ICTlogy

Student research seminar: Benjamin Addom

This is a proposal for a theory-driven Evaluation Research using Fourth Generation Evaluation Framework (FGE). The history of agricultural development reveals that agricultural technologies over the years have been bought, borrowed, or stolen and therefore should not necessarily be domestic. The model of diffusion of innovation especially has been applied in the transfer of these technologies to developing countries. TEEAL and AGORA are two initiatives that are transferring scientific knowledge from the North to the South. The proposed research tries to explore or assess or evaluate the merit of the initiative to the primary users (researchers, students and policy makers) and its worth to the secondary users (farmers) in Ghana. The concept of global and local knowledge, theory of absorptive capacity of “community”, community ties theory, and the technique of social network analysis are being proposed.

Main aspects

• Inefficient mechanisms for informatino/knowledge “transfer” (exchange)
• Inadequate investment in research internally
• Use of outdated technologies

Arnold and Bell (2001) argue that the exponential growth of ICTs has transformed the ability to take advantage of knowledge developed in other places of for other purposes.
WSIS Action Plan, Line C-7, item 21 on e-Agriculture.
Faculty and researchers only had access to print copies of serials that were years, if not decades, out of date (Wallace & Jan Olsen, 1980).
Research background: Cornell University TEEAL Project.
Research background: FAO AGORA Project

The study will evaluate

• Link between TEEL/AGORA and researchers/students
• Link between researchers/students and the farmers
• What content do Researchers/Students “transfer”
• How does the social structure of the communities facilitate or retard use of the knowledge?
• With what effects?

Theoretical Framework

• Concept for knowledge sharing – GDN or WB, Szulanski (2003)
• Absorptive Capacity of Communities – Cohen and Levinthal 1990 Xahra and George (2002)
• Theory of Community Ties – Warren (1978)
• Social Network Theory – Perkins et al. (2002)

My reflections

• I guess I’d add some experiences from the Open Access world, specially when dealing about the diffusion of knowledge in open environments and how to measure it

More info

• FGE:
• TEEAL
• AGORA

Student research seminar: Bodó Balázs

Bodo Balazs does an overview of piracy practices along history and seeing how they actually, even if acting against the Law, they played an important role on knowledge diffusion.

Piracy exists because there is a systematic market failure created by the advent of the Internet, and is not suppliers pushed but demand pulled.

And more, piracy has evolved from evil masterminds to individuals interconnected through peer-to-peer networks. Causes?

• Not enough products at the right price at the right time, vs. the largest, most comprehensive digital archive in history: demand is there, supply is not
• Release strategies, the party next door effect: commercial campaigns cannot more be constrained to country boundaries, because they will spill over and become the former point
• User valuations: culture is an experience
• True demand: people applauding after seeing an ad

File sharing is also about identity, loyalty and can even become really important in the political agenda.

Initial guesses

• Traditional markets limited by the economies of scale
• Heavy public subsidies
• Applies to very narrow selection of target
• Heavy competition
• Public bankruptcy
• So: who will serve the marginal?

Good comment by Wendy Seltzer: even if there is no problem on not respecting intellectual property, the problem still is that pirates do not create content, which is what intellectual property is all about, not (or not just) distribution. Bodó Balázs states that there are some communities, little clusters, that self organize, create legitimate copies and somehow managet to exclude free riding from the community. A good thing about P2P downloading is that it seems to help street pirates to get out of the “market”.

Lead: Lewis Hyde, Wendy Seltzer, Rob Faris

Recent years have seen the idea of “the commons” as a form of ownership being discussed in a number of areas. Many environmental issues are usefully approached in terms of common assets, from aquifers to wetlands, from the oceans to the atmosphere. People who think about technology find themselves more and more speaking in terms of a commons, especially in regard to broadcast spectrum, the architecture of the internet, and software. Arguments that arise out of biotechnology–about seedlines, patented drugs, the ownership of genetic materials and so forth–also benefit from a clear model of what it means to place limits on the market and hold some things in common. Finally, many of the recent turf battles around intellectual property have hinged on whether creations of the human mind and imagination should be treated as proprietary goods or not.

Peter Barnes, in his new book Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons offers a simple definition of the commons as “the sum of all we inherit together and must pass on undiminished to our heirs.” Somewhat more prosaically we might say that a commons is a social regime for managing a collectively owned resource.

This session will provide some definitions, history, and theory about the commons as a form of ownership. Participants will read a chapter from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks that deals with commons-based production in the information economy. With Benkler’s work providing one concrete example of a modern commons, the discussion will open up to consider when the commons might be a useful way to manage our shared wealth, and when it might not.

Possible solutions to underprovision

• Put prices on consumption
• Put direct rewards on provision, such as peer-to-peer networks that reward people that share more files by making downloading faster;
• Put indirect rewards on provision based on a reputation system, as it happens in the free software sector, where you’re more likely to get contracts the more you contribute to the project

But there’s more than underprovision: preserving the integrity of the Commons is also a must, e.g. preservation of the air quality

How to convert private property into Commons?

If information is really non-rival and non-exclusive, how to try and expand the scope of the Commons?

• One way could be to extend Fair Use in a Copyright environment.
• Another example is the Open Access movement, specially when they ask research funders to include the diffusion of results (to the public domain) in their funding strategies.
• Anti-DRM initiatives.

What’s next?

What do we want to live to the public sector? What should be managed by the government? What should be managed by private trusts? It seems that in the Internet the Tragedy of the Commons is subverted and the more people benefits from the Commons, the more the Commons benefit from it.

On the other hand, do we need more IGF meetings or shoud the herd manage themselves (cite by Jonathan Zittrain) and try and deal with spam and so?

My reflections

Readings

More info

• Commons Knowledge, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• Hardin, G. (1968). “The Tragedy of the Commons”. In Science, 162(3859), 1243 – 1248. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved July 23, 2007 from http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/162/3859/1243.pdf
• Benkler, Y. (2002). “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm”. In The Yale Law Journal, 112(3), 369–446. New Haven: The Yale Law Journal Company. Retrieved June 12, 2007 from http://yalelawjournal.org/images/pdfs/354.pdf
• Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (Eds.) (2006) Understanding Knowledge as a Commons. From Theory to Practice. Cambridge: MIT PRESS

We’ll never thank Chintan Vaishnav enough for arranging our visit to the MIT Media Lab and OLPC Foundation, impressive places where to work (or study, of course: actually, a place to learn, either official role you get there with), really interdisciplinary.

MIT Media Lab

We visited Lifelong Kindergarden research group, which has Lego as main founder, and Lego Mindstorms as one of Lego-MIT Media Lab most interesting outcomes.

Jay Silver

We there were presented a couple of very interesting projects:

Scratch

Jay Silver kindly introduced us to the rudiments of Scratch and how to get started on this tool. Actually, I still wonder whether it is a game, a multimedia design and production tool, an educational technology, a collaborative web 2.0 networking social software or all of them.

I’m pretty sure that Jay Silver was right when he said that tools the like of Scratch actually fit on what Ivan Illich wanted to state on Deschooling Society.

What’s Up

It then was turn for Leo Burd’s thesis Technological Initiatives for Social Empowerment: Design Experiments in Technology-Supported Youth Participation and Local Civic Engagement, most commonly known as What’s Up.

The project joins best of both worlds in VoIP, mobile telephony and social software for community building. The idea is that while the Web is quite spread, in most developing countries the ICT revolution is clearly led by mobile phones. Thus, What’s Up presents the usual community site but empowered with VoIP and all kinds of mobile enhanced features, just like SMS posted text and vodcasts.

One Laptop per Child Foundation

XO Laptop (AKA “OLPC” Laptop)

It is actually relevant that our visit at One Laptop per Child Foundation was lead by Samuel Klein, director of content of the One Laptop per Child Project.

A year and a half ago I wrote Negroponte and the Web 2.0 or the Four Classes of the Digital Divide to state that Nicholas Negroponte’s effort to bridge the digital divide will be worthless if digital literacy and provision of content and services did not accompany the infrastructures revolution and diffusion. Having Samuel Klein as spokesman or PR representative makes a tacit statement on what the One Laptop per Child Project is about: it is not about delivering laptops to children, is about opening them the gates of content, which is the real issue.

As he himself explained, every activity has comunity around it, being the goal to build education networks, an example of it the installation of Moodle for some community projects, being the management and coordination of this free software LMS done by the same educational institutions that provide wireless connectivity to the laptops.

The commitment with content can be on the other hand exemplified with the Summer of Content 2007 initiative to provide content to be packeted with the XO laptop.

Samuel Klein strongly encouraged the audience and anyone interested to both contribute to the OLPC Project Wiki and subscribe to the OLPC Project Wiki mailing lists.

More info

• MIT: Media Lab, Stata Center, Press, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• MIT: One Laptop Per Child, by Daisy Pignetti
• ‘$100 laptop’ production begins

Leads: Henry Jenkins, Carrie Lambert-Beatty

What connections might we posit between the participatory culture which has grown up around popular media and the ideals of participatory democracy? In the last Presidential campaign, we saw the emergence of blogs, amateur film contests, and social networking software as significant resources for political activism and we saw signs that people were remixing media images for the purpose of creating their own political commentary. What seemed to be cutting edge practices four years ago are emerging as pervasive aspects of the current campaign season (witness the anti-Hillary “1984” advertisement, the Pro-Barrack “Obama Girl” video, and Hillary Clinton’s own spoof of The Sopranos, all circulated via YouTube in an election that is just getting started.) Similar tactics have emerged through the Save Our Internet campaign which was launched to promote Net Neutrality. How do such tactics mobilize our skills as fans, bloggers, and gamers as resources for promoting a more engaged citizenship? What does this suggest about the importance of protecting the rights of citizens to appropriate, parody, remix, and recirculate media content in an age of increases struggle over intellectual property? What might our educational institutions do to insure that young people acquire the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully participate in these debates? How might we understand these trends in relation to a growing backlash against what writers like Andrew Keen are calling “the Cult of the Amateur”?

Activism, civic engagement will not be top-down organized but really grassroots and participatory, active (i.e. spectacles that work only if the people help create them). Low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement.

Ideals of a Progressive Popular Culture

• participatory
• active
• open ended
• transparent
• transformative

My reflections

• The problem with popular media making politics become something suitable for “consumption” iis that the system gets subverted. In subversion, the supporter becomes the center of the spotlight and is no more supporter but the target. I.e. it is OK to have U2 sing Sunday Bloody Sunday (on anyone else doing such stuff) but it is absolutely unacceptable to have Mr. Bono speaking on behalf of Africa in a most illegitimate way.
• See Bono, I Presume?, Africans to Bono: ‘For God’s sake please stop!’ and Bono versus Mwenda (all via Ethan Zuckerman‘s blog).

Readings

More info

• WochenKlausur
• ‘Chica Obama’ contra ‘chica Hillary’
• Debate ’08: Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl
• Evangelicals and the Media
• Henry Jenkins Confronts Obama Girl, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• OII Day 5, by Alla Zollers

Leads: Dan Gillmor, Steve Schifferes

From Lecture to Conversation, by Dan Gillmor

“Democratized” Media

Not in the sense of voting… but participation, production, access

Lots of data, previously unreleased, previously unrecorded, now come to light because there’s someone there, in situ, to collect them and share them in the shape of text, photo, video, etc. And all this data is (almost) immediately made public… enhanced and brought to you by RSS feeds.

Indeed, data is not only collected by treated, thus becoming information. Does this make of all of us journalists? people? academics? nonprofits? corporations? Steve Jobs posts Thoughts on Music instead of conceding an interview: is the he the journalist?

It is, indeed, the best time ever to be an entrepreneur journalist Same for nonprofits (under another model, of course), such as Global Voices.

Media remixability

Multimedia mashups are becoming more and more popular due to the ease to make them (and the impressive availability of huge amounts of content, I’d dare ask).

More and more, citizens are asked to contribute with their stuff to traditional media… but people also do it by themselves, and upload their stuff on the Internet, either in their own spaces or shared spaces provided by third parties.

Actually, people had done this before. But now its easiear, ubiquous.

Problems?

• Media overload
• Who to trust
• Need for media literacy, for both producers but, specially, for consumers

Basic Principles (for Audience)

• The audience should be skeptical… but just about everything
• but adjusting a “trust quotient” for each site
• Keep reporting
• Learn media techniques, not only technologycal, but also about media power, how to use it, etc. Training about principles, practices, ethics, law…

Basic Principles (for All Journalists, Pro and Amateur)

• Throroughness
• Accuracy
• Fairness
• Independence
• Transparency

Daily Us

• Popularity is not enough
• Reputation

My reflections

• Keeping on with the question whether i.e. bloggers are journalists… they might be somewhere within the range of being zero journalists to absolute journalists. Do they really need to adhere explicit manifestos about their ethics? always? never? only if they are really close to being “real” journalists? should it be kept implicit? expliciting it is just a means to try and shape oneself’s identity as journalist?
• Keeping on with the issue of the Daily Us and reputation… will academic blogs ever count (academically, scientifically)? will some kind of reputation system (à la hacker?) override/complement traditional peer review? there actually exists some kind of peer review on blogs through comments, pingbacks and trackbacks and blogrolls (and other “citation” systems), blog/website rankings, and so?
• will everyone be a prosumer by default and his respective “trust quotient” will draw the redline between amateurs and professionals?

Downloading Democracy, by Steve Schifferes

From 2004 to 2005 people audience for elections has trippled, over all due to increased broadband use at home, but also due to increased Internet use at work (something not specially prosecuted at the UK).

Another reason is that media have really covered the “online campaigns” (the BBC making the difference with other media.

The election audience is similar to the BBC News website audience, which is known to be different to other BBC platforms: Internet users are more interested in politics and current affairs. This could be due to the bias the Internet itself induces on users: medium to high class, young profile, etc.

And the consumption of politics information the do on the Internet is huge. Indeed, young viewers use the BBC web more but also use other news sources. They really go “out” of the established media and look for other voices.

But only a minotiry were mobilised to become political activists. Surprisingly, the bias of political blogs (they approach a determinate party’s discourse) is increasing. Thus, it looks like the web is positive for political engagement

My reflections

• the web is positive for political engagement… but it looks as it is not the traditional engagement parties expect people to take
• is this engagement more focused on concrete actions, issues… on organizing smart mobs?
• As an answer to the previous point, Steve Schifferes states that, at least from now, blogs and digital media are more likely to be reactive to (a) parties’ proposals and (b) traditional media coverage and information (in the form of adherence or criticism) rather and be more proactive and the origin of actions. This does not mean they cannot (are not) being proactive, but this is not the norm

Readings

More info

• Citizen Kane? No, Citizens Gilmour, Shifferes and Kelly, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• OII Day 3, by Alla Zollers