digitalcommons

Incommunicado reader

In June the Institute of Network Cultures hosted a conference. I wrote a report following the meeting. They have a reader (print/CD) which is available online.  You may also request a free hard copy though the ones I received yesterday had no CD-ROM included. There is a wide variety of topics covered: info development, open source software in Brazil, urban issues in Bangalore, piracy, international remittances. The download is 17.5 Mb as a single file.  Well worth the time, but the printed version is easier to read.

Here's  The Table of Contents

Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle,  Incommunicado Glossary
• Jan Nederveen Pieterse,  Digital Capitalism and Development:  The Unbearable Lightness of ICT4D
•  Bernardo Sorj and  Luís Eduardo Guedes,  Digital Divide: Conceptual Problems,  Empirical Evidence and Policy Making Issues
•  Lisa McLaughlin,  Cisco Systems, the UN, and the  Corporatization of Development
•   Shuddha Sengupta,  Knowing in your Bones  that You’re Being Watched (Transcript)
•   Roy Pullens,  Migration Management: Export of the IOM Model
•  Alexandre Freire, Ariel G. Foina,  and Felipe Fonseca, Brazil and the FLOSS process
•   Kim van Haaster, The University of the Future:  Software Development in Revolutionary Cuba
•  GovCom.org,  Digital Cartogram
•  Scott S. Robinson,  Diaspora Incommunicados - IT,  Remittances and Latin American Elites
•  Glen Tarman,  The Biggest Interactive Event In History?
•  Ravi Sundaram,  Post-Development and Technological Dreams
•  Nnenna Nwakanma,  The mirage of South–South cooperation in  ICT4D: Reflections from African Civil Society
•  Loe Schout,  Why Civil Society is not Embracing FOSS
•  Heimo Claassen,  Formatting the Net: Trusted Computing  and Digital Rights Management to Accelerate  the Proprietary Seizure
•  Steve Cisler,  What’s the Matter with ICTs?
•  Solomon Benjamin,  E-Politics of Urban Land
•  Maja van der Velden,  Cognitive justice:  Cultivating the diversity of knowledge
•  Jo van der Spek and Cecile Landman,  Info-Solidarity with Iraq

World Summit & Human Rights

Tunisia is hosting the followup conference to the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society. This 2005 event started today, and already the country's security forces have roughed up journalists and foreign attendees.  A wonderful start for a problematic meeting!

It is described in the web log entry for the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 

John Seely Brown & Michael Yates

Concluding Session--Where do we go from here?
Michael Yates: It's not about a digital divide or knowledge per se.  In this emerging world how do we make progress on pressing scientific issues. How are the socio-economic issues playing out? 

How can we put together new end-to-end systems and look at new ways of delivering information to new places. Accenture is proud to be backing the Open Knowledge Network in India where the fishing villages had access to Navy wave information. Software has to be optimized for people who can only be online a few minutes a day, for people whose culture is oral.  New IP rights that help local knowledge to be shared but not exploited. There needs to be a business model that is sustainable. OKN is running in several African and Asian countries.

John Seely Brown:
Information comes when we listen with humility. Common ground is not achieved easily. Knowledge ecologies will work but only if they leak. He stressed the importance of bricolage: A bricoleur is one who improvises and and uses any means or materials which happen to be lying around in order to tackle a task: '"The bricoleur is adept at executing a great number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools. The open source is strongly tied to open knowledge.

Last week the people accessing wikipedia exceeded those accessing the New York Times.

"Innovation depends on forgetting as much as remembering."

Yates thought the DOT Force was a good collaboration, though it was rocky at first because of the varying agendas of the participants. However, the cost of the meetings and the resulting paper given in Geneva was a mismatch of input and outcome.

Bowker: Claude Levi-Strauss used the term bricolage to denote the way the 'savage mind' thought and made use of knowledge. Is all knowledge bricolage?  What role can we play at the Center to create a knowledge commons?

Brown: a lot of meaning resides in stories and look at the way they travel and embed themselves. Students want to go into social entrepreneurs and have a foot in business and the other in a social venture. the Center could help negotiate this territory.

Incommunicado conference

Incommunicado is a distributed working group of people interested in critiqueing ICT in development and discussing issues related to the World Summit on the Information Society meeting(s) being held and culminating in Tunis, November 2005. This June there will be a very interesting meeting of incommunicado in Amsterdam. I have been involved from afar but will not attend. The draft program is here.

ICANN, ITU, WSIS, and Internet Governance

Geoff Huston is one of the clearest writers on technical aspects of the Internet. This opinion piece will give you a very good introduction to the historical role and current controversies regarding the way the Internet is run and the problem facing ICANN. It was published in the March 2005 Internet Protocol Journal.

ICT access and (de)regulation

Several years ago USAID formed an alliance of nonprofits and contractors working on a variety of projects in the area of governance, education, and public access in developing countries. The dot-com alliance has issued a series of short papers on various ICT-related topics.  Several discuss regulations and wireless networks. "Free market competiton and licensing: methods to improve ICT access" provides an introduction to licensing, why it's important and some issues to consider. "Spectrum management: the key to wireless technology" is very basic and while it devotes some space to what are euphemistically called challenges it does not delve into the battles or serious problems like "amp wars" that are taking place in many areas where wireless has been deployed. Excess power can seriously impede others from providing a service or connecting to a wireless network.  This pamphet does include more extensive web-based documents on wireless.  Disclaimer: I'm on the technical advisory board for this alliance.

Saskia Sassen

Dr. Sassen is one of the speakers on the first panel. "Developing a knowledge commons" at the forthcoming conference. In a 2004 interview with Bad Subjects she makes a statement which should be considered during each part of the conference:

"We have technology to travel throughout the world but we're unable to provide water, food, vaccines, or jobs for more than three billion people. It's not a consequence of some scientific inability, but of economic and political projects that don't pursue common well-being."

Experts and knowledge sharing

Multitudes is a political journal, web site, and mailing list that grew out of writings and discussions of the works of Negri and Hardt (Empire). The site is in French, and it includes hundreds of authors. This particular article ("Le défi de la production d'intelligence collective") is a short interview with Andrée Bergeron who discusses the question of expertise in a knowledge society.