.
La idea de usar la tecnología digital para aumentar nuestra capacidad de agencia en sistemas tecno-políticos complejos. Esto está en confluencia con los argumentos de Bret Victor, pero asume una perspectiva más política.
Acá la idea es que los hackers cívicos pueden ser puentes entre distintas comunidades. De alguna manera, esto está pasando con los Data Week y cómo articulan distintos públicos.
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He proposes that “monitorial citizens” act as a watchdog for specific issues, ready to take action. From this perspective, civic hack-ers could be considered a monitorial elite, watching data streams and processes of algorithmic regulation for injustices and engaging directly with local politics. “The local” operates as a point of collaboration (Dunbar-Hester, 2013) and point of entry for geeks to engage with neighborhood issues
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After all, “government transparency cannot be defined as only the information that governments deign to share
with the public.
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Civic hackers widely view machine-readable data as more useful because it drives a wider variety of potential uses, even as the shift from informational uses raises the bar to the literacies required to interpret it. In civic hackathons, knowledge of government operations was as useful as technical knowledge.
En el Data Week intentamos poner a dialogar estos alfabetismos críticos y crear capacidades en la base. En la tercera edición, por ejemplo, además de trabajar con el código, también modelábamos cómo el lenguaje de contratación estatal se colocaba dentro del entorno computacional.
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Data activism and advocacy ranges from civic engagement (Putnam, 2001) to more oppositional activism (Jordan, 2001). In this sense, it is a spe-cific association of technologically mediated participation with particular political goals (Lievrouw, 2011) resulting in a wide range of tactics. Although open government data is still evolving and is constrained by predictions for economic growth and self-regulation, I argue it enables civic hackers to participate in civic data politics. This is particularly important because data-driven environment is often distanced from pro-viding individuals a sense of agency to change their conditions (Couldry and Powell, 2014). Data activism and advocacy can take place through organizing on related top-ics, online through mediated data repositories such as Github, and in-person events such as hackathons.
[...]Contributing, modeling, and contesting stem from residents leveraging possibilities of open data and software production to attempt to alter process of governance.
En este amplio espectro, sería chévere ver maneras de gobernanza y cómo pasan a la esfera de lo público y se articulan con los bienes comunes y las entidades encargadas de preservarlos y extenderlos.
Esta transición aún está desarticulada y no la hemos visto. Las formas de gobernanza de HackBo, aún se encuentran distantes de las formas institucionales públicas, privadas y del tercer sector (ONG), si bien piezas de este rompecabezas se exploran en paralelo, su escalamiento a nivel ciudad aún está por verse.
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Obama appointed Aneesh Chopra as the first chief technology officer (CTO) of the United States and released executive orders defining open government in 2009 as entailing transparency (“conduct its work more openly and publish its information online”), participation (in decision-making), and collaboration (both internal and external). In 2013, he emphasized machine-readable data as a “default for govern-ment.”
- Transparencia
- Colaboración
- Participación Pero no reponsabilidad o trazabilidad.
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Open data, like open information before it, promised fixes for bureaucratic problems and leveling power asymmetries (Fenster, 2012). Municipal governments strapped for funds and in dire need of more efficient frameworks have, of course, welcomed the message that open government data can alleviate time-consuming FOIA requests, make services easier for residents to use, and drive hack-athons as a form of public outreach.
Interesante ver cómo CfA ha permitido el tránsito del sector ONG al público (ver párrafo anterior).
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Swartz objected because transparency for transparency’s sake shifted labor from government entities to eve-ryday citizens, and the connection of transparency to accountability had been irrevo-cably altered: “the pipeline of leak to investigation to revelation to report to reform has broken down.” In their opinion, flows of information became detached from their uses to gain leverage against corruption.
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Crowdsourcing is often used as a metaphor for open data initiatives with emergent and vaguely defined goals of collaboration rather than specific ones (Brabham, 2013). Open data came increasinly referred to an ecosystem of production rather than accountability. In The New Ambiguity of Open Government, Harlan Yu and David Robinson (2012) note that open data signals a movement toward “politically neutral public sector disclosures that are easy to reuse, even if they have nothing to do with public accountability” (p. 178).
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The emphasis on innovation is also vis-ible in Tim O’Reilly’s (2010) influential notion of “government as platform,” which positioned systems of governance as being similar to technical systems, subject to con-stant observation and tweaking to improve inefficiencies. He applied a biological model to government, where “information produced by and on behalf of citizens is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation” (O’Reilly, 2010: 14).
El concepto de transparencia y responsabilidad se contraponen a miradas más instrumentales de la apertura de datos.
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The computational shift of open government data refers to the move from governments fulfilling information requests to automatically releasing data to fulfill a range of more speculative uses. While promises about the Internet (Morozov, 2013b) encouraged this move, so too did notions of open government from previous decades. For example, David Osborne’s notion of “reinventing government” involved hallmarks familiar to open data initiatives: “catalytic” public–private relationships, connecting with communi-ties, and decentralized collaboration (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992)
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On the level of municipal governments in particular, the movement from information to data focused on new uses that emphasized collaboration and utility over accountability (Yu and Robinson, 2012), signaling what I term the computational shift of openness.
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The open data definition drafted at Sebastopol describes data’s completeness, primacy, timeliness, ease of physical and electronic access, machine readability, non-discrimination, use of commonly owned standards, licensing, permanence, and usage costs. This description made it clear what the proper-ties of data were, even as outcomes, fitting with an open-source model, were more
[...] ambitious
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His stance was not cyberlibertarian (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). As his successive refutation of transparency in this shift toward open data indicates (Lessig, 2009), he was quite concerned about efforts with software becoming distanced from tangible outcomes. Lessig might regarded as a hacker in the mold of Tim Jordan (2008), taking a progressive perspective on how we might regulate technologies—alongside laws, norms, and markets—that affect behavior.
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In the early 1990s, govern-ment transparency became something of a fad, spawning similar legislation overseas. Leading transparency activists started to view the potential of the Internet for increasing accessibility as a natural extension of this freedom of information movement. The efforts of Carl Malamud and the Sunlight Foundation applied right to information principles to the Internet, facilitating public access to vital information on law and government before individuals requested it. They took a more overtly ecological perspective on openness where information could be integrated into as-yet unforeseen processes
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First, FOIA provided accessible tools to put abstract ideas into practice. Everyday citizens started to attach various political notions to these activities. Second, information flowed into a journalistic ecosystem that was prepared to process and interpret it for everyday citizens. Information obtained through FOIA was being interpreted in stories that changed public opinion (Leff etal., 1986). Third, ability for individuals to request information led to alternate uses for activ-ists, public interest groups, and non-profit organizations.
Interesante ver cómo se conectan el periodismo y el activismo. Una necesidad de dicha conexión ya había sido establecida en la entrada sobre los Panamá Papers.
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FOIA was only strengthened after Nixon’s resignation in 1974 when it was amended over Ford’s veto. Even afterward, it didn’t match with the complete vision of ASNE. At times requests to comply stretched well beyond 10days and requests are still frequently denied. Despite claiming to embrace openness, Obama’s presidency has been notoriously secretive, with record numbers of whistle-blower cases and FOIA requests being denied or censored.
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Harold L. Cross to write The People’s Right to Know. Cross concluded that “there is no enforceable legal right in public or press to inspect any federal non-judicial record.” This text was published in 1953 and circulated mostly at the federal level, promoting the idea of freedom of infor-mation within and outside of journalist circles as being beneficial to the public good. Congressman John Moss’ commission then garnered the attention for President Johnson to sign FOIA into law on 4 July 1966.
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The replacement of FOIA requests by open data is still touted by data platforms such as Socrata as a savings of labor and money (Quigg, 2014). Participants in civic data hackathons conceptually connect open data with accountability, to “keep city hall honest” as one participant put it.
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Journalism historians Stoker and Rawlins (2005) extended Brandeis’ metaphor of light to describe this as a move from “searchlight to flashlight”—a narrower and less powerful beam that only illuminated what corpora-tions wanted. Yet they also critiqued progressive beliefs that publicity was synonymous with purification and backers such as Adams for placing “too much faith in information’s power to produce public action” (p. 186)
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In 1902’s What is Publicity? political professor Henry Adams described publicity as “an essential agency for the control of trusts” (p. 895).
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Open government data therefore provides a specific lineage to compare and contrast with the multitude of “open” concepts in circulation, including open standards (Russell, 2014), open source (Coleman, 2012a), and open systems (Kelty, 2008: Chapter 5). While the open government data movement in the United States is kin to these other lineages, it is conceptually and historically distinct. It also bears mention that this history is con-fined to the United States. Practices with openness have been differently interpreted by grassroots participants across the world, from Asia (Lindtner, 2012) to the global South (Chan, 2013).
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Yet, the natural equating of “openness” or government transparency (Hood and Heald, 2006) with accountability increasingly became dubious (Tkacz, 2012). The move to “open data” was often an imperative that didn’t make clear where the levers were for social change that benefited citizens (Lessig, 2009). Still, I argue that civic hackers are often uniquely positioned to act on issues of public concern; they are in touch with local communities, with technical skills and, in many cases, institutional and legal literacies. I conclude by connecting the open data movement with a specific set of political tactics—requesting, digesting, contributing, modeling, and contesting data.
Transparencia y reponsabilidad no son lo mismo y no hay vínculos entre lo uno y lo otro directos. Los ofrecimiento gubernamentales de datos son sobre "emprendimiento" y no sobre reponsabilidad y trazabilidad.
Sin embargo, los saberes locales que ponen datos como una forma de acción política ciudadana, que incluye la contestación han sido evidenciados en HackBo, con el Data Week y las Data Rodas.
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Coleman suggested scholars consider the diverse range of ways individuals organize, mobilize, and act politically. This move toward how political notions evolve within specific collectives can also be seen in Nathanael Bassett’s (2013) writing on activist hackathons and Molly Sauter’s (2014) work with online civil disobedience. Their mode of inquiry, and the one I follow here, focuses on a specific collective with a specific and traceable history with attendant tools, practices, and tactics.
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In each case data was framed as repressive of notions of civil society or enforcing an impoverished or constrictive notion of citizenship. The perspectives of Tufekci and Cheney-Lippold provide valuable insight into how algorithms and data are powerful shapers of modern life. Yet, they leave little room for a different form of algorithmic citizenship that might emerge where indi-viduals desire to reform technology and data-driven processes. As Couldry and Powell (2014) note, models of algorithmic power (Beer, 2009; Lash, 2007) tend to downplay questions of individual agency. They suggest a need to “highlight not just the risks of creating and sharing data, but the opportunities as well” (p. 5). We should be attentive to moments where meaningful change can occur, even if those changes are fraught with forces of neoliberalism and tinged with technocracy.
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Two overall framings of hackers’ engagement with the political have dominated discussion: “hacktivists” or activists who leverage instrumental uses of online technologies for direct political action such as protest and disruption (Jordan and Taylor, 2004), and geographically distributed communities of practice where principles of openness enable forms of political action (Coleman, 2004). Gabriella Coleman (2012a) argues that pragmatism enables action on issues related to informational freedoms and reflects liberal democratic tenets such as freedom of speech. According to Coleman (2004), explicit involvement in “politics” in a formalized sense is distasteful to free and open-source hackers, as it is viewed as “buggy, mediated, and tainted action clouded by ideology” (p. 513). Civic hacking represents a third mode of participation among a group that often explicitly engages with political causes through designing, critiquing, and manipulating software and data to improve community life and infrastructures of governance. Civic hackers therefore have distinct histories, con-tours, and conflicts from other genres of hackers, even as they share a certain family resemblance (Wittgenstein, 1953).
Interesante la idea de terceros modos. Desde acá se pueden conectar tanto HackBo con el Data Week y los movimientos de código abierto y software libre.
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Civic hacking can broadly be described as a form of alternative/activist media that “employ or modify the communication artifacts, practices, and social arrangements of new information and communication technologies to challenge or alter dominant, expected, or accepted ways of doing society, culture, and politics” (Lievrouw, 2011: 19). Ample research has considered how changes in technology and access have created “an environment for politics that is increasingly information-rich and communication-inten-sive” (Bimber, 2001). Earl and Kimport (2011) argue that such digital activism draws attention to modes of protest—“digital repertoires of contention” (p. 180)—more than formalized political movements
La idea de tener "repertorios de contención" es similar a la de exaptación en el diseño.
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Organizations such as Code for America (CfA) rallied support by positioning civic hacking as a mode of direct partici-pation in improving structures of governance. However, critics objected to the involve-ment of corporations in civic hacking as well as their dubious political alignment and non-grassroots origins. Critical historian Evgeny Morozov (2013a) suggested that “civic hacker” is an apolitical category imposed by ideologies of “scientism” emanating from Silicon Valley. Tom Slee (2012) similarly described the open data movement as co-opted and neoliberalist.
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Other definitions capture broader notions of civil society. A 2010 study backed by the Open Society Foundation described civic hackers as “deploying information technology tools to enrich civic life, or to solve particular problems of a civic nature, such as democratic engagement” (Hogge, 2010: 10).
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I conclude civic hackers are utopian realists involved in the crafting of algorithmic power and discussing ethics of technology design.
In the process, civic hackers transgress established boundaries of political participation.
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Successive waves of activists saw the Internet as a tool for transparency. The framing of openness shifted in meaning from information to data, weakening of mechanisms for accountability even as it opened up new forms of political participation. Drawing on a year of interviews and participant observation, I suggest civic data hacking can be framed as a form of data activism and advocacy: requesting, digesting, contributing to, modeling, and contesting data
Tags
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Annotators
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Local file Local file
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What might Raymond Williams make of our ordinary hacker? He might be relieved to see the continued importance of hands-on work and reciprocity among ordinary people in hackerspaces, even if he found them too close to a drinking-hole (they are far from a high society tea-house). For their part, members would find much in common with Williams’ progressive embrace of technology paired with disdain for formalized education.
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The durability of hackerspaces is curious, given their relative fragility. Hodder grappled with the idea that over time we become progressively more entangled. Hacker and maker spaces as a particular model have survived ideological inversions, international deployment, and alternate cultural interpretations. The heterogeny of hackerspaces, far from being a limitation, lends a mutability and easy embedding in various communities and social contexts. Entanglementalso suggests dependences outside of the space itself.
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Echoing an old observation in activism about the “tyranny of structurelessness” (Freeman, 1972), power became difficult to contest when you remove the mechanisms to contest action. New visitors who didn’t immediately resonate with the space were turned off from the cold vision of geeks silently co-working next to each other. Longstanding members became frustrated by frequent clashes between hotheaded personalities. Then there were issues about what went where. Who didn’t put the hand drill back in the bin? Technology was a source of drama, particularly when commitments were discussed on email lists or in passing and then forgotten. Who said they would get the laser cutter running? Although sufficiently meta and informal to be palatable to members, it was hardly a smooth way to run an organization.
Hemos tenido inconvenientes similares en HackBo, particularmente con los visitantes. Para ellos es difícil percibir el valor del espacio y pagar por algo incompleto, que no ofrece un servicio o productos específicos, más allá del espacio mismo y contar con un lugar donde trabajar en proyectos incompletos.
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Individual agency is the core of do-ocracy, fostered and filtered through projects, objects, and tools in the space itself.
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n large part the desire for autonomy alongside warm community relationships can be seen as an extension of what Fred Turner (2008) termed “new communalism.” New communalists emerged alongside the new left and believed in a kind of hive mind while rejecting formalized politics and institutions. Hackerspaces, as a kind of “third space” (Oldenburg, 1997), provided a site for these ideas to expand. Democracy was seen as cumbersome and slow. Do-ocracy provided speed and the freedom to act without consultation.
Para el caso de HackBo, parte de esto tiene que ver con la idea de plurarquía (Las Indias) que fue explorada antes de su constitución en comunidades en línea. La idea de actuar, a menos que alguien se oponga, no cuando todos estemos de acuerdo, también se traspasó al espacio físico y las consultas se referieren sólo a afectaciones durables de dicho espacio.
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Members strived to make the invisible, sinewy dependences in the space visible. Despite its utility, the set of target boards was eventually left behind a storage bin.
Los espacios físicos de HackBo no reflejan fuertemente lo que ocurre en ellos y salvo el espacio de La par y Ecomunidad, el resto no dan cuenta de las temáticas y qurehaceres allí, como ocurre con estos otros, a partir de los afiches de cine o de proyecto ecológicos.
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Projects, as an entanglement, are “open, partial and indeterminate” (Hodder, 2012, p. 159).They might be being showed off at the next open house, orentirely forgotten. Peter noted that his hard drive was filling up with “functionally dead” shelved projects that got boring or require expertise from outside the space. Yet, to Peter failure was an indication of project success. He believed, as scholars of innovation do, that embracing failure contributed to better ideas. Projects also carried an ethical charge. Michael, a quiet member and software professional, reflected at length on what he called the “philosophical” side of projects. He saw them an inroad to “participation in the fabrication process” that was empowering. In his words, projects were “manufacturing liberation.”
A pesar de los proyectos inacabados de HackBo, antes mencionados, Grafoscopio, el Data Week y las Data Rodas, tienen la intensión de permitir saltos desde la infraestructura y dar una noción de continuidad (ver gráfica de Markus). Se pueden mostrar en el siguiente evento, pero definitivamente no son para ser desechados. Manufacturar liberación es importante para tales proyectos, pero al confinar la apertura (preestableciendo tecnologías y temáticas) sobreviven a futuras iteraciones.
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Counter to a high-minded association of “liberal projects,” projects in hackerspaces resisted a final form. The action in hackerspace is more bricolage(Lévi Strauss, 1962, p. 18)than engineering. Projects in Geekspace arose spontaneously. Their inertia drew people to the space, bringing their tools and ideas that would then supplement the ideas of others. This churn is captured by how projects were seen as a success of the new space even though very few projects were actually finished.
Grafoscopio, el Data Week y las Data Rodas efectivamente atrajeron gente nueva al espacio, a pesar de su caracter inacabado y en continuo movimiento. También ha favorecido el diálogo de saberes y los aportes diversos, si bien hay un fuerte énfasis en el código y la escritura como manera de reificar dichos saberes.
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These more formalized gatherings were an attempt to get people working and collaborating in a space that had mainly turned into a spot for hanging out, drinking and foosball. The shift to the new space was seen as an opportunity to encourage members to use the space in a more productive way. The space needed members as much as members needed the tools. Members echoed a liberalist concern with increasing freedom of individuals to act, while retaining hobbyist cultures’ engagement with materialities. Often hackerspace members also described the need for a hackerspace as part of a shift in their city’s economy
Discusiones similares sobre proyectos compartidos se tuvieron en HackBo al comienzo, con ideas como lanzar un globo a la estratósfera, hacer crowdfunding de hardware y otras, que tenían que ver con "reuniones de segumiento". Algunos de ellos convocaron a miembros por poco tiempo y atrayeron nuevos miembros de manera permanente. Sin embargo, los tres proyectos que más se mantienen son: dos empresas/fundaciones y el de las Data Week y Data Rodas alrededor de Grafoscopio.
Los cambios de escala ciudad han sido conversados de manera informal, pero nunca han cristalizado y salvo acciones de activismo específica como la Gobernatón, no logran impactos de escala ciudad.
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projectors refer to “people who find a way out of their difficulties by coming up with novel ideas” (Novak, 2008, p. 3)
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Members became entangled with ordinary things and people, developing dependences they found alternately pleasurable and frustrating. Tools came to the space to suit individual needs, including shaping of recreational interaction. The more taut the dependences they develop, the more closely members aligned themselves with the space, and the better for the group
Esto lo he visto también en HackBo, particularmente en lo referido a la frustración referida a la habitual situación económica precaria. Lo placentero es más invisible, si bien tenemos un espacio permanente de reunión y acción, pero su disponibilidad es menos visible.
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Eventually she became more entangled with social relationships, which helped her work on technical projects that brought a comfort of similarity from previous work. Initially she didn’t identify with the term “hacker.” Only later did she came to understand herself as oriented around self-sufficiency and creative problem-solving. For her, the resonance with hacking as an identity came after participation and a deeper entanglement.
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The hands-on nature of the work to her resonated with her family history, love of tactile assembly, and disdain of consumerism. Vicki, like many members, came to view hackerspaces as sites that rejected consumerism, even as they paradoxically engaged in consumer culture by purchasing kits and materials.
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Hackerand maker spaces are meta-organizational assemblages. Entanglement – through the notion fo “do-ocracy” –stands in for typical organizational trappings of rules, hierarchies and roles. Hackerspaces morph and evolve to meet the desires of participants, draw on affordances of tools and materialities of the space itself.
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Hodder suggests that entanglements attain fittingness, or a degree of phenomenological and emotional appropriateness for particular groups. Fittingness is attained through abstraction, resonance, and affordances of particular things.
- abstraction
- resonance
- affordances
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Hodder pushes us to consider how dependence relationships emerge over time and result in people getting “trapped” in particular routines and ways of acting.
También puede ocurrir que ciertos entramados deconstruyan las formas de hacer y revelen las trampas de la rutina. Este es la aspiración de Grafoscopio, que intenta poner a circular un saber simbólico para extender y deconstruir su propia materialidad y revelar las trampas en sus elecciones tempranas. Sin embargo, algunas "trampas" más conceptuales (ejp OOP), sólo pueden ser deconstruidas cuando las más superficiales se han atravesado.
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to explore how webs of dependences balance participation and organization in the context of hackerspaces. Ian Hodder (2012) defined “entanglement” as dependences between humans and things, which are “stuck together” in a web. He defined things as entities that are “contained and identifiable” (p. 7) by a particular person or group, which gives them a presence and longevity. Dependences refer to enabling and constraining relationships that are created partly from how people recognize and perceive the material and immaterial qualities of things, and partly from the interlocking nature of things with other things.
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this case study hopefully reveals how hackerspaces might be considered as a particular genre of organization that defies traditional organizational practices.
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the ordinary hacker emerged from the entanglement ofhackerspaces. Writing on hacking has a rich subtext of intertwined human and non-human agencies. Tim Jordancompelling argued that the essence of hacking deeply involves reciprocalinteractions between individuals and things (Jordan, 2008). Hackers are often thought to be exceptional masters of technology. According this narrative, they leverage expertise with hands-on work to reveal what’s inside “black boxes.” This chapter explores an intriguing counter-argument: things make the hacker. This process deeply involves affect, a sense of community, and identification with a personal narrative.
Las cosas crean a los hackers. que a su vez crean/modifican cosas que crean/modifican a más hackers!
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hackerspace members’ relationship with materialities. In response, this chapter advances an idea about how interactions between individuals and things (Hodder, 2012) can shape collective action. Hackerspaces’ horizontalist mode of organizing is oriented around material forms of participation and communication.
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As critics have noted, hackerspaces have only a thin veneer of democracy, made thinner still by a reliance on meritocracy. Members described the dominant ofrm of regulation in the space as “do-ocracy,”
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Interactions through things, and perceptions about their potential, were ways to negotiate between seemingly conflicting imperatives of the individualism and communalism (A. L. Toombs, Bardzell, & Bardzell). Members would deliberately design activities that were incomplete to encourage a playful material improvisation. In these ways, the “material sensibilities” of members were particularly important. Similarly, reading a history of craft into software hacking, Lingel and Regan (2014) found that software hackers identified their work with craft as process, embodiment, and community. These sensitive readings of interactions with stuff seemed to more accurately capture the genre of hackerspaces, more so than action was guided by culture.
La idea de actividades incompletas y un jugueteo material están embebidas en el Data Week y Grafoscopio, así como la identificación de software como artesanía, lo cual dialoga con Aaron y Software craftmanship.
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This work perceptively suggested that people often don’t arrive at hackerspaces with an identity fully-formed. Tools and projects, as socio-material assemblages, shepherded new arrivals in and helped them understand
themeselves in relation to the group. “The process of becoming such an established maker seems to rely less on inherent abilities, skills, or intelligence per se, and more on adopting an outlook about one’s agency”
Esto ha pasado con el Data Week y Grafoscopio y está vinculado a comunidades de práctica y lo identitario.
Se puede empezar por acá la caracterización de lo hacker!
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economic vision didn’t seem to hold water, while a cultural perspective seemed insufficient to explain hacker and maker spaces as a particular genre of participatory organization. Recent ethnographic inquiry on hackerspaces grounded in social and material interactions provides a way forward. While hackerspaces may be inspired by online peer production, the transfer of this ethic to offline space is often imperfect due to the nature of physical things
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economic vision didn’t seem to hold water, while a cultural perspective seemed insufficient to explain hacker and maker spaces as a particular genre of participatory organization.
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Most members of western hackerspaces I encountered were fairly well-off and had day jobs. The last thing they wanted to do at the end of the day was come to a second workplace with deadlines and responsibilities
Este fue el caso de HackBo y la discusión que tuvimos cuando tomamos la sede actual en arriendo.
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Challenges have been mounted to those who view hackerspaces through simple economic and political lenses. One comes from viewing hackerspaces as a whole with a coherent ideology.
Aplazar la caracterización de la cultura hacker fue benéfico, pues este texto dialoga con otros que estaban puestos en el esqueleto.
Concentrarme en la dualidad dinácas y artefactos y su visualización es mejor por lo pronto.
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Maxigas (2012) used political ideologies to claim a differences between overtly politicized lineage of European hack labs and only partly political hackerspaces. By his reading, hackerspaces either came from a lineage of activism or had activist potential that had yet to be fully activated. Others have taken a middle-ground, using cultural approaches to hackerspaces
[...] that are more culturally and geographically situated.
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As I will discuss shortly, hackerspaces pull people in, and it is often only through shared engagement that they understand themselves as hackers and makers. Unpacking emic terms members use to describe this entanglement — project and do-ocracy — is the focus of this chapter.
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My more explicit framing of hackers as ordinary — approachable, common, and attainable — lets us consider how collectives and identities are forged among everyday people in unremarkable spaces and material contexts.
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That hackers are created, not born, is hardly a new claim. In Coding Freedom Gabriella Coleman described how an open-source hackers’ identity emerged from a fervent brew of digital connectivity, technological concepts, and shared work (Coleman, 2012). Political awareness was connected to liberalism through open-source and code over time. Put simply, being a hacker is a trajectory with multiple points of origin and destinations. Neither is suggesting that hackers are ordinary meant to discard a concern with exceptional hackers. We should be concerned with the Chelsea Mannings and Edward Snowdens of the world, and the causes they have championed.
Can the data activism be a connection between the concerns of the ordinary and the extraordinay hacker? The Data Week experience seems to support this claim, as a frequent activity in our common hackerspace, that invites a diverse group of people but put activist concerns as a explicit topic, instead of the neutralized "hello world" introduction to technology.
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Worrying that hacking might be “gentrified,” as Scott does, brings up a further irony. Hacking’s expansion beyond circles of tech-savvy, affluent white males demonstrates diversity, not homogeny. Seeking an essence of hacking misses this diversification. There are also risks in separating the exceptional and everyday hacker. A wall creates artificial distinctions between “haves” (intelligence, political awareness, skills) and “have nots.” The more productive perspective to gentrification might be hybrid forms of hacker pluralism.
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We may simply misunderstand what motivates them to do what they do as new groups adopt the identity. We presume they follow in a certain mold of hackers, or are Trojan horses for Silicon Valley.
¿Pueden ser estos troyanos del Valle del Silicio ser culturales, como en el caso descrito por los Radical Engineers de Götz?
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A similar wall now exists between the exceptional and ordinary hacker. Journalistic and academic writing defines hackers as resistant geeks capable of bringing about changes in governments and corporations. The hacker is the powerful underdog, plotted against by the powers that be. Their anti-hero status is even more salient when viewing the trope of the hacker in popular media. We cheer for the exceptional hacker, as well we should. But in many readings hacking’s subversive nature is assumed to be diluted by its mainstreaming. Disappointment is rampant when hackers are found not to be sufficiently resistant. Brett Scott echoes this perspective when he writes about how the “wild and anarchic” hacker ethos was gentrified by “yuppies” (2015). Evgeny Morozov (January 13, 2014) interpreted makers as no more than commodified hackers lacking a radical edge. Hackers simply lost their mojo. It is only with a shrug and a sigh they are revealed to be dupes of a fraudulent ideology. At most dystopian, David Golumbia’s cyberlibertarian thesis, coming from critical studies, proposes that hackers’ espouse a technological solutionism that is responsible for the collapse of the political left (Golumbia, 2013).
Hackers simply lost their mojo.
Ordinary vs Extraordinary hacker!
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Members often toutthat “anyone can be a hacker.”While this claim is dubious– participation is limited by technical inclinations, skills, and comfort hanging around rowdy spaces –hackerspaces certainly helpproduce an “ordinary hacker.” Theyare sites where we can observe hacking’s movement from subculture to mainstream, and from an edgy to popular identity.
Son los hackerspaces los espacios donde los hackers crean a los hackers, como un "bien recursivo" social. Habría que ver cómo es ese "hacker ordinario" y esos espacios de estéticas echizas y las preferencias de la gente afiliada por ellos y cómo esto configura o restringe formas de participación.
Está creando el Data Week otro tipo de hacker que no es el ordinario, al tener llamados y poblaciones más diversas.
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Hackerspaces’ messy, heterogeneous interactions between people and things reflect an odd bundle of concepts. They are competitive andneoliberalist. Simultaneously, they are injected with feelings of community and liberal freedoms.To understand the logic that undergirds this confluence of concepts and where it leadsI argue we must return to Williams’ notion of ordinary.
Esto se parece a la acepción de cultura diversa y definición abierta y multisituada de Coleman.
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Ordinariness– the everyday, unexceptional, and mundane – is a useful hermeneutic to view collective action and identity in hacker and maker spaces (or simply “hackerspaces”) (Schrock, 2014). This framing is a response toassumptions about hackers as exceptional. Two types of exceptionality have emerged. Critical scholars praiseactivism in hackerspaces(Maxigas, 2012)orotherwise bemoan the invisible hand of “cyberlibertarian” ideology(Golumbia, 2013). Then there are writers who look tohackerspaces as the key toeconomic profitability(Anderson, 2012). Thedefinitional disputebetween activism and corporatization bears more than a whiff of similarity toa previous such dispute; Pekka Himanen’s “hacker ethic”(Himanen, 2001) idealized hackers as labor for modernity, while McKenzie Warkpositioned hackers as a resistant class (Wark, 2004).
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Annotators
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limn.it limn.it
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if stopped in their development and reified too early, are potential sources of hacks in the derogatory sense. The latter is, according to their stories, exactly what happened when, 40 years ago, the prototypes left the labs too soon, and entered the world of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, producing the accumulation of bad decisions that led to a world where people stare at smartphones.
So, how, this time, in reimagining the future 40 years ahead, the gap between that future and our current present will be not filled by current dystopia?
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To prevent misunderstanding: neither I, nor the engineers I research, think that the actual future can be hacked together singlehandedly by a bunch of engineers in Palo Alto or Oakland. But I do think that radical engineers such as Engelbart’s, Kay’s, or maybe Victor’s research groups, in their specific, highly privileged positions, add something crucial to the complex assemblage of forces that move us in the direction of futures.
So, how they invite more people to explore, build and move us in the direction of those futures?
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If you are lucky, you have the conditions and abilities to work all this through in a long, non-linear process also known as bootstrapping, where you go through many iterations of hacking apart and hacking together, all the while creating fundamentally different ideas about what technologies should do, and could do, matched by a succession of devices and practices that help shape these ideas, and “demo” to yourself and others that some utopias might not be out of reach. This is what radical engineers do.
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The black boxes will most likely also contain ideas about the roles of the different types of engineers, programmers, designers, managers, and so on. If you take all this apart, you might look at the elements, throw away a lot of them, twist others, add stuff from elsewhere, and grow some on your own. You will look into different, often historical, technological paradigms, other ideas about what will become technologically possible (and when), different ideas of social order, the good life and problems that need addressing, other books to be read, alternative uses of the forces of media, and different ideas about the kind of people and the nature of their professions or non-professions, who should take charge of all this.
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That future is not given, but depends on the medium the group is imagining. It thus depends on the properties of the medium that the group is exploring, selecting, and practicing. On the one hand, technology enables a new medium, which is imagined as shaping the future, on the other hand the future is imagined as shaping the new medium, which then should drive technology.
This relationship between imagined futures and how they mold the medium, leave out the bridged with the present. If history with Kay's group repeats, what fills the gap between the prototypes of the present and the imagined future, is a form of dystopia.
Esta relación entre los futuros imaginados y cómo moldean el medio deja por fuera los puentes con el presente. Si la historia con el grupo de Kay se repite, lo que llena la brecha entre el presente de los prototipos y el futuro imaginado es una forma de distopia.
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Computing is to take the role of an infrastructure: much as books need light, but are not modeled after the light’s logic, the medium might draw, where necessary, on the computing possibilities provided by the OS in the background, but it should not be driven by them. Instead, the dynamic spatial medium should be driven by properties of the medium itself, and as such, it should drive technology.
Esta relación entre frente y fondo, entre infraestructura y medio es importante sin embargo. ¿Cómo se pasa de la una a la otra? Grafoscopio, es una infraestructura para un medio escritural, pero esa transcición entre fondo y frente ayuda a cambiar la forma en que se escribe.
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The lab as a whole—its walls, desks, whiteboards, roofs, machines, and the people inhabiting it—functions as a first demo for an alternative medium.
Esto es porque el laboratorio está habilitado por medios diversos embebidos en el espacio, lo cual nosotros aún no tenemos.
Desde el "Sur Global", el hackerspace también funciona como un prototipo en sí mismo, de espacios comunitarios y convivenciales alternativos, así como de dinámicas de bootstrapping.
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As such, bootstrapping can assume different scopes and directions. While Engelbart’s and English’s project might sound ambitious, they still believed, at least in the 1960s, that bootstrapping inside a research group would achieve the desired results. Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group extended this setting in the 1970s through pedagogy and McLuhanite media theory. By bringing children in, they aimed to achieve recursive effects beyond the lab, with the long-term goal of involving the whole world in a process akin to bootstrapping. Bret Victor and his research group’s form of bootstrapping resembles a multi-layered onion. The kind of people who should be part of it, and at what moments, can lead to intense internal discussion.
En mi caso, se trata de traer hacktivistas, periodistas, profesores y hacerlo desde espacios comunitarios y cívicos en lugar de, desde laboratorios.
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Simply building prototypes with prototypes would not be a smart recipe for radical engineering: once in use, prototypes tend to break; thus, a toolset of prototypes would not be a very useful toolset for developing further prototypes. Bootstrapping as a process can thus only work if we assume that it is a larger process in which “tools and techniques” are developing with social structures and local knowledge over longer periods of time. The processes are recursive, much like the “recursive publics” that Chris Kelty (2008:30) describes for the free software development community: in both cases developers create sociotechnical infrastructures with which they can communicate and cooperate, which then spread to other parts of life. Kelty shows how such recursive effects are not simply the magical result of self-enforcing positive feedback. Recursive processes are based on politics. And resources. And qualified personnel. And care. And steering. In short, they need to be continually produced.
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in a continuous process of “augmenting human intellect.” According to Engelbart, the latter can be achieved through the process of “bootstrapping.” This is a term that can mean many things in the Silicon Valley, from initiating systems to kicking off startups, but in the context of Engelbart’s work, bootstrapping is the “…interesting (recursive) assignment of developing tools and techniques to make it more effective at carrying out its assignment. Its tangible product is a developing augmentation system to provide increased capability for developing and studying augmentation systems” (Engelbart and English 2003:234). Just as Moore’s so-called law, this is a dream of exponential progress emerging out of nonlinear, self-enforcing feedback. How much more Californian can you be?
Bootstrapping es el proceso que hemos usado en HackBo con Grafoscopio: Un contexto provee la necesidad para desarrollar una herramienta en solitario, que modifica las prácticas en ese contexto, y aumentaría la capacidad colectiva para modificar dicha herramienta y otras relacionadas.
El ejercicio, como con la mayoría de proyectos de software libre, sigue ocurriendo en solitario, por ahora, pero hay más intereses colectivos aunándose.
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- Jun 2017
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meta.wikimedia.org meta.wikimedia.org
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☛ Risk: The Wikimedia global movement does not improve in cultural, geographic, or demographic diversity, leading to less relevant and lower-quality content for a global audience.
Nex time Wikimedia ask me for money only, without any attempt to make any real two way communication, I will try to volunteer time to help them with this Risk, particularly showing them diversity in concerns and technology.
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- May 2017
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www.fossil-scm.org www.fossil-scm.org
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Each repository database has a table holding the username, privileges, and login credentials for users authorized to interact with that particular database.
Puede esta caracterísitca de permisos y usuarios ser empleada para namespaces en el wiki
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onsmalltalk.com onsmalltalk.com
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Neither Apple nor Microsoft really captured the essence of what made the Smalltalk system powerful. They used it as a model to make computers more accessible, but they left out the aspect of letting people bend the system to their will, to customize it to be just what they want. Their systems were really an object-oriented facade over a traditional, non-object-oriented system. They lacked a consistent metaphore of everything being an object. The web has been even more stultifying in this regard (I mean the web interface), though Firefox has helped some, so I hear, with the concept of browser extensions.
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Elaborating on what I said earlier, RoR has an appeal to web developers because, given the skills they have, it provides an "instant gratification" that's very real for them, in the same way that Squeak does for graphics and text. In that way it's approachable. That approachability makes it "worth the trip" to learn about more of it.
¿Cual es la gratificación instantánea que ofrece Grafoscopio? Debería estar asociada a la escritura. Tomar notas rápidamente, versionarlas y exportarlas a la web. Por ejemplo, gracias a los shorcuts de Leo, es la herramienta que hasta ahora me ha provisto más gratificación respecto a escribir y organizar rápidamente notas, aunque en la interface visual, la más gratificante ha sido TeXmacs. Qué puede aprender Grafoscopio de estas formas de gratificación?
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insearchofsecrets.com insearchofsecrets.com
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Smalltalk is simply data manipulating programs that are themselves data–it’s the inverse of the Lisp philosophy, but the end result is the same.
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- Mar 2017
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www.mightymeta.co.uk www.mightymeta.co.uk
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- Estas ideas podrían explorarse para el proyecto de deconstruir las publicaciones, que hemos conversado con Adriana.
- El sistema podría ser Pharo con un rendering nativo usando Sparta y exportando a la web, sin las restricciones de la misma para la lectura en otro dispositivo y con las ventajas de Pharo: interactivo, integrado, coherente, etc. Habría que descargar un app que sea el entorno de lecto-escritura para este nuevo tipo de publicaciones.
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Furthermore, the results could focus on drawing the user into the virtual app space (immersive) or could use the portable nature of tablet to extend the experience into the physical space inhabited by the user (something I have called ’emersive’). Generative (emersive) Books that project coloured ambient light and/or audio into a darkened space Generative (immersive) Books that display abstracted video/audio from cameras/microphone, collaged or augmented with pre-designed content Books that contain location specific content from the internet combined with pre-authored/designed content
Estas líneas y las siguientes definen un conjunto interesante de posibilidades para las publicaciones digitales. ¿Cómo podemos hacerles Bootstrap desde lo que ya tenemos? (ejp: Grafoscopio y el Data Week).
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Jessica Helfand in her essay The Dematerialism of Screen Space (2001) critiques the phenomenon of design practise being led by developments in software engineering. She argues that designers should take the initiative: “design must submit to a series of commands and regulations as rigourous as those that once defined Swiss typography. Aesthetic innovation, if it indeed exists at all, occurs within ridiculously preordained parameters: a new plug-in, a modified code, the capacity to make picture and words ‘flash’ with a mouse in a non-sensical little dance. We are all little filmmakers, directing on a pathetically small screen – yet broadcasting to a potentially infinite audience. This in itself is conflicting (not to mention corrupting), but more importantly, what are we making? What are we inventing? What are we saying that has not been said before?” Helfand here is referring to the web, but her argument applies equally well to designing tablet publications. Designers of book and magazine apps should be asking themselves those last three questions. Since tablet publishing conventions are in the process of being formed (like child invention), we have a unique opportunity right now to influence their direction.
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Some key themes arise from the two NNG reports on iPad usability: App designers should ensure perceived affordances / discoverability There is a lack of consistency between apps, lots of ‘wacky’ interaction methods. Designers should draw upon existing conventions (either OS or web) or users won’t know what to do. These are practical interaction design observations, but from a particular perspective, that of perceptual psychology. These conclusions are arrived at through a linear, rather than lateral process. By giving weight to building upon existing convention, because they are familiar to the user, there is a danger that genuinely new ideas (and the kind of ambition called for by Victor Bret) within tablet design will be suppressed. Kay’s vision of the Dynabook came from lateral thinking, and thinking about how children learn. Shouldn’t the items that we design for this device be generated in the same way?
The idea of lateral thinking here is the key one. Can informatics be designed by nurturing lateral thinking? That seems related with the Jonas flopology
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The document argues that the use of illusionary surfaces and objects will lead to a more intuitive and pleasurable experience for the user. It also, yet again, looks to prior conventions for solutions rather than starting afresh.
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A first list of projects are available here but more can be found by interacting with mentors from the Pharo community. Join dedicated channels, #gsoc-students for general interactions with students on Pharo slack. In order to get an invitation for pharoproject.slack.com visit the here Discuss with mentors about the complexity and skills required for the different projects. Please help fix bugs, open relevant issues, suggest changes, additional features, help build a roadmap, and interact with mentors on mailing list and/or slack to get a better insight into projects. Better the contributions, Better are the chances of selection. Before applying: Knowledge about OOP Basic idea about Pharo & Smalltalk syntax and ongoing projects Past experience with Pharo & Smalltalk Interaction with organisation You can start with the Pharo MOOC: http://files.pharo.org/mooc/
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github.com github.com
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Seco, si bien es una implementación del 2004, tiene varias ideas que son similares a las de Grafoscopio de hoy, incluyendo la persistencia de una imagen (ellos usan HyperGraphDB, pero incluso mencionan Smalltalk), el hecho de ser una aplicación de escritorio y la idea de una computación p2p, o la opción de embeber el motor de rendering de un browser o el browser mismo en un ambiente más rico, incluso la inspiración de los notebooks de mathematica.
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- Jan 2017
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aeon.co aeon.co
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Each whale is a perceptive messenger of the state of its species, the state of the cetaceans, the state of the oceans as a whole, as close and determined observation by Mayo and many others has shown. Now each piece of baleen is making those animals into messengers from the past, as we are expanding our own range of perception to understand.
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but scientists have found that biochemical traces of some of its experiences persist in its body, even long after death. Just as geologists decode the history of the Earth from rocky strata, or dendrochronologists interpret past climactic conditions from tree rings, so biologists are now learning to read a whale’s life history as inscribed in its baleen. This anatomical oddity, part of a class of animal tissues that are emerging as tenacious biological recordkeepers, could reveal a monthly, even weekly, historical record of a whale’s life events stretching back as long as two decades. Just how much it will tell us remains to be seen.
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I’ve collected the following list of needs based on what I’ve noticed across projects. I’ve tried to roughly organize it from critical (bottom of Maslow’s pyramid) to legacy (higher on the pyramid).
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So as long as a project meets the first criteria (i.e. is popular), we ought to move beyond questioning whether it deserves to exist, and instead focus on what we can do to ensure it is healthy and supported.
This is kind of the classical popularity syndrome shown in US culture and exported everywhere. Unpopular stuff could be considered worthy, even if it serves small communities. One of the big advantages of Free Software is overcoming market barriers.
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From far away, successful Bazaars look like moneyless anarchic systems, but up close, the bulk of responsibility falls on a couple of people, who are usually being paid to do the work.
O es parte de su investigación doctoral, como con Grafoscopio. El desarrollo de modelos de sostenibilidad alrededor del mismo está aún por verse.
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Open source projects don’t start as communitiesMany would agree that open source projects don’t start out as Bazaars, but just in case, I’ll emphasize the point. Raymond himself wrote:It’s fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn’t try it. I didn’t either.Somebody has to be chiefly responsible for an open source project’s initial development. In Linux’s case, it was Linus. Somebody has to live and breathe the problem all day. Once that project is in a stable position, the community helps support it.
Esto ha pasado con Grafoscopio y en otras comundiades como Leo. El trabajo permanente del autor incial es requerido mientras la comunidad se consolida y puede que esto nunca pase y siga siendo, sobre todo un proyecto individual.
En el caso de Grafoscopio, el hecho de que el mismo lenguaje de narrativas de datos sea el de modificación del entorno (uniformidad y continuidad) ayudaría a crear una comunidad de co-creadores, sólo en caso de que los saberes en ella y las prácticas se consoliden, para lo cual se requieren tiempos y periodos más constantes e intensos de aprendizaje (algo en formato diplomado).
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medium.com medium.com
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The whole github ‘no licence’ thing when they started was unbelievably naive and has contributed to a world where there is piles of software that purports to be available but it actually ‘all rights reserved’ to the author, because that’s what international law defaults to. I’ve had to explain this numerous times to people (and companies that really should know better!) who’s code I want to use who have no understanding of why it matters. This is a sad, and rather unnecessary, state of affairs (somewhat improved since github stopped that idiotic practice, but there are still people below saying ‘but I put it online so it must be OK for you to use’).
GitHub "no license" means international default: "all rights reserved".
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Interesting to see what some people think ‘open source’ is these days. Back when the OSI was created with the movement that wanted to call it ‘open source’ instead of ‘free software’, people said ‘don’t do that — it devalues the fundamental point’. And here we are 20 years later, with OSS being hugely well-used, but many of the contributors insisting that licences are irrelevant or just having available source is all that’s needed, or it’s all about the community. Well I guess those of us who though that the ‘Open Source’ naming was a bad plan are proved right about the downside. But of course we’ll never know if it would have been so successful if it had remained as ‘Free Software’ (I don’t see why not, because it’s the process and efficiency that has made it popular).
This note is aligned with most of my comments on the open source depolitization of free software.
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The public sector should definitely prioritize Open Source, as a fair ground for companies and individuals to compete for their business. This should drive cost down (and therefore taxes), while making local developers happy.
Something that we, in the Global South have been doing since early 2000's, because of the understanding of the political nature of technology in general, and software in particular. Open Source depolitization brings this kind of pendulum movement back to the politics ans sustainabilitly.
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Open source is about emphasizing community over self. But today’s open source doesn’t really operate that way — at least not in the long tail of smaller, homegrown projects. Whether this is a symptom of “new developers” who need to be properly socialized, as some would suggest, or truly an evolution of open source culture, is still up for debate. I’ll leave that to you.
I would think that is a result of the depolitization of "Free Software" to become "Open Source", as pointed in other of my annotations on Nadia's texts. "My" was also an associative term in the old days of Free Software. The pendulum to repolitization is going back after the excessive neutralization of the Open Source terminology, to a sense of commons, shared stewarding and plural association, even if new developers think that is just about uploading code to GitHub.
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In open source, you can only have “my” in the associative sense. There is no possessive “my” in open source.”
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medium.com medium.com
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I don’t want the culture of open source to be organized around a legal definition. I want to zoom out and look at the broader ecosystem (of which the legal definition is one, essential node). A friendlier, more accessible term would make it easier to discuss topics like sustainability, collaboration, and people involved. Those aspects don’t need to be included in the official definition, but they still matter.I still like the term “public software” because it allows more people (including those new to, or unfamiliar with, open source, even if they use or benefit from it) to quickly understand what open source software is and how it should be protected. It doesn’t change the legal definition at all; if anything, it enforces it better, because we would want to define and protect public software exactly as we would any other public resource.
I remember the term "Public Software" used several years ago from the Lula's initiative to migrate Brasil public software infrastructure to Free Software.
Now there is, again, and effort to discuss the term, this time from a Anglo-centric perspective. Native English speaking people, particularly in US have the trouble with free as in freedom and as in "gratis", meanings and being immersed in a "market first" mentality, usually they think first in price and markets instead of rights.
Dmitry Kleiner has addressed the problem of software as a commons and its sustainability with an alternative license (p2p license), that is not as restrictive as the Fair Software one, but it repolitize the capitalist friendly Open Source gentrification of the original Free Software movement, involving also a core concern of sustainability.
Would be nice to see a dialogue between Nadia's and Dmitry's perspectives and questions about software as a commons.
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Early open source was about the idea that code is ownerless, enforceable by license, which theoretically leads to resilient software.Modern open source is about 1) building and 2) collaborating in public.The conversation has shifted from protecting the rights of a user to adopt the software as they wish (now the norm) to protecting the rights of the author or community that stewards the code (still TBD).
Early Free Software (predating Open Source) was about protecting community rights: in this case the ones of the hacker communities and authors sharing the software. The extreme depolitization of modern open source, particularly in USA and The Valley, brings hide politics and governance, as is documented in the bitcoin case, the hidden politics of the "apolitic" money. So, there is some kind of pendulum movement from plain Open Source to its re-politization showing again a concern for governance and sustainability of software as a commons.
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I’m interested in figuring out a term that feels inclusive, easy to grok, and free of political baggage.
¿depolitization as inclusion? Seems quite the opposite: market as exclusion, because Free Software (as in Freedom) has been gentrified by "Open Source" and become a commodity for startup building, instead of a conception of technology/knowledge as a right.
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In my last post, I said that we couldn’t charge for Python any more than we could charge for English. The difference between English and Python is that one requires dedicated maintenance and upkeep so that it doesn’t break. It has millions of dollars, and even lives, riding on it.
This recovers the perspective of technology as a cultural shared construct and the problem of its sustainability in difference to other shared humans constructs (artificial languages vs natural languages). A perspective that would be interesting is about the role of governments into sustaining common/public tecnological goods.
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By not charging for open source infrastructure, we protect the right of anybody with an Internet connection to teach themselves how to code and build. This is good for startups, and for you.
Kind of curious how this story doesn't account for the gentrification of the Free Software ethos into the Open Source and how story starts before (Kleiner and Maxigas have a more critical reading of this process, and yes, hacker beginnings are multi-situated, but gentrification also happened). Some discourses of LAMP started to diffuse in Global South, mainly because of the reading of knowledge/technology as a right, instead of knowledge/technology as a cheap merchandise. In the Global North emphasis is almost always flipped.
This (too) capitalism friendly perspective of USA writers is sometimes like seeing fishes who are unable to see the water.
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aeon.co aeon.co
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Those in positions of power have always craved a mechanism with which to expose the inner beings of citizens, to reveal ‘the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us’, as Foucault described it. There are, or seem to be, rather dangerous and wild expanses within each individual. If we are to be controlled, that must be made known, and tamed. There is no better way to divide and subdue a people, and seduce them into self-regulation, than to expose their perversions but promise absolution.
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People unburden themselves to their followers in the hope that their needs will be validated, their opinions affirmed, their quirks delightfully accepted. The result is a growing conformity within camps, as well as a narrowing of the shared space for understanding and dialogue between them.
Me recuerda la frase de Hawings sobre la ilusión del conocimiento como verdaredo enemigo del conocimiento (en lugar de la ignorancia) y la ilusión de participación, como verdadero enemigo de la participación genuina.
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Later, according to Foucault, the institution of confession shifted from religion to a host of secular traditions, such as confessional literature, medical examinations and psychoanalysis. But they all operated on the same principle, which was to patrol the boundary between what was normal and acceptable, and what was shameful and deviant. ‘The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us,’ Foucault wrote. ‘On the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, demands only to surface.’
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A man without shame, Plato says, is a slave to desire – for material goods, power, fame, respect. Such desire is tyrannical because, by its nature, it cannot be satisfied.
Un hombre sin pena, es esclavo de sus deseos
– Platon
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Having a smartphone and access to the internet does not automatically equip us with the tools necessary for effective and respectful collaboration, negotiation and speech, such as democracy requires.
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the act of watching is itself a devastating exercise of power. It has the capacity to influence behaviour and compel conformity and complicity, without our fully realising it.
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The American theorist Bernard Harcourt points out in Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (2015) that ‘surveillance state’ hardly fits the bill any more. He prefers to talk of a ‘tentacular oligarchy’, to include corporations now spying on us from numerous vantage points. To this we must add our audience followers, from colleagues and acquaintances to the public at large.
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In the presence of ever-watchful witnesses, he said, physical coercion is no longer necessary. People police themselves. They do not know what the observers are registering at any given moment, what they are looking for, exactly, or what the punishments are for disobedience. But the imagination keeps them pliant. In these circumstances, Foucault claimed, the architecture of surveillances become perniciously subtle and seamless, so ‘light’ as to be scarcely noticeable.
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That’s not to say that social media curbs our self-awareness, or that our internet selves aren’t highly artificial and curated. Nor that people living in oppressive regimes, or as minorities in societies where they know they will be targeted, aren’t justifiably anxious about what they say online. But the point remains that digital media have radically transformed our conceptions of intimacy and shame, and they’ve done so in ways that are unpredictable and paradoxical.
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aeon.co aeon.co
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In the future, scholars who lean on digital helpmates are likely to dominate the rest, enriching our literary culture and changing the kinds of questions that can be explored. Those who resist the temptation to unleash the capabilities of machines will have to content themselves with the pleasures afforded by smaller-scale, and fewer, discoveries. While critics and book reviewers may continue to be an essential part of public cultural life, literary theorists who do not embrace AI will be at risk of becoming an exotic species – like the librarians who once used index cards to search for information.
Este es el clásico presagio fatalista y clásico de los proponentes de la inteligencia artificial. En un esquema de inteligencia aumentada, la posibilidad de usar grandes corpus coexiste con la de criticar obras individuales.
En un sistema como Steam, por ejemplo, yo no quisiera sólo grandes corpus de críticas a video juegos, sino críticas individuales que me permitan ubicar juegos particulares con modos y sentimientos específicos. No sólo ver patrones en el pajar, sino encontrar la aguja, incluso si es pinchándonos con ella.
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Like many other AI practitioners, I’m a philosophical functionalist: I believe that a cognitive state, such as one derived from reading, should not be defined by what it is made of in terms of hardware or biology, but instead by how it functions, in relation to inputs, outputs and other cognitive states. (Opponents of functionalism include behaviourists – who insist that mental states are nothing other than dispositions to behave in certain ways – and mind-brain identity theorists – who argue that mental states are identical with particular neural states, and are tied to specific biological ‘hardware’.)
La idea de dependencia en un "hardware" biológico es la más cercana a mi perspectiva. La funcionalista se acerca al test de Turing y proponentes similares.
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AI criticism is also limited by the accuracy of human labellers, who must carry out a close reading of the ‘training’ texts before the AI can kick in. Experiments show that readers tend to take longer to process events that are distant in time or separated by a time shift (such as ‘a day later’).
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Even though AI annotation schemes are versatile and expressive, they’re not foolproof. Longer, book-length texts are prohibitively expensive to annotate, so the power of the algorithms is restricted by the quantity of data available for training them.
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In most cases, this analysis involves what’s known as ‘supervised’ machine learning, in which algorithms train themselves from collections of texts that a human has laboriously labelled.
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Consider the opening sentence of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967): ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ The complex way in which Márquez represents the passage of time is a staple of modern fiction. The time corresponding to ‘Many years later’ includes the fateful time of ‘facing’ the firing squad, which in turn is simultaneous with that final ‘remember’-ing, which is years after ‘that distant afternoon’. In a single sentence, Márquez paints a picture of events in the fleeting present, memories of the past and visions for the future.
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The so-called ‘cultural’ turn in literary studies since the 1970s, with its debt to postmodern understandings of the relationship between power and narrative, has pushed the field away from such systematic, semi-mechanistic ways of analysing texts. AI remains concerned with formal patterns, but can nonetheless illuminate key aspects of narrative, including time, space, characters and plot.
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The ‘structuralist’ strand of literary theory tends to deploy close – sometimes microscopic – readings of a text to see how it functions, almost like a closed system. This is broadly known as a ‘formal’ mode of literary interpretation, in contrast to more historical or contextual ways of reading.
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- Dec 2016
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Bazaars are rhetoric, not reality
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aeon.co aeon.co
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As in any contract, there’s a balance of power. If the architecture of today’s web is any indication, that balance is skewed toward the designers. Unless we want to keep pinging around like Skinner’s pigeons (or like poor Michael S), it’s worth paying a little more attention to those whom our attention pays.
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‘In the past, if you were an alcohol distiller, you could throw up your hands and say, look, I don’t know who’s an alcoholic,’ he said. ‘Today, Facebook knows how much you’re checking Facebook. Twitter knows how much you’re checking Twitter. Gaming companies know how much you’re using their free-to-play games. If these companies wanted to do something, they could.’
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sites such as Facebook and Twitter automatically and continuously refresh the page; it’s impossible to get to the bottom of the feed.
Well is not. A scrapping web technique used for the Data Selfies project goes to the end of the scrolling page for Twitter (after almost scrolling 3k tweets), which is useful for certain valid users of scrapping (like overwatch of political discourse on twitter).
So, can be infinite scrolling be useful, but not allowed by default on this social networks. Could we change the way information is visualized to get an overview of it instead of being focused on small details all the time in an infitite scroll tread mill.
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At first, if you want to make money, you sell whatever is in the room. Maybe it’s excellent journalism. Maybe it’s a game or a recipe. Maybe it’s an item that will get shipped to someone’s house. In this model, the internet offers a straightforward transactional experience in digital space.Over time, instead of making money from whatever is in each room, companies begin to monetise the doors. They equip them with sensors. Each time you go through one, someone gets paid. Immediately, some people will start adding a lot of new doors. Other people will build rooms that are largely empty, but that function as waystations, designed to get as many people as possible to enter and leave.
Interesante la comparación de puertas versus cuartos. Hoy vendemos los sensores en las puertas (links)
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But she argues that, when it comes to machine design, it’s not exactly about giving people what they do or do not want. What matters, Schüll says, is ‘the accentuating, accelerating and elaborating that happens between the wanting and the giving’.
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www.knightfoundation.org www.knightfoundation.org
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Fact-based journalism now competes with false information for our attention while our cities and citizens become both more connected by technology and more divided by ideology and income. The values reflected in lines of code, whether it be at the ATM, when we search on internet or drive a car, are already affecting what we think, what we do and what information we share with those around us.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Video games need to discover what’s special and different about their own medium to break out of their cultural ghetto.
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gemstonesoup.wordpress.com gemstonesoup.wordpress.com
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Smalltalk doesn’t have to be pragmatic, because it’s better than its imitators and the things that make it different are also the things that give it an advantage.
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blog.blainebuxton.com blog.blainebuxton.com
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Self contained. All of the source code is accessible inside the image. One can change any of it at any time. Every tool is written in Smalltalk. If one doesn't like how something works, one can change it. If one wants to add a feature, one is empowered to. Since everything is open, one can even change how the language works. It's programming without constraints. The original refactoring tools were written in Smalltalk.
Yo mismo disfruté estas características y puedo dar fe de su potencia comparada con el paradigma Unix de una herramienta para cada cosa, hecha desde un paradigma totalmente distinto y con el código fuente bien "lejano" en algún repositorio remoto.
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Members can be added to the TC at any time. Any committer can nominate another committer to the TC and the TC uses its standard consensus seeking process to evaluate whether or not to add this new member. Members who do not participate consistently at the level of a majority of the other members are expected to resign.The TC just uses the same consensus seeking process for adding new members as it uses for everything else.It’s a good idea to encourage committers to nominate people to the TC and not just wait around for TC members to notice the impact some people are having. Listening to the broader committers about who they see as having a big impact keeps the TC’s perspective inline with the rest of the project.As a project grows it’s important to add people from a variety of skill sets. If people are doing a lot of docs work, or test work, treat the investment they are making as equally valuable as the hard technical stuff.
Está interesante esta idea de presión desde abajo (bottom-up), en lugar del crecimiento desde el centro, que limita las perspectivas y diversidad de los participantes futuros a aquellos que son aprobados por quienes ya están en en centro/núcleo. Es diferente a lo que tenemos en HackBo, por ejemplo, aunque es de anotar que las dinámicas respecto a comunidades en espacios analógicos y comunidades pequeñas es distinta a la de los espacios virtuales y comunidades grandes
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Avoid creating big decision hierarchies. Instead, invest in a broad, growing and empowered contributorship that can make progress without intervention. We need to view a constant need for intervention by a few people to make any and every tough decision as the biggest obstacle to healthy Open Source.
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In pure consensus everyone essentially has a veto. So, if I don’t want something to happen I’m in a strong position of power over everyone that wants something to happen. They have to convince me and I don’t have to convince anyone else of anything.To avoid this we use a system called “consensus seeking” which has a long history outside of open source. It’s quite simple, just attempt to reach a consensus, if a consensus can’t be reached then call for a majority wins vote.Just the fact that a vote is a possibility means that people can’t be obstructionists, whether someone favor a change or not, they have to convince their peers and if they aren’t willing to put in the work to convince their peers then they probably don’t involve themselves in that decision at all.
Esto sería clave para iniciativas como las que se pactan en las JSL, por ejemplo respecto al nombre del colectivo empresarial. No pasa mucho en comunidades pequeñas, como las de Grafoscopio, actualmente.
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Not every committer has the rights to release or make high level decisions, so we can be much more liberal about giving out commit rights. That increases the committer base for code review and bug triage. As a wider range of expertise in the committer pool smaller changes are reviewed and adjusted without the intervention of the more technical contributors, who can spend their time on reviews only they can do.
Esto es clave. Si se consideran sistemas de integración continua asociados a los distintos repositorios (de código y documentación) con permisos en ellos, se pueden corregir los errores que se presenten, sin restringir grandemente la posibilidad de colaborar.
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A key part of the liberal contribution policies we’ve been building is an inversion of the typical code review process. Rather than the default mode for a change to be rejected until enough people sign off, we make the default for every change to land. This puts the onus on reviewers to note exactly what adjustments need to be made in order for it to land.
En el caso de Grafoscopio, se tiene una política similar en la que cada contribución es bienvenida, pero se coloca en lugares distintos dependiendo del nivel de experticia: etherpads, repositorios de documentación (del Data Week o de Grafoscopio), repositorios de código para proyectos específicos (como los Data Selfies, donde sobre todo hay archivos html y css imágenes png o javascript) y los repositorios de código de SmalltalkHub (para el paquete DataViz o para Grafoscopio).
Con una experiencia de aprendizaje más larga, como la del diplomado, se podrían conectar estas diferentes formas de experticia (un pad que se vuelva un documento interactivo, como hicimos en el Data Week 7, por ejemplo). Dichas transiciones estuvieron mediadas por la maduración de la infraestructura para hacerlas posibles y por los conocimientos con los que contaba el público asistente y sus intereres.
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Sure, we get bad bugs, but we have a ton of contributors who can immediately work with people who log them to educate them on better practices and treat it as an opportunity to educate. This is why we have documentation on writing good bugs, in order to educate contributors, not as a barrier to entry.Creating barriers to entry just reduces the number of people there’s a chance to identify, educate and potentially grow into greater contributors.
La frase final es clave:
Creating barriers to entry just reduces the number of people there’s a chance to identify, educate and potentially grow into greater contributors.
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We know what happens to unhealthy projects over a long enough time period, more maintainers leave, contributions eventually fall, and if we’re lucky users leave it. When we aren’t so lucky adoption continues and years later we’re plagued with security and stability issues in widely adopt software that can’t be effectively maintained.The number of users a project has is a poor indicator of the health of the project, often it is the most used software that suffers the biggest contribution crisis.
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This is what a healthy project should look like. As the demands on the project from increased users rise, so do the contributors, and as contributors increase more are converted into committers. As the committer base grows, more of them rise to the level of expertise where they should be involved in higher level decision making.If these groups don’t grow in proportion to each other they can’t carry the load imposed on them by outward growth. A project’s ability to convert people from each of these groups is the only way it can stay healthy if its user base is growing.
El tránsito de usuarios a hacedores requiere espacios de formación más prolongados. Incluso en las varias iteraciones de los data weeks y a pesar de los saltos que permitía la infraestructura dicho tránsito no se dió pues el evento de la semana se terminaba. Por ello se hacen necesarios espacios como el diplomado que he estado planteando a partir de la experiencia de los últimos Data Weeks.
La idea de tener más círculos concéntricos y pasar de los unos a los otros es clave en el desarrollo de dichas comunidades saludables, que no se ven sobrecargadas por el aumento en los usuarios.
Grafoscopio no sufre del problema de muchos usuarios activos (incluso yo, como su autor y contribuyente más activo, lo uso de maneras esporádicas), pero con el aumento en la frecuencia y sobre todo la duración de los talleres (pasando de data weeks de 36 horas a diplomados de 90 a 120 horas) la maduración de la infraestructura podría traer un incremento grande de usuarios.
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Vocabulary* A Contributor is any individual creating or commenting on an issue or pull request. * A Committer is a subset of contributors who have been given write access to the repository. * A TC (Technical Committee) is a group of committers representing the required technical expertise to resolve rare disputes.
Estas definiciones más granulares ayudan a las personas a sentirse parte de una comunidad. Otros roles podrían hacer parte agruparse en estas definiciones, por ejemplo, un documentador es alguien que tiene acceso de escritura a un repositorio de documentación (por tanto un commiter) y dichos accesos pueden ser otorgados a partir de la calidad con la cual se participa en los etherpads de los talleres como el Data Week, de modo que puedan crecer de maneras muy orgánicas. Para ello, infraestructuras mejoradas, que conecten los pads, los repos e incluso permitan la escritura colaborativa de libretas, han sido pensadas hace rato, pero requieren del tiempo para ser implementadas.
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medium.com medium.com
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“Funding infrastructure” means more than funding maintainers. This is partially why I think crowdfunding platforms and donation campaigns, while helpful, can only go so far.Instead, we need to take a holistic approach to sustainability: fixing systems, not just throwing money at the same old problems and forcing developers to figure it all out themselves.
Las conexiones entre campañas de microfinanciación y las diversas labores comunitarias son claves. Hasta ahora la mayoría de sitios, como bounty source, están centrados sólo en el desarrollo de código, pero la documentación es clave. Nuestra aproximación para el caso de Grafoscopio, es financiar tanto el código como los talleres, donde lo enseñamos y para los cuales desarrollamos documentación interactiva, de este modo lidiamos con la tensión entre el código y las otras múltiples cosas conectadas al mismo, que pueden construir una comunidad fuerte y diversa.
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Should open source projects look like companies? Of course not. For one thing, a company is a business, and an open source project is a community, with very different goals and needs.
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There is little support for functions that directly help code, like documentation or test automation. There is even less support for functions that indirectly help code, like community or evangelism.
Paradógicamente, eso último es lo que más hemos hecho en comunidades de software libre ubicadas lugares del Sur Global, como Colombia, con proyectos como El Directorio, (wiki de documentación), eventos como el FLISoL o SLUD (difusión y evangelismo) , pero no acaban de ser vistos con buenos ojos. Siempre termina siendo más importante el código. El "Talk is cheap, show me the code" fue tomado muy literalmente, cuando lo que implica es compromiso (de diversas maneras) y no sólo código.
Un cambio se empieza a ver: el código ya no es tan lejano, sin volverse central (afortunadamente), algunos proyectos de difusión y documentación están siendo retomados e incluso valdría la pena pensar en qué sería necesario para revivir proyectos de documentación como El Directorio, y crear variaciones y nuevas reinterpretaciones del mismo en los tiempos actuales.
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In 2012, AKQA’s chief creative officer Rei Inamoto debuted a new wisdom at SXSW: “To run an efficient team, you only need three people: a Hipster, a Hacker, and a Hustler.” The startup trifecta was born.
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When we think of open source’s influence on software, we tend to think about the legal implications. Open source made it acceptable to share, use and modify software freely.But open source changed how software companies build proprietary products, too. That open source principles are being used to develop closed source software speaks volumes about its cultural legacy.
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Last year, O’Reilly Media went so far as to coin the term InnerSource to characterize this phenomenon:Inspired by the spread of open source software throughout the areas of operating systems, cloud computing, JavaScript frameworks, and elsewhere, a number of companies are mimicking the practices of the powerful open source movement to create an internal company collaboration under the rubric InnerSource.
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Git, the version control system released in 2005, made those processes even easier.
Among many others DVCS / SCM (for Distributed Version Control Systems and Software Configuration Management). The coupling between Linux Kernel and Git make the last gain a lot of visibility, becoming the de-facto standard and choice, despite of its fitness for any community or workflow.
In my case, after testing several DVCS / SCM, arch, git, bazaar, mercurial and fossil, I choose the last one, because I think it fits better small communities and individual projects, without the gratuitous complexity of Git and similar ones.
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The rise of agile coincided with the rise of startups using open source projects. At first, startups just incorporated those projects into their own software. But like any cultural exchange, open source began to affect how startups built products, too.
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- Nov 2016
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Local file Local file
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Corporate practices can be directly hostile to individuals with exceptional skills and initiative in technical matters. I consider such management of technical people cruel and wasteful. Kierkegaard was a strong proponent for the individual against “the crowd” and has some serious discussion of the importance of aesthetics and ethical behavior. I couldn’t point to a specific language feature and say, “See, there’s the influence of the nineteenth-century philosopher,” but he is one of the roots of my reluctance to eliminate “expert level” features, to abolish “misuses,” and to limit features to support only uses that I know to be useful. I’m not particularly fond of Kierkegaard’s religious philosophy, though.
Interesante ver cómo el lenguaje de programación es diseñado como una prevención contra la cultura corporativa.
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TR: How do you account for the fact that C++ is both widely criticized and resented by many programmers but at the same time very broadly used? Why is it so successful?BS: The glib answer is, There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses.There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful–many more. The purpose of a programming language is to help build good systems, where “good” can be defined in many ways. My brief definition is, correct, maintainable, and adequately fast. Aesthetics matter, but first and foremost a language must be useful; it must allow real-world programmers to express real-world ideas succinctly and affordably.
La idea, de Stroupstrup en C++, de un lenguaje para escribir sistemas (¿de computo?) constrasta con la de uno que sirva a la expresión creativa del espíritu humano, de Ingalls en Smalltalk. El programador profesional como destinatario del lenguaje en C++ también contrasta con los niños en Smalltalk.
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TR: In retrospect, in designing C++, wasn’t your decision to trade off programmer efficiency, security, and software reliability for run time performance a fundamental mistake?BS: Well, I don’t think I made such a trade-off. I want elegant and efficient code. Sometimes I get it. These dichotomies (between efficiency versus correctness, efficiency versus programmer time, efficiency versus high-level, et cetera.) are bogus.What I did do was to design C++ as first of all a systems programming language: I wanted to be able to write device drivers, embedded systems, and other code that needed to use hardware directly. Next, I wanted C++ to be a good language for designing tools. That required flexibility and performance, but also the ability to express elegant interfaces.
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And without real changes in user behavior, software suppliers are unlikely to change.
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People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first. That’s because people want fancy new gadgets now.
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Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it: a system just “sort of evolved” into something minimally acceptable. Personally, I prefer to know when a system will work, and why it will.
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You couldn’t charge people to use Python, for example, any more than you could charge someone to speak English.
This reminds me of Elionnor Ostrom and Antonio Lafuente examples of language as a common.
Do we have a sustainability model for the commons?
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What did it mean for a project not to be venture backable? Likely, it met one of the following criteria:There was no business model (ex. no customers to charge, or no advertising model)The project was not structured as a C corpThe project could not conceivably return an investment at venture scale
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YCombinator funds nonprofits and now, research. OATV launched indie.vc last year. Peter Thiel created Breakout Labs. Elon Musk created Open AI.
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ci.inria.fr ci.inria.frTeapot2
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serveStatic: '/static' from: '/var/www/htdocs'
How this message can be send using TeaLight
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GET: '/divide/<a>/<b>' -> [ :req | (req at: #a) / (req at: #b)];
This should be:
GET: '/dividir/<a>/<b>' -> [ :req | (req at: #a) asNumber / (req at: #b) asNumber]
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- Oct 2016
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www.jacobinmag.com www.jacobinmag.com
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My hope is that the book I’ve written gives people the courage to realize that this isn’t really about math at all, it’s about power.
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n a study cited by the Swiss group last month, researchers found Twitter data alone a more reliable predictor of heart disease than all standard health and socioeconomic measures combined.
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dl.dropboxusercontent.com dl.dropboxusercontent.com
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Empirically, I trace how civic hackathons in Los Angeles evolved in 2013 - 2015 from engineering exercises to spectacles where civic futures of technology were performed through communication, before turning to particular lessons drawn from civic hackathons. Civic hackathons’ emergence from technical cultures means they often produce conservative civic visions. I pay close attention to moments of failure – moments when possible technologies reproduced existing cultural divisions. Still, I resist describing them as completely co-opted and useless, as I found surprising moments of civic learning and exploration.
Interesante ver que no está totalmente cooptada.
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