Post-users

I just returned from 3LK Paris where I presented an academic paper drawing on Smart Internet CRC research on user-led innovation, Web 2.0 and participatory media from an upcoming report. My paper titled “Citizen Innovation: using participatory research for knowledge discovery”, discussed how user-led innovation provides new concepts and methods capable of extending the field of knowledge about participatory research. It explored how practice-based methods such as Participatory Action Research and Community-based Research have facilitated the rise of Citizen Innovation which provides opportunities for citizen empowerment; supports the co-creation of new public-sector services and scientific knowledge discovery; and utilises knowledge that is embodied, experiential and collaboratively produced. The presentation also canvassed pathways for public-sector organisations to leverage the participation of citizens and amateur scientists in the interest of co-creating new forms of knowledge.

I got to meet some wonderful people including Eric Seulliet, a Paris-based foresight consultant and founder of La Fabrique du Futur (The Factory of the Future) and we discussed his interesting new book project on user-led innovation. The Inauguration Plenary launched the conference with a fascinating discussion on the co-production of knowledge partnerships between researchers and civil society for a more just world. The philosopher Isabelle Stengers had to withdraw at the last minute due to an injury and was replaced by the outspoken American scientist Ignacio Chapela whose thought-provoking presentation proved to be a surprising highlight of the three-day event. Chapela has raised the ire of the University of California Berkely, at which he is tenured, for openly criticising UC’s signing of a $500-million research contract with the petroleum company BP. Chapela refers to these circumstances as “the loss of space to make science” and voiced concern that BP and other corporate sponsors are engaged in “the wholesale buying of the entire University of California Berkeley”.

Hats off to Claudia Neubauer of the Fondation Sciences Citoyennes, for organising 3LK and coordinating the 300 attendees and over 100 oral presentations. I was not familiar with the Living Knowledge Network before the conference and was impressed to learn about the Science Shops Network that was launched in 1999. According to the European Commission, Science Shops are grass-roots research organisations that provide an interface between scientific researchers and citizens of the local communities they serve. Science Shops can be found in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom. Canada, Israel and the USA have developed similar initiatives outside the European community. Science Shops help non-profit clients like NGOs solve scientific problems and carry out research that measures the effects of pollution, as well as investigating social and environmental problems.

I see these exciting policy developments as another aspect of the peer to peer transformation currently taking place across the world in a variety of disparate fields, as Michel Bauwens has so elegantly documented. Like Open Source software, Wikipedia, user-generated content and peer production, citizen innovation through Science Shops provide another opportunity for people to become empowered by participating in the co-creation of scientific knowledge that is personal, relevant and commonly shared by the local community. The Living Knowledge Network is playing an important role in bringing scientific researchers, citizens, universities and government agencies together for this very purpose and I look forward to exploring opportunities for trialing similar activities in the Asia-Pacific region.

The 4th Living Knowledge Conference will take place in Dublin, Ireland in 2009.

Jens Bonk made a cute video of the 3LK conference which he posted to YouTube.

Paper presentations will soon be made available at the Conference website which can be found here.

For more on the Living Knowledge Network follow this link.

This entry was originally posted at The Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives Blog.

Bob packed up his bags and left the building this morning.

I’m sure he’ll give them hell up there.

He’ll sure as hell be missed down here.

RIP Bob. We love you always!

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From his blog:

Robert Anton Wilson Defies Medical Experts and leaves his body @4:50 AM on binary date 01/11.
All Hail Eris!

On behalf of his children and those who cared for him, deepest love and gratitude for the tremendous support and lovingness bestowed upon us.

(that’s it from Bob’s bedside at his fnord by the sea)

RAW Memorial February 07
date to be announced

The great man behind the Illuminatus Trilogy and other classics like Cosmic Trigger and Prometheus Rising is sick and needs help to pay medical and living expenses. Donations can be made directly through Bob’s PayPal address: olgaceline@gmail.com.

You can also send a check payable to Robert Anton Wilson to
Dennis Berry c/o Futique Trust
P.O. Box 3561
Santa Cruz, CA 95063.

Apparently Bob can’t meet next month’s rent, a dreadful thought, which gets one wondering about how little authors earn from royalties. If you’ve benefited from Bob’s profound insights then dig deep.

See: BoingBoing and Rushkoff posts for more information.

From The Australian newspaper 29 August 2006:

“Localisation boosts users of MySpace” by Chris Jenkins

MYSPACE has more than doubled the local sign-up rate to its social networking website following its recent localisation.

Australian sign-ups had jumped from 3000 users a day to 7000 since the launch of the Australian site two weeks ago, MySpace Australia director of marketing and content Rebekah Horne said.

MySpace claimed a victory over online video YouTube earlier this month when online measurements group comScore Media Metrix reported 20 million unique visitors to the MySpace video site, compared with 16 million for YouTube.

“Video has gone through the roof,” Ms Horne said.

Growing local awareness helped fuel growth in Australian subscriptions, she said.

“Our content is now also localised across the board.”

MySpace is popular with teenagers, who use online profiles to find people with similar interests.

MySpace users had an average session time on the website of over 50 minutes, Ms Horne said.

There were now 1.2 million Australian MySpace users, she said.

MySpace was working on a mobile application due for release before the end of the year, she said.

The mobile application would allow direct file uploads from mobile handsets, she said.

MySpace was acquired last year by News Corporation, parent company of the publisher of The Australian.

Great audio with Bruce Sterling.

About 16Mb each.

A rare UK audience with the leading science fiction author, online commentator, and radical environmental campaigner
Bruce Sterling, chaired by Kathryn Corrick. Here he discusses the nature of Web 2.0, his latest work and his thoughts on future technologies.

Worth a listen!

This mirrors my recent post to the p2p foundation blog. Wrote this to coincide with the Asia Conference on the Digital Commons in Bangkok (June 6-8), I thought blog readers would appreciate hearing more about my recent trip to the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Conference that took place at Yale Law School between April 21-23 2006. According to Wikipedia: “The goals of Access to Knowledge are embodied in a draft treaty, emerging from a call from Brazil and Argentina for a development agenda for the World Intellectual Property Organization. The treaty is intended to ease the transfer of knowledge to developing nations, and to secure the viability of open innovation systems all over the world.”

The Yale A2K conference was an important opportunity for the movement’s various actors to get together, share knowledge, build alliances and define future strategies. The proceedings kicked off with an impressive opening panel of speakers –”Framing A2K”– comprising Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University), John Howkins (The Adelphi Charter), Davinia Ovett (3D Three), Sisule Musungu (South Centre), Yochai Benkler (Yale Law) and Jack Balkin (Yale Law).

Yochai Benkler, professor at Yale Law School and author of the newly published Wealth of Networks delivered the stand-out speech of the three day event. In his address Benkler articulated his preferred vision for an A2K Draft treaty. He posed three questions “Why Now?, Why care? and What is to be Done?”. In answering the first he identified four long-term trends that differentiate this important historical moment: 1) Move from decolonization, to self-determination, to integration into a global trade system; 2) Rapid industrialization to rising capital intensity to an information knowledge economy; 3) Move from mass media to increasingly competitive media environment, to rise of netowrked information society; 4) From communism and statism to the ascendance of human rights, human dignity and participatory politics, development as freedom.

In answering the second question “Why Care?” Benkler linked acess to knowledge as a necessary ingredient to acheiving justice, freedom and human development: “we have seen the technological threshold conditions enable greater practical human agency, individual action, both commercial and noncommercial, and social sharing and exchange are emerging as major modalities of economy production, which,in turn, allow us to exercise greater individual autonomy and participate in an appreciably more participatory public sphere and in newly emerging practices of more participatory and critically self-reflective culture.”

Finally in rensponse to the third question “What is to be Done?”, Benkler offered a tentative list: “Regulation of information production and exchange, like patents and copyrights is a central potential barrier to Access to Knowledge for all of these. Telecommunications, ICT policy, broadband, open spectrum, are necessary moves in assuring access the ability to participate in these practices. The battle over open standards in technology and regulation policy, which are under pressure from regulatory requirements to implement trusted systems or patents in standards, become a place where in technology the values of openness are being challenged…But no less important than that we focus on the legal mechanisms, we must focus on the possibilities for action within civil society, both in organized forms and in decentralized distributed practices using the very mechanisms that allow for the emergence of peer production as themselves ways of overcoming the barriers to Access to Knowledge.”

Benkler’s impassioned presentation was an impressive rallying cry for the advancement of this nascent A2K movement. His concluding remarks emphasised the need to formulate new legal/policy frameworks, social practices and organisational forms that work towards the benefit of global society:

“We stand at the moment of opportunity. We have an opportunity to forge a practical, cultural and intellectual coalition at a moment of transformation. The stakes are high, the question is how should we be as free, equal, productive human beings in a global network information economy?”

Transcript of Benkler’s speech available here, along with A2K Conference site and Wiki.

Returned to Melbourne a few weeks ago and have been swamped with work, hence the lack of blogging. The A2K conference at Yale Law School was outstanding. Yochai Benkler’s presentation was a rallying cry for greater coallition building across diverse movements like access to medicines and Free and Open Source Software to a global A2K movement. He made the argument that A2K is as fundamental to human development as justice and freedom. I interviewed Benkler for my upcoming report on user-led innovation. Also had the opportunity to interview Eric von Hippel, author of Democratizing Innovation, and John Howkins the creative industries expert from London. It was great to catch up for dinner with Brian Fitzgerald, Head of Law at QUT who I’d previously interviewed for the Smart Internet 2010 project. More to follow…

Heading to the States nest week to attend A2K at Yale University in New Haven Connecticut. Has a great line-up of speakers and panel discussions. Looking forward to catching up with Yochai Benkler, Eric von Hippel and John Howkins to discuss the future of user-led innovation and the sharing economy. Very exciting! Will post details on my return.

From the website:

In the digital era, most multinational corporations and policymakers are of the view that the current trend characterised by increasing intellectual property rights and corporate control over knowledge best serve society’s interests. At the same time, however, a growing number of commentators believe that widespread access to knowledge (A2K) and the preservation of a healthy knowledge commons are the real basis for sustainable human development. Nonetheless, intellectual property-based approaches continue to singlehandedly dictate global legal norms and shape national legal infrastructures.

The first goal of the Yale A2K Initiative is to come up with a new analytic framework for analysing the possibly distortive effects of public policies relying exclusively on intellectual property rights. Beyond this aim, the A2K initiative seeks to support the adoption and development of alternative ways to foster greater access to knowledge in the digitally connected environment.

The landmark A2K conference at Yale Law School will bring together leading thinkers and activists on access to knowledge policy from North and South, in order to generate concrete research agendas and policy solutions for the next decade. This conference will be among the first to synthesize the multifaceted and interdisciplinary aspects of access to knowledge, ranging from textbooks and telecommunications access to software and medicines. The A2K Conference aims to help build an intellectual framework that will protect access to knowledge both as the basis for sustainable human development and to safeguard human rights.

Just read this very interesting paper by Julian Bleecker, Research Fellow, Annenberg Center for Communication titled “A Manifesto for Networked Objects - Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things” (PDF here). Bleecker expands on science fiction writer and Viridian Design pioneer Bruce Sterling’s notion of an “Internet of Things”. For the uninitiated please read Sterling’s excellent Shaping Things (MIT Press, 2005). Sterling created the speculative neologism “SPIME” to describe a new class of object: “SPIMES begin and end as data. They are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means and precisely tracked through space and time throughout their earthly sojourn” (Sterling 2005). These objects would be embedded with RFID tags which transmit their location and material condition, essentially creating an “Internet of Things”.

Bleecker posits the “blogject” (objects that blog) as a precursor to the spime given our current level of technosocial development. Well worth a close read. Slightly suspicious of Bleecker’s claim that “blogjects” have the potential to become: “socially relevant actors and strong-willed agents that create social capital and reconfigure the ways in which we live within and move about physical space” (p.2). Really? What about traffic lights and tollways with eTag readers? They transform how we move through space and time, are linked to vast human-computer networks and spew location-specific real-time data. But would you call a traffic light a “socially relevant actor”? Hardly. That said it would still be incredibly useful to know the lifecycle details of your clothing, sneakers and whitegoods. For example what is their chemical composition? What were the labour conditions like of the workers who manufactured them? How long do they take to breakdown in the atmosphere? Important metrics to counter the ignorance of a throw-away society of planned obselescence.

This ancient alchemical symbol nicely embodies some of the major themes I want to focus this blog around; co-evolution, self-organisation, feedback cycles, regeneration, recursion, whole-systems, user-led innovation and sustainability. We better get used to the idea of eating our own shit before it overwhelms us!