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.
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