Category: Recommended Posts

Posted on

Disinformation Visualization: How to lie with datavis (the essay)

Following my Disinformation Visualization workshop at the Info Activism Camp, the wonderful people at the Tactical Tech Collective have invited me to publish these ideas as an essay on their site. I am cross-posting the opening here and encourage you to read the whole thing on the Visualizing Advocacy site (and get their wonderful book … Continue reading Disinformation Visualization: How to lie with datavis (the essay)

Posted on

OPEN DESIGN NOW / Learning By Doing

open-design-now-why-design-cannot-remain-exclusive

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.

Continue reading “OPEN DESIGN NOW / Learning By Doing”

Posted on

לדעת קהלים נסתרים / Getting intimate with Invisible Audiences (Hebrew Translation)

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.

Continue reading “לדעת קהלים נסתרים / Getting intimate with Invisible Audiences (Hebrew Translation)”

Posted on

Introducing Forks vs. Knives

Format note: Written as a grant proposal.

Forks vs. Knives – Developing the code that governs us

Describe your project

Reaching consensus is never easy and when it gets really tough some reach for their knives. We say, drop the knives and pick up the forks.

Imagine a site – fvsk.org – where each community can store its social pact – be it legal, economic, ethical or religious code – and share it with its members and the world. Much like the social coding sites – Github and Bitbucket – the site will let each community member create her own version, a “fork”, and then share and discuss it with others. Forking becomes an opportunity to reflect, explore and innovate.

But we will not stop at that, communities need a way to agree on a mutual social pact. FvsK will support a well-defined enactment process for accepting forks and updating a pact. Using the power of distributed version control systems (DVCS) such as Git and Mercurial we will create a system that keeps the entire history of changes to the social pact and allows each member to propose changes. We will use the key processes of DVCS – forking and merging – to encourage free flow of ideas and to formulate agreement. On top of the DVCS system we will use tested organizational workflow solutions (such as BPM) to model the current process of pact revision approval and create simple tools to improve that process.

Our long-term vision is to create a system that can serve any size of community – from the manifest of a small ad-hoc activist group to a country’s statutory law – providing a way to keep their pact dynamic and encourage members’ participation.

This project will launch in Israel, one of the most challenging political environments today, where opposing communities are torn over national, religious, economic, racial and cultural differences. The future of our region is dependent on gaining the permission to read, write, and enact the codes that govern us, and to dare innovate, engage and affect them.

During the first year of this project we will build a system to serve two Kibbutz communities to be elected from the 256 “Kibbutzim” in Israel. Being a communal village of a few hundred people, the bylaws of the Kibbutz are critical to its members. The issues of private vs. communal property are hotly debated as kibbutzim adapt to economic changes and the evolving needs and wants of their members. Continue reading “Introducing Forks vs. Knives”