I guess “NOW” is relative as the essay I wrote for Open Design Now is now at least 2 years old. But still I figured it makes sense to share. (on more than one level) I recommend reading this in the original site, but just as a backup I will publish it here as well. One of the reasons I waited with publishing it here in the blog (even though the whole book is CC-SA-BY licensed) is that the publishing model they took was to slowly publish the essays over a long period of time, one essay at a time. And the book was going from 0% open to 100% open. It’s an interesting model, certainly a compromise between the OPENESS tribe and the publisher’s concern over the INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY and the commodification of the content. Now that it is 100% open, and my essay is just slightly dated, I think it’s fair to share it here :)
Mushon Zer-Aviv describes his efforts to teach open source design as an attempt to investigate why collaborative work combined with individual autonomy has not been common practice in design, as it is in open source software development. He discusses whether what worked for code might just as easily be transferred to design: the physical object as binary structure.
A machine learning experiment trying to decode social normalcy. This is a collaboration between Yonatan Ben-Simhon and myself and was initially presented at the Science Museum in Jerusalem as a part of the Other Lives exhibition inspired by the life and work of Alan Turing on his birthday anniversary.
The first Open Knowledge Festival (#OKfest) took place in Helsinki, Finland, September 17-22, 2012. The festival, arranged by the UK based Open Knowledge Foundation was dedicated to the growing culture of openness extended through digital technology. Following that spirit it covered 13 different “topic streams” coordinated by multiple program planners and attracting talks, panels, workshops and hackathons pitched through an open call. Throughout the festival 6 of the many parallel sessions were constantly streamed live online, all of these recordings are (openly) available.
The topic streams included everything from Open Democracy and Open Development, through Open Cities and Open Education, to Open Design and Data Visualization. The one thing shared throughout the sessions was a conviction that opening things up is generally a good thing that can leads society in the right direction.
I was in Helsinki as a guest of Pixelache and the Mushrooming Network giving a workshop titled Dis-Information-Visualization (more on that in a different post). My contributions to OKfest was two slightly more skeptical sessions in the Open Design (Wikipedia Illustrated) and Open Cities (Life in the Urban Panopticon) streams. Yet as a volunteer with the Israeli Public Knowledge Workshop (PKW) I was mainly interested in discussions around government transparency and civic engagement. This is also what I focus on in this post.
Best nametags ever! Each of them a custom laser-cut…
A Global Movement
The Open Knowledge Foundation is mainly an Open Gov NGO, so the Transparency and Accountability topic stream was a prominent one. On the first morning session of the first day after a few speakers gave their case studies, there was a lightning round presenting around 25 different government transparency projects from around 25 different places in the world. Each presenter was given 2 minutes and one slide. Funny enough most of them spoke of pretty similar efforts and challenges: governments reluctant to release data, lack of standardization, efforts to find partnerships with representatives, and so on… I could’ve just repeated the same story for our work in the PKW but instead I decided to tell the uplifting story of the “Opening the Finance Committee” project — the committee’s protocols were berried in print archives and our volunteers decided to force them open by scanning and crowdsourcing their digitization. 12 hours after launching the project’s website, the government got the message and released the protocols online in a machine readable format. We got some enthusiastic claps for that.
The Declaration on Parliamentary Openness
Another interesting session focused on ways for parliament monitoring organizations (PMOs) to collaborate, especially under the umbrella of the joined “Declaration on Parliamentary Openness”. The declaration, signed by more than 80 orgs (including us) from more than 55 countries, is a collaboratively written document laying out principles and best practices for governments to follow and for PMOs to push for.
The 44 points document is not necessarily something to expect govs to fully implement at once (though it could be nice), it is mainly used as a platform for cross-pollination between PMOs and as a tool of leverage to further advance the cause.
María Baron, from the Argentinian Directorio Legislativo, shared their strategy in using the document even before it was published. They got their government (which she personally doesn’t like that much) invested in advance as a partner and invited them to actually comment on and influence the declaration. Her group evaluated the Argentinian government’s standing on each of the 44 points in the document, not comparing them the UK or the Netherlands, but to the neighboring Chile, Peru, Paraguay & Uruguay. When it was clear that in this comparison the Argentinian gov is not looking so good, they warned they’ll be going to the press with the alarming results. The government in response set a joined work group with the PMO to change the reality for the better.
The declaration is written as a live document. It can receive inline comments adding local perspectives. Even better, it is built to collect local examples and updates that can serve as case studies and leverages for parallel efforts.
An interesting remark from Sarah Schacht (from Knowledge As Power) was that in most cases the politicians can’t necessarily change much in the government’s approach to openness as it’s the clerks who set the standards. Beyond the big words about democracy and transparency that politicians would gladly align themselves with, the staff has to be on board. It is true that some clerks won’t act without higher political will, but they often are much more critical players in the process than we usually consider. We won’t win them over by waving open standards and democratic euphemism but by listening to what they need and by understanding what the tools mean for them. We should remember that their focus is mostly on the document management system, for them openness is an after thought.
In this conversation I have also learned about two relevant projects that are gaining some global interest. The first, Akoma Ntoso (http://akomantoso.org), is a machine readable XML format for parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents. The second, Bungeni (http://Bungeni.org) builds on top of Akoma Ntoso to provide a suite of (Python based) open source tools for drafting, managing, consolidating and publishing legislative and other parliamentary documents. The names of these projects may sound African, that’s because they are. In these projects openness is not an afterthought but a foundational essence. Obviously, once standards and tools are shared the potential for cross-PMO Open Source collaboration is huge.
The steps to take full advantage of this document initiative is to print it, translate it, localize it (make it fit the local political system and culture). Out of the 44 points in the declaration, each country can choose to focus on its few target points, then obviously share examples and updates with the other PMOs by annotating the living document and participating in the mailinglist.
Data Overload
As engaging and exciting as it was, almost all of the conversations in the festival seemed to be very low level – more about opening data, less about what to do with the data once open. Personally, I feel like the openness is just the beginning, and even if it is not complete, heck, even if we have to get the data by scraping PDF files, open knowledge is not only about informatics.
I often use the DIKW model which generally says that DATA given context becomes INFORMATION give meaning becomes KNOWLEDGE given insight becomes WISDOM. I would add “…given organizing becomes ACTION”. Yet, the Open Knowledge Festival was much more concerned with open data than with open knowledge. It seems like this movement is breeding a new phenomenon: the spreadsheet activist. It’s a somewhat apolitical way of dealing with politics and that’s not good. When there was any discussion of contextualizing the data, the automatic solution was always: Data visualization. And you know what I think about that…
It got me thinking about the time when we chose to call our NGO the “Public Knowledge Workshop”. At first I regretted the departure from the term “Open Knowledge” that was already spreading around Europe. But now I think that “Public Knowledge” is actually a much more committed term. Open Knowledge can be piles of valuable books freely and openly available to read, inspect, remix and distribute, even if no one actually does that. Public Knowledge means that data, information, knowledge, are being used and shared, not just potentially but actively. This requires much more than making the data available, it requires us to put it into action, and much more, to get it to drive civic engagement and to actively improve not only our information systems, but our societies at large.
Trying to be proactive, I grabbed Banjamin Ooghe, from the French PMO Regards Citoyens, for a one-on-one session. He gave me a demo of the parliament monitoring work they do and I responded with a demo of our projects. They’re doing some interesting stuff with search and automation, taking advantage of the Open Source Solr search engine. They’re also making much less use of user generated content than we are. I posted my interview of him demoing on YouTube, to show the gang back home. I loved his response to the way some activists rush to declare themselves as non-partisan. He said: “We’re not non-partisan. We’re trans-partisan.” We were both tremendously inspired and agreed that this is exactly what the next OKfest (next year, in Switzerland) should have more of. Let’s make it happen!
The 1st Open Knowledge Festival was also the host of the 1st Dis-Information-Visualization workshop, a critical attempt to actively explore the dark side of information visualization. In the full day workshop (led by me, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and organized by Pixelache and the Mushrooming Network) 4 groups were encouraged to lie with infographics. Rather than falsifying the data, the dis-info-visualizers have manipulated its meaning by creating truthful, yet misleading representations.
We started with an introductory presentation offering a few critical tools through which to investigate (and generate) visual manipulation. The talk suggested that rather than looking at data information visualization as “Beautiful Evidence” (to quote the title of a book by Edward Tufte) we should read them as often beautiful and sometimes even seductive arguments.
This week I’ll be presenting Wikipedia Illustrated and participating in other events at Helsinki’s Open Knowledge Festival. I would love to see you there:
Thursday, Sep 20th, 6:30pm Life in the Urban Panopticon Discussion - a panel discussion on privacy and policy in public space as a part of the Open Cities topic stream
Saturday, Sep 22th, 10am Dis-Information-Visualization a workshop hosted by Pixelache and the Mushrooming Network and actively exploring the dark side of InfoVis
The following is a Hebrew translation and presentation documentation for my Sept 2010 paper. I recommend reading the original, hyperlinked and slightly more up-to-date text in English. Both the original article and a video of the accompanying presentation are available in English.
a spiritual plugin visualizing the (forced) confessions obtained by divine web trackers.
As the Decode exhibition opens I am very happy to launch a brand new project today, Good Listeners, commissioned by the V&A with generous support from the Porter Foundation and in collaboration with Design Museum Holon.
Good Listeners is a browser plugin that exposes the secret ways in which our browsing habits are shared with and mined by 3rd party web trackers (like Google Analytics and Facebook “Like”) without our consent or knowledge. Whenever a site exposes the visitor’s data to a third party service a confessional booth window is opened and the priest in the window offers words of invisible wisdom, divine providence and spiritual guidance pertaining to matters of web browsing, social networking, e-commerce and digital identity.
p>I wish I was in NYC these days for Mobility Shifts, an international future of learning summit. My recent parenthood along other commitments prevented me from joining but I was happy to contribute to the Learning Through Digital Media reader where I published an essay about my experience teaching with collaborative blogs. The peer-review process was interesting, and we were all invited to review and comment on each others works paragraph by paragraph. This definitely improved my paper and was generally an enjoyable and educating process.
Like the rest of the essays in the book, mine titled: “When Teaching Becomes an Interaction Design Task: Networking the Classroom with Collaborative Blogs” is published on the site and is available for download in multiple formats. My “Topics in Digital Media” graduate students at NYU’s Media Culture & Communication program have created a video response to the paper, which is possibly one of the most exciting memories I take with me from my NYC teaching years.
I am embedding an online version of the book here and would cross post the full article below it. I hope you would enjoy the essay, and hopefully find it useful for your own teaching. Let me know what you think.
Israel’s greatest political uprising in recent years is fighting to “not be political”. Why? And would that hurt it’s chances of social change?
The first morning in Tel Aviv's tent city (by Gal Kedem)
In the last week we’ve seen the rise of a popular revolt against the housing bubble. It started as a simple Facebook event in Tel Aviv but within days multiple tent cities sprung all around the country. Between these tents citizens meet, spend the night, argue about the right way to go and enjoy some free music and a unique mix of a festive & revolutionary atmosphere.
The NYTimes writes: Spirit of Middle East Protests Doesn’t Spare Israel. But while the international community might imagine these protests calling for democracy for everyone between the river and the sea, the end of the occupation or at least the reversal of the Netanyahu/Liberman government’s series of anti-democratic laws, this is not exactly the case.
What are we fighting for?
You see, while Netanyahu brags about a stable economy, the high GDP and the low unemployment rates, it might impress the NYTimes, but it doesn’t impress the residents of Tel Aviv. We are not that stupid, we drill deeper into the statistics to find that while employment rates might be low (~6%), families with both parents working can rarely make it through the month. We work hard and yet we stay poor. In fact every 4th family is poor, and 2 out of every 5 children is poor.
But this is not an uprising of the poor. It is an uprising of the middle class, especially the younger generations the 20+ and 30+ who are working their asses off and are trying to not slip into the widening margins of the statistics I just mentioned. In a very enraged and damning column published on Ynet today Shlomo Kraus writes:
You, who received the state on a silver plate, are calling us ‘spoiled’. The joke will be on you when in old age you would need the warm hug of the welfare state. We will explain to you then that geriatric care depends on supply and demand.
The ‘you’ are our parents (and leaders) generation. The ones who have grown in a welfare state and enjoyed its fruits in the form of affordable housing, social rights, workers rights and so on, and then adopted Neo-Liberalism wholeheartedly to make some extra bucks on our backs. In the tent city today a man in his 50s approached me and asked: “Are you with the organizers?” (he didn’t wait for an answer) “Tell them to go to the mayor and demand what we got 20 years ago. Back then the municipality payed half our rent for two years.”
Just don’t say the ‘P’ word
From outside Israeli politics is complex. What most see from afar is the dangerous game it plays between its democratic and Jewish identities (constantly pitted against each other by 44 years of occupation and by the policies and legislation of the current government).
But it’s also complex from inside. The thousands who are camping in the cities boulevards and squares, marching on the luxury towers with signs and torches, and chanting anti-capitalism slogans calling for affordable housing are also asking to not make this struggle “political”. The government is the key target here, but the protestors still do not want to call it “politics”. 18 years after the Oslo accords the “Peace Process” is so dead that most Israelis would rather die and not be called “lefties” (quite literally when you think about it). The Israeli public is disenchanted with the classic division of Israeli politics in which the left was pro-peace and a 2 state solution and the right was pro-security and less eager to compromise. The dominant narrative is that the left has not only lost that argument but also betrayed Israel (by compromising its security and aligning with the enemy’s interests). In Israel 2011, thanks to the failures of the peace process, the anti-democratic efforts of forces on the right and Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation, left = treason.
So the people marching in the streets are labeling their struggle as economic, social, civic, urban, democratic, revolutionary, anything… just not leftist and not “political”. And indeed the Tent Protest makes for strange sleeping bag fellows: hipsters and homeless, far left anarchists and far right reactionary nationalists, pot heads and bourgeoisie families with children… They all fear that this rare alliance that for once alleviated the public sphere from the Right/Left deadlock will vanish if we dare confront our political sub-conscience and label ourselves politically.
Even hardcore anti-occupation activists are biting their tongues and agree to not talk about the red elephant in the room. They do try to connect this to the struggle of Palestinian families being evacuated from their homes in Jaffa, Ramla and Jerusalem but are careful to keep it within the so-called a-political housing discourse.
And what about some goals?
One of the most common arguments against the uprising is that it does not have clear goals. There are a lot of different factions under the protest tent. They can’t decide whether the struggle should focus on housing (the original plight of the protest) or expand to the wider social policy of the state. They do not know whether to join hands with some politicians or to deny them the photo-op and kick them out of the camp. They don’t know whether to decide on a list on demands or how to really defend against the government spin doctors.
My own take is quite different. Right now I’m not that interested in conclusions. There are some amazing things happening in and around the tents. And the longer they persist the more amazed would the government be at this powerful and passionate uprising. Let the economists and the politicians suggest plans and let the academics, journalists and social activists analyze them. A housing crisis is not an easy or immediate problem to solve, let alone the whole economic policy of the last two decades. This will not be solved in the next days, weeks or months.
But right now we are achieving a different parallel and possibly even more important byproduct. We should learn from what our Arab neighbors taught us: find a common target, work together, stop being afraid, rediscover people power. Neither our neighbors nor we would enjoy the fruits of a dramatic overnight economic justice. But like our neighbors we are fighting against a dictatorship. The dictatorship of despair and political determinism. The one that led Israel to a paranoiac passive aggressive policy and have put its public sphere on sleeping pills.
The residents of these tents are not sleeping, this civic engagement thing is just too cool to let it slip. Just don’t call it “politics”, yet…
Rather than doing unpaid corporate cartography,
join us in mapping the world together as a publicly shared resource.
In April 19th 2011 Google announced its new Google Mapmaker expedition to send its users to map the US. This would seem like a great innovative platform for mapping our streets together for those who don’t know that a service like this have actually existed since 2004. Open Street Map is a great collaborative project which Google chose to compete against rather than collaborate with.
In Google Mapmaker, all of your edits would belong to Google. In Open Street Map all of our edits belong to everybody who agrees to equally share them. Google preferred to keep its map proprietary and to prevent equal access to it from those who created it, which it ironically calls “citizen cartographers”. It is sad to say that even Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are working in collaboration with the public through Open Street Map rather than create a proprietary competitor. Think about it, it’s like undermining Wikipedia by editing a Googipedia instead…
A year of edits in Open Street Maps
You probably understand this conflict of interests and would choose to draw your streets in our map. But Google, being Google has a much wider outreach and can easily mislead people about “The Meaning of Open”. Therefore I made a very small browser plugin to install on your mom’s browser to protect her from cartographic exploitation by a corporate entity.
The plugin in action: An opportunity to rethink which map to draft
What Reclaim the Street Map! does is simply send an alert when opening Google Mapmaker and suggests using Open Street Map instead. If approved, it would redirect to OpenStreetMap.org if not, it would stay on the page. Simple.
So until Google chooses to do less evil, to be a good citizen and to not exploit your mom, please…
For transparency’s sake this is the Javascript code that the plugin would run on google.com/mapmaker:
var r=confirm(
'Reclaim the street Map!' + '\n' +
'Rather than doing unpaid corporate cartography, join us in mapping the world together as a publicly shared resource.'
);
if (r==true) {
alert('Great choice! Redirecting to OpenStreetMap.org');
window.location.href='http://openstreetmap.org';
}
else {
alert('Interesting choice, good luck!');
}
My name is Mushon Zer-Aviv. I'm a designer, an educator and a media activist based in NY & Tel Aviv. In this blog I write about my work and interests, ranging loosely between networked collaboration and Middle East politics, Between Open Source and design.
By