As college winds up for easter and the freelance work dips down briefly in-between jobs the to-do list has cleared out and it’s time to fill you in on what’s been eating my time for the last month.

Pindices

Pindices.org is my second time working with Lucy Kimbell, the last time was back in Plymouth while I was working on the Arch-OS: Software for Buildings project. This time round we’ve made something a bit more complex and a lot prettier. I’ll let Lucy explain what the site aims to do:

Personal Political Indices (Pindices) is a project by sociologist Andrew Barry and artist Lucy Kimbell. It tries to design ways to make political or citizenship activity visible, by asking individuals what acts they perform week to week. Through a gallery project and a website, participants are invited to make public their own activity and how they make sense of it.

You’ll see one of the outputs of the site to the left of this post - click the badge to see a more in-depth analysis of my political activity.

I have to give out a big thank you to a really good friend of mine, Lee Parry, who’s responsible for all of the client-side design and construction. I’ve wanted to work with him on an interesting project for a while now and I think you might be seeing some more interesting stuff from us just as soon as we can make the time.

Interaction Design Interim Show

So, before I’ve even had time to put up some documentation of my BlogRadio project, let alone its appearance in the Interim Show Regine from we-make-money-not-art.com has beaten me to it. Now all I need is a couple of days to fix up the code (after only two and a half days of production it’s functional but rests somewhere between the alpha and beta stages) and a machine external to college to host it on - the R.C.A. is following the popular trend of tightening its firewall so tight that I can’t get a signal out without a bit of a rethink.

Ways of Working 2 conference

And right in the thick of freelance and Interim Show panic what did I do? Booked myself into a conference of course! Thankfully this one was quite good and I managed to recognise some friendly faces through my bleary, wired eyes. I got to meet Prodromos Tsiavos from creativecommons.org.uk who assured us that the U.K. versions of the creative commons licenses should be online really soon, Stewart Home pointed out that you didn’t really have to worry about Copyright if you’re a Communist or don’t have enough money to be worth suing and Lawrence Liang made clear how advanced the appropriation markets are in India.

Data Browser contribution

Which leads nicely onto the news that a page from my Wiki will soon be appearing in DATA Browser 02: Engineering Culture. The page is the precursor to a series of workshops demonstrating how to appropriate consumer technology which will hopefully highlight the power relationships of the consumer=producer marketing model. Explore the Wiki for a more in-depth explaination.

Dissertation

So in amongst all the above I also had to squeeze out another project at college that I haven’t even mentioned yet and a proposal for my dissertation. I’ll save the project for when I’ve done some proper documentation and just give you my dissertation proposal:

Free, Libre, Open Source Software and Creativity in Programming

Through an in-depth look at the history of how the Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) publishing models have developed and several case studies of how particular FLOSS projects have mutated during this time, this paper will look at the state of creativity in software production.

By making objective predictions as to what this history points to, the intention is to answer the question: Will the cultural impact of FLOSS result in software programming being seen as a more creative act?

If you have any recommendations of essays, books, papers, etc. I should read or people I should talk to please let me know.