A very short report from Sci(bzaar)net, one week later.

First of all, thanks to Gian for this opportunity offered me. Participating in the organization process (even if only online, building the event’s website) and at the event was an opportunity to learn a lot about how we can make room for an open dialogue between very different personalities (researchers, bloggers, designers, creatives, psychologists, journalists, programmers)… such knowledge I hope I can put it into practice when I will be the facilitator of one of the working groups of UrbanLabs.

The event was held in the Model Lab of the Scuola Politecnica di Design, and although I had not studied there but at the Politecnico di Milano, I rediscovered the university atmosphere and especially the climate of activation and of laying the foundations for collective projects that only a Model Lab (with all its tools and work desks) could exemplify so well.

Here are the event pictures taken by me and the other participants, on Flickr:

For those who could not attend, the videos were published on the website; you can find the final text of the brainstorming here (and here the related videos). Finally, I recommend you to read the Bonaria Biancu’s post that summarize very well all the interventions placing them within a coherent overall speech.
All the videos and posts regarding individual authors can be consulted on the official website of Sci(bzaar)net, which will remain as a platform for collective discussion about the relationships between Internet, Scientific Research, Dissemination Scientific and Open Culture.

It was certainly a success and an important event: the specific organizational form (halfway between a BarCamp and more traditional conference) and the heterogeneity of the components have shown that they can give an added value to the meeting and the discussion. Rarely we can attend such meetings on these issues and it’s always a pleasure to know other bloggers or persons behind new experiments in person.

I’d like now to summarize my contribution and some brief reflections resulting from the brainstorming. As you can imagine, I have participated as an “Open Culture expert” and not about scientific research/publication. The main idea that I wanted to share with the participants is that we should think about Open Culture not as a simple set of publication practices ( “to publish a specific content with a specific license”) but as a real philosophy based on enabling complex systems. Open Culture is not just use a Creative Commons license: it means to facilitate a system that shares and reuses the information self-organizing independently. Thinking about Open initiatives in a reductionist way, just like the use of a specific license, can only lead to failure.

We can then study how to enable complex systems that follow Open Peer-to-Peer dynamics and imagine what activities of scientific research and dissemination (definition of hypothesis, definition of research, data collection, data analysis, compilation of results, publication, etc.. ) can be opened to these systems.

One of the concerns expressed most frequently during Sci(bzaar)net regards the opportunity to share the research results (under Open Access): why we should do that, when other people could take all the economic benefits and increase problems for those who carry out researches? Certainly it is true, if we consider scientific research and dissemination using pre-Open Culture parameters, that is as activities based on copyright as a means of appropriation of benefits from their information within a market economy. But now we know how Open Peer-to-Peer organisational forms range between market economies and gift economies, protection of intellectual property and information sharing. We can therefore imagine new forms of organisation capable of ensuring economic resources necessary to who performs scientific research.

In this direction, we can find countless opportunities and diversity of organizational forms: the first suggestion comes from Andrea Gaggioli who proposes a crowdfunding service for scientific research.
I hope that this direction will be studied further on the Sci(bzaar)net website.

Finally, here are my presentation and video (which are also available on the official website here):

And the second announcement refers to the UrbanLabs 08 event, which will be held on 9-10-11 October 2008 in the Citilab-Cornellà (Barcelona), a space designed to activate, promote and expand the creative and innovative capacity in technology entrepreneurs, companies, citizens of the information and knowledge society and knowledge.

The aim of the event is to think and propose new projects, practices and usages for cities and citizens, based on existing examples of appropriation of information technology and communication (ICT) and of innovation originating from social demands. The interaction between digital technology, digital culture and citizens’ space provides opportunities for citizen action affecting many different areas and open up potentially more creative and innovative participatory dynamics. These innovations can be translated into new opportunities for socio-economic development and local cultural as well as for strengthening civic networks and their mechanisms of participation in urban governance. The local objective, therefore, from a global perspective and tools.

The news that gives me great satisfaction is that Ramon Sanguesa invitated me to participate as a facilitator for Group A, Productive collaborative innovation: concepts of open innovation in the social, technological and entrepreneurial field. So this will be a very important opportunity to confront, share and experiment the themes of open innovation for communities and cities through the role of facilitator (enabler).

The intention of the six groups is to enable spaces for conversation, discussion and planning for specific projects related to each of the six subjects. The objectives of the Group A are:

• to work on collaborative innovation for civic-based and business-based projects;
• explore the concepts of open innovation in the social, technological and entrepreneurial field;
• explore the open and collaborative design; see how the concept of the culture changes after the collaborative and innovative “digital culture”.

Before the event, the pages of each working group the contextual framework and potential contents and projects that may arise, as well as initiatives, are developed in the pages of each working group. Each can be edited by its facilitator and other people interested in attending the working group, while broadening the discussion in the respective discussion page.

Other good reasons to follow this event are the presence of Michel Bauwens from P2P Foundation and of Juan Freire.

Registration is free for the first 100 seats, and then, for organisational reasons, there are still 50 seats reserved with a registration fee of 50 euros. And during those days it will be possible to follow the conference through videostreaming on the website.

I hope you will participate in the website and in the Citilab!

People Make Places, Melissa Mean, Charlie Tims, Demos, London (2005), (pdf file, in english)

Based on in-depth studies of three British towns and cities Cardiff, Preston and Swindon, People Make Places explores how the best public spaces are created by people and communities themselves. The book sets out the forms of governance, design principles and everyday uses that can help boost people’s participation in public space and the wider public life of their town or city.

Cities were invented to facilitate exchange – the exchange of ideas, friendships, material goods and skills. How good a city is at facilitating exchange determines its health – economic, social, cultural and environmental. Public space forms a vital conduit in this exchange process, providing platforms for everyday interaction and information flows – the basis and content for the public life of cities. At their best, public spaces act like a self-organising public service; just as hospitals and schools provide a shared resource to improve people’s quality of life, public spaces form a shared spatial resource from which experiences and value are created in ways that are not possible in our private lives alone.

What our search highlighted was the importance of understanding public space from the perspective of the participant. A new town square could be carefully, beautifully designed, but there was no guarantee that people would come and use it.
People have a wide variety of motivations, needs and resources that shape their personal capacity and desire to use the communal spaces within their town or city. This sometimes creates sharp inequalities between different people’s ability to participate in the wider public life of a city outside home and work.

We also found that public space is better understood less as a predetermined physical space, and more as an experience created by an interaction between people and a place. In other words, public space is co-produced through the active involvement of the user. This shift from a place-based to a userled understanding enables the quality of public space within a neighbourhood or even a whole city to be assessed in terms of how well it supports a range of ‘public experiences’, such as belonging and companionship, risk-taking and adventure, and reflection and learning.

So what might a user-led framework for public space experiences look like? The publicness of a space can be measured in terms of its ability to provide a platform for the creation of different types of experience by different people.

This process of co-production holds out a potentially powerful way forward in terms of closing the persistent gap between the promise and reality of public space. It is adept at countering some of the negative trends that are perceived to be undermining public space as well as working with the grain of these trends and creating positive externalities.

First, co-production helps to counter the decline in trust in other people’s behaviour and to generate a sense of community efficacy.
[...]
Where the organisation of the spaces reflected the principles of co-production, however, there tended to be a much higher confidence in other people’s behaviour and greater openness to a diversity of activities and people; people felt safe, but were more willing to take risks, for example by talking to people they did not know or trying a different kind of activity.

Second, by drawing on the diversity of people in the creation of shared experiences, co-production helps spaces to avoid the twin dangers of a lowest-common-denominator blandness or extreme fragmentation. Because coproduced spaces are partly self-organised they tend to be much more flexible, responsive and therefore more able to simultaneously meet a diversity of needs.

Third, co-production is governance-neutral and can work in a range of environments – public, private and civic – to improve their quality. Public space works best where people are able to positively contribute to their everyday environments through their personal choice and actions. The implication for governance of every type of space – public, private or civic – is that more space and control needs to be given over to the people using it. This process of ‘letting go’ could also be the means by which different types of spaces are better connected together. Revitalising the public life of cities demands that we start with people rather than with physical space.

A very interesting post by Jamais Cascio, about four different possible future scenarios, with sustainability, technology and organizational forms in mind. We should note that, according to him, open source and distributed organizational forms can lead to two different scenarios, a positive one and a negative one.
Yes, open and peer-to-peer organizational forms promising, but aren’t just perfect! I already wrote some months ago, that we could use them for unsustainable projects too, therefore we should study them to understand how to apply them and where!

Drivers

The four boxes represent a variety of “response” scenarios, each embracing elements of the prevention, mitigation, and remediation approaches to solving the climate crisis. Certain approaches may receive greater emphasis in a given scenario, but all three types of responses can be seen in each world.

The first driver is Who Makes the Rules?, with end-points of Centralized and Distributed. This driver looks at the locus of authority regarding the subject (in this case, climate responses) — are outcomes dependent upon choices made by top-down, centralized leadership, or made by uncoordinated, distributed decision-making?
[...]
The second driver is How Do We Use Technology?, with end-points of Precautionary and Proactionary. This driver looks not at the pace of technological change (something of a canonical scenario driver), but at our political and social approaches to the deployment of new tools and systems.

Scenarios

The combination of these two drivers give us four distinct worlds.

“Power Green” — Centralized and Proactionary: a world where government and corporate entities tend to exert most authority, and where new technologies, systems and response models tend to be tried first and evaluated afterwards. This world is most conducive to geoengineering, but is also one in which we might see environmental militarization (i.e., the use of military power to enforce global environmental regulations) and aggressive government environmental controls. “Green Fascism” is one form of this scenario; “Geoengineering 101″ from my Earth Day Essay is another.

“Functional Green” — Centralized and Precautionary: a world in which top-down efforts emphasize regulation and mandates, while the deployment of new technologies emphasizes improving our capacities to limit disastrous results. Energy efficiency dominates here, along with economic and social innovations like tradable emissions quotas and re-imagined urban designs. The future as envisioned by Shellenberger and Nordhaus could be one form of this scenario; the future as envisioned by folks like Bill McDonough or Amory Lovins could be another. Arguably, this is the default scenario for Europe and Japan.

“We Green” — Distributed and Precautionary: a world in which collaboration and bottom-up efforts prove decisive, and technological deployments emphasize strengthening local communities, enhancing communication, and improving transparency. This is a world of micro-models and open source platforms, “Earth Witness” environmental sousveillance and locavorous diets. Rainwater capture, energy networks, and carbon labeling all show up here. This world (along with a few elements from the “Functional Green” scenario) is the baseline “bright green” future.

“Hyper Green” — Distributed and Proactionary: a world in which things get weird. Distributed decisions and ad-hoc collaboration dominate, largely in the development and deployment of potentially transformative technologies and models. This world embraces experimentation and iterated design, albeit not universally; this scenario is likely to include communities and nations that see themselves as disenfranchised and angry. Micro-models and open source platforms thrive here, too, but are as likely to be micro-ecosystem engineering and open source nanotechnology as micro-finance and open source architecture. States and large corporations aren’t gone, but find it increasingly hard to keep up. One form of this scenario would end with an open source guerilla movement getting its hands on a knowledge-enabled weapon of mass destruction; another form of this scenario is the “Teaching the World to Sing” story from my Earth Day Essay.

via | Beyond the Beyond

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Once we define the platform, it is possible to comprehend what, effectively, a designer can design for an Open Peer-to-Peer community. It still remains to define how this project plan can be carried out holding account of the complexity of the community. It is necessary to define a design methodology (or at least some guidelines) that can improve the open and peer-to-peer participation of the community and its complexity.
The community is a complex system, and there is the need of a design methodology able to face its complexity without reducing it. As we have seen before, Open Peer-to-Peer organizational forms seem promising in supplying greater probabilities to face complex problems and to elaborate complex artifacts. That happens just thanks to their own intrinsic complexity: the complexity of the project reflects the complexity of the community, and both strengthen each other. Whe we design an activity, the community itself (a complex system) designs a complex project collectively (its own organization and the necessary conditions).

Moreover, a project dedicated to a community must hold on account the characteristics of the context in which it lives, especially the territorial characteristics that become resources once the community realize their importance. This is an ulterior reason for giving it a greater opportunity of direct participation to the design process, as a community can recognize the usable resources better than others. This is therefore a design approach that take advantage of the participation of a potentially elevated number of participants, through a complex process characterized by its specific path (path dependency), oriented to several the levels of interaction: between participants, participants and community, community and another community, communities and institutions, community and society. We should therefore adopt a design approach based on participation, in order to use the knowledge of the participants to getter better results.

We can therefore say that a project directed to an Open Peer-to-Peer community should be itself Open Peer-to-Peer, based on the participation of the community to the design process (open: open to the participation), to whose members is recognized an equal and active role (peer-to-peer: the acknowledgment of other people’s competences and acquaintances). An Open Peer-to-Peer design process therefore becomes a co-design process, where designer and participants collaborate (a collective intelligence) constituting a wider design community.

The designer therefore assumes a specific role in the projects directed to Open Peer-to-Peer communities. Thanks to his/her competences, a designer can supply the instruments of self-organization and the optimal conditions for an activity to take form, assuming a role of an enabler and not of a provider (or supplier of defined solutions). No more a simple supplier of his/her own creativity, but an enabler of distributed creativity. No more a simple design process that produces definitive solutions, but a design process that support communities so that they can develop appropriate solutions to their own needs and characteristics.

We can see that the same shift is happening in the local institutions too, where local government is transforming into governance. A redefinition of the role of the local institution that becomes an enabler of the participation and the coordination between public entities and private and social ones, and not a provider of rules and services¹.

A designer can be an enabler naturally, since his/her competences make him/her able to establish connections between customers and enterprises, therefore mediating between different interests. Thanks to his/her abilities to visualize in advance, a designer can at the same time manage multiple and discordant interests, remembering the advantages that derive from a collective collaboration. Moreover, an enabler should supply support to reach the self-organization of the members in the short term, avoiding to render them depending on him/her in the long term. The goal of a designer is therefore the social enabler of the development of communities; the role that Linus Torvalds chose to assume in the development of Linux, avoiding the more traditional one of designer-provider².

(to be continued)

Notes:

1. (2004) Vicari Haddock S., La città contemporanea, Il Mulino, Bologna [↩]
2. (2000) Kuwabara K., Linux: A Bazaar at the Edge of Chaos, First Monday, volume 5, number 3, March 2000, http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_3/kuwabara/index.html [↩]