Local Practice, Global Reach?

Copenhagen.
I spent the first session of this second day at AoIR 2008 as a member of a panel on academic publishing - I didn't blog this, for obvious reasons. This second session starts with a paper on "Transcoding Place" by Vicki Moulder, in the overall area of social design and media convergence. How do communities enact agency in this space, especially given that digital social architecture is a fluid system, unlike conventional physical architecture?

Designers and creative professionals have a responsibility and are able to cause real change in design; this is especially important in the context of the changes brought about by media convergence. Can meaningful online agency (e.g. tagging and uploading content to YouTube and other social media sites) compare in any real sense with activism on the streets? Vicki and her colleague Jim Bizzocchi examined this question in the context of the Crude Awakening event at Burning Man, comparing the semantic structure of a face-to-face event in the Nevada desert (attended by some 45,000 spectators) with its video documentation (which was uploaded to YouTube by numerous users within hours of the event).

This involved an analysis of the textual structure of each act of the performance event, and a cataloguing of the videos of the event uploaded to YouTube. What out of the 45 minutes of performance did people decide was important enough to upload (keeping in mind that regular users may upload only up to 2 minutes of video in one go)? It turned out that almost all of the videos featured the pyrotechnic mushroom cloud featured in the performance. Was the motivation of any of these uploaders an intention to extend the performance in any way? Perhaps not, but it is possible that it may have yielded such an effect anyway.

Up next is my paper with Sal Humphreys about our edgeX project, which Sal will present. The slides are below, the full paper is also online, and I'm hoping to add the audio soon, too. Unfortunately the audio recording didn't work out...

Some very interesting discussions afterwards - thanks to everyone who contributed!

Laura Forlano is the next speaker, and shifts our focus to WiFi hotspots. What are the intersections between physical spaces and wireless networks, and how does this impact on knowledge work as it is conducted outside of office settings? How is mobile connectivity framed in the media, and how does this compare to the reality of practices? What is the role of lead users or user entrepreneurs in this context; how do they promote innovation or develop innovation spaces?

There are two types of innovation here, Laura says - innovation in new products and services, and innovation in organisational forms. Community wireless organisations by now have a relatively long history, and such organisations are typically closely related to the cities from which they have emerged; they may have emerged from the open source software movement, but are much more strongly geographically focussed. There is often also a focus on specific spaces - variously predominantly networking cafes or residential spaces, for example. One example for this is the Berlin-based Freifunk network - such projects see themselves as social initiatives, but especially also as building physical infrastructure.

Laura now shows an IssueCrawler network map of leading community wireless initiatives, which clearly shows both the interlinkage between the sites of these initiatives and the connection between such initiatives and wider open source and related communities (including Slashdot, Drupal, and similar projects). Additionally, of course, there are also geographical maps of the neighbourhood wireless networks themselves.

But how are such networks used? Laura conducted a number of interviews with users in New York, Budapest, and Montréal, and found that many of them would commute some distance to wireless access zones - not only in order to gain access (many would also have access at home), but in order to be seen to be part of the community; there is a collaborative, communal aspect to this practice, then.

One graphic illustrator, in fact, uses three different wireless zones - one as a pre-production space in a bookstore cafe (which provides him also with easy access to relevant publications); one as a production space where the work visible in this public space also draws valuable unsolicited comments from random passers-by; and finally one as a deadline space in a cafe in an ethnic neighbourhood where it is easier for him to concentrate on his work because (as an outsider) nobody will talk to him.

The emergence of coworking in such wireless access spaces is a particularly interesting organisational innovation - here, wireless spaces are used for informal collaborations between likeminded practitioners. Indeed, there are plans to organise a two-week mobile coworking festival in New York in the not-too-distant future.

Technorati : AoIR 2008, Crude Awakening, Ipswich, YouTube, community, edgeX, ir9, local, wireless
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