Doctorado

How can we change the digital artifacts that change us? In a world where human affairs are more and more mediated by such artifacts, this is a question about empowerment and self-determination both, individual and collective. This proposal explores this question from an Open Collaborative Science in the Global South approach in two senses and spaces:

• It happens in a hacker/maker space of the Global South (Hackbo in Bogotá, Colombia) encouraging and exploring open/garage/citizen science practices throught Visual Data Narratives and self-referential digital artifacts.

• It happens in the context of a doctoral research in design and creaton taken place in a University in the Global South (Univerisity of Caldas, Manizales, Colombia) by using Open Research and Indie Web practices.

The next part of the document will expand on this two points, show the connections between this research and the thematic areas of OCSD, the theoretical and practical advacements so far since 2010 to the present and the connections with Theory of Change, including development outcomes.

As an Open Research iniciative the inquiry takes part as a doctoral research in design and creation, started in 2010, that has incorporated, since 2011, Open Research and Indie Web (http://indiewebcamp.com/) practices, like having a self hosted source code repository of all the research, (including this proposal) located at http://mutabit.com/deltas/repos.fossil/doctorado-offray/ and aligned with what, recently, has been coined as Research Object (http://researchobject.org/) which tries to go beyond pdf and writing paper as central elements of research and makes another research objects and their history visible and auditable. Because research is not on natural sciences, but in design, it is part of the broader field of open research, where open science is located. Particulary the research ask for the design and exploration of empowering community dynamics mediated by digital artifacts from the reciprocal modification between them and the communities where they belong. The research also uses for itself the artifacts that proposes and mobilizes for the community, like self contained Distributed Version Control Systems (fossil DVCS), or easily learnable and self-referential mutable Content Management Systems (web2py) and computer environments for programming and writing of strutured interactive documents (pharo/smalltalk http://pharo.org/, Leo Editor http://leoeditor.com/, IPython Notebook http://ipython.org/notebook.html). In fact one of the premises is that bridging research, community and hacker/maker practices and artifacts is better for all of them.

The key idea about exploring the question about mutual modification of community and digital artifacts is to use the property of self-refenciality in digital artifacts, i.e. the fact that they can contain a discourse about themselves, to make their structure and function explorable and modificable by the communities where they're introduced, especifically, hacker/maker spaces as disruptive community operated/oriented places, where this intial exploration can enable new open/garage/citizen science practices, throught visual data narratives (VDN), that boostrap new practices inside the community and with the surrounding environment. Internally the idea is to understand better what happens inside a particular hacker/maker space and the knowledge flows and practices and externally, to make visible critical dialog with the surrounding environment, particulary goverment and other institutions, about how Information and Communication Technology can help to empower people beyond homogeneous instrumental discourses. VDN are a good medium for this becasue they use two powerful innate ways to understand and show a complex world: visualization and story telling, and they not only mix worlds, data, algorithms and visuals but also blur the distinction between document, IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and the programming language and require interdisciplinary knowledge to be build more effectively, so by constructing VND a group of diverse people can understand the syntax, sematics and pragmatics of a programming language to talk about the world and once learned that language enables them to build new artifacts to tell new stories. Similar practices where the community changes the tools for expression/exploration has been happening previosly by live coding music scene, the scientific programming and the the tooling (custom tool adaptation/creation) in software engineering, and they have led to new practices and ways of participation and empowering of the communities around them. VDN are ways that people can use to talk about their concerns, based on evidence and with the possible verification of peers, so in that sense is connected with the dynamics of Open Science but not only limited to the questions, discourses and the predominant ways of science, but mainly related with citizen concerns like activism and/or the oversight of public affairs, among other issues.

This research is related with two of the thematic research areas of OCSD:

• (T2) Infrastructures & Technologies: particulary the question on How could knowledge infrastructure be designed to maximize inclusive participation for OCS? because it considers technologies with high potential for moficability, low infrastructure requirements and hightly distributed, so they can be part of a peer to peer dynamics of equals without central points or cyberfeudalism practices enabled by centralized digital infrastructures, but connected throught open standars. Also because the research inquires about the duality participation-reification (Wenger, 1999) and how the reification of (new/mutated) digital artifacts can enable (or not) new forms of participation, using VDN as a medium.

• (T3) Communities of Practice in Open and Collaborative Science: particulary, the question on How do these pathways challenge conventional norms and structure on the flows of knowledge about science and development, because the research inquires from a open/garage/citizen science perspective that, as I said, asks different questions and happens in different places from those of the intitutional science but can talk with it and enables a different kind of dialogue between Scitific institutions and the broader society.

So far the research have advanced in two fronts:

• On the theoretical front a conceptual frame has being build, starting with the idea of self-referential artifacts and reciprocal modification of communities and users and the techno-polical discourse of the hacker/maker culture that takes form in doing with code artifacts, spaces and other creations (Coleman, xxx, Sennett xxx). Theoretical references has beein reviewed about self-referentiality: Wolfgang Jonas and his epistemology of design, based on autopoietic systems from Maturana, Varela and Luhman and the critics to the last one by Fuchs and Hofkirchner in their critical social systems theory. This theoretical framework can be connected with Theory of Change and its idea of a transparent (re)distribution of power but can also be assumed from a non-linear complex systems perspective with feedback cycles, holoptic infrastructures (Bauwens), internal evalution and self-directed modification.

• On the practical front, besides infrastructures and practices for Open Research already in place, HackBo, the local hackerspace has been habitated, since its beginning in 2010, reviewing, designing and partipating in several activities, seeing the dynamics and motivations of the people and the relationships between several communities of practice inside the space and their artifacts. Their domains cover different themes like designing and making crowdfunding campaigns, cryptography and privacy, hacktivism and citizen empowerment, programming workshops, web infrastructures, Internet governance or citizen organized hackathons for a more auditable and transparent goverment. Some of them happen in articulation with global initiatives.

Despite the relative flat and transitory hierarchies, there are still barriers of participation, mainly for novices and people with different interest to the already enumerated. The big potential of the hacker/maker ways of doing your self, doing it together and doing it with others (DYI, DIT, DIWO) is not only on the artifacts but in the dynamics that enable the shared building of solutions, like an online encyclopedia of hundreds of thousands of editors, an operative system kernel of thousands of programmers or hundreds of small community places run by local communities with almost no hierarchy. The general population can be a beneficiary of new ways of doing together, particulary in what concerns with open, garage and citizen sciene in a dialogue with more orthodox ways of making science and citizen participation.

The research or activity will add value to existing knowledge and/or practice, by extending and articulating the previous practice in research outcomes. The current research and practice made by the applicant organization and researchers includes:

Practice:

- Gobernatón: A citizen iniciative of social an open innovation, that is trying to use the hackathon model
  is a critic to the cooptation of the this model by the goverment without constructing real commons and for
  maximizing the profit of intermediaries instead of base communities.
  The idea is to use ICT for a more transparent and auditable goverment and build with them from a
  critical perspective, to maximize social benefit by using open Knowledge Licenses to cover the results 
  of citizen hackathons and to articulate base communities around this initiative.

  More information (in Spanish) at: 

  - http://wiki.hackbo.co/doku.php/eventos:hackatones:gobierno-transparente
  - http://mutabit.com/gobernaton
  - http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/la-gobernaton-que-sigue.html

• Indie Web Science Workshops: This is a series of events wich try to mix the Indiwe Web principles (owning data and infraestructure, plurality, tools for ourselves, and others at http://indiewebcamp.com/Principles) with Open, Garage, Citizen Science. We have a zotero collection with the memories of the workshops here:

  https://www.zotero.org/groups/diseo_y_creacion_phd_msc_universidad_de_caldas/items/collectionKey/AT5A8NHK

• Data Narratives in medical prescription. This is an on-going work (please don't quote without authorization) to build a data narrative for 7 hospitals in Cundinamarca (Colombia) from several months of medical prescription, to diagnose the current situation and enabling interventions to create a more rational use of medicines for the treatment of hyper-tension disease.

  More information at:

  • Timeline of the source code repository: http://beta.piamed.org/repos.fossil/uso-racional/timeline?n=200
  • Working draft: http://beta.piamed.org/repos.fossil/uso-racional/doc/tip/linea-base-aras-iecas.html

• Open/Community innovation for cultural enterprises inncubator of
  for the University of Caldas (Manizales - Colombia). It was a two days practical workshop that showed how a panoramic view of close/open/community innovation, hacker/maker culture and spaces as an example of the last two and crowdfunding as a way to make viable this model with local experiences on that fronts. The idea is to bridge theoretical perspectives with real examples in community practices and sites/infrastructures to enable them.

  More information at:

  • Mental map of the workshop: http://bit.ly/1lDzsD5
    
  • Slides from a local example of an open project with crowdfunding campaing: http://bit.ly/W04loV
  • Repository with all the files of the workshop: http://bit.ly/1pyErWd

Research:

- This includes my own doctoral studies with a dialogue between several authors (see bibliographic notes)

The development outcomes are the following:

• The doctoral thesis as a Open Research object, with a qualitative and quantitative model of the reciprocal modification of communities and digital artifacts. The quantitative approach expects to be build on mapping the modifications of source code repositories, infrastructures and artifacts and their authors/mantainers. The qualitative approach expects to be build as a description of motivations and interactions between participants in the hacker/maker space and the effect of VDN inside and outside the space. Both of them expect to dialog with Theory of Change as an approach to design, evaluate, build consensus, construct in the divergence and also to put ToC in the context of non-linear community dynamics.

• A digital artifact for the writing of visual data narratives and research papers, from an outliner tree-like non-linear writing metaphor, that integrates the scholarly Markdown, pandoc, yaml, CSL and Zotero. There is already a description of this process on my own writing at: http://bit.ly/1owVIc8 and also a pharo/smalltalk new prototype under a MIT open knowledge license at: http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Offray/Ubakye/

• Visual data narratives workshops with documentation and artifacts covered by Open Knowledge Definition compatible licenses and aligned with was has been explored on the Indie Web Science workshops.

• Articulation with national and international networks and collectives of open science, citizen oversight, freedom of expression and net neutrality throught several events like hackathons, workshops and barcamps. For this the experience of the Karisma Foundation will be used to diseminate results to different stake holders beyond local community at the hackerspace. Karisma Foundation has build long lasting relationships with EFF, Mozilla Foundation, p2p Foundation, LatinAmerican Foundation for the Freedom of the Press (Flip) among others and will be a key partner of mutabiT in mobilizing this ideas in several events and collectives. There is also a starting informal dialogue between people at HackBo as a community operated space and hacker/maker/fab/living labs and spaces inside Universities, with people at TadeoLab (Tadeo University), ViveLab (National University of Colombia), Atico (Javeriana University) and plataforma (Luis Angel Arango National Library).

This outcomes are an extension and consolidation of the already ongoing theorethical and practical field research, using the OCSDnet grant to empower artifacts, comprenhensions, networks and practices already depicted. The beneficiaries will be the grant recipients as this will be used to cover this dual (community and institutional) Open Research/Science project, by building and completing artifacts for this research, helping with economical struggling of the hackerspace, giving infrastructure to become a seeing hacker/maker space (see Bret Victor video and comic on Seeing Spaces at: http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/) and enabling new relatioships and dialogues with goverment, labs/spaces inside academia, throught evens like hackathons, barcamps, etc.