I’m George’s Blog

So, finally I’m back, BlogRadio is back and Radio Rita is coming back (this Thursday).

I’ve got lots to post about, some long, some short but first lets get rid of what’s been causing the post blockage – my dissertation.

The Popularisation of the Hacker Ethic (PDF 500k)

The subject changed quite drastically from my early drafts and the paper I presented at Submerge as I ended up opening a huge can of worms by looking at the post-Marx Marxist theory of the Autonomists. I didn’t really leave myself enough time to tackle this properly or my suggestion of looking at the Hacker ethic through Hannah Arendt’s work so it feels a bit like this paper is just an introduction to a bigger one. Take a look though, there might be something there you like, I have to wait until January to get my results for it.

Just a few quick links that’ll let you know what I’ve been up to:

http://flickr.com/photos/imgeorge/
Penance to Kris Cohen who gave me a free Pro account only to be dismayed at how long it was taking me to use it.

http://www.rcainteractiondesign.org
Congratulations to all the second years that have just passed their final exams, an invitation to come see The Show for everyone else.

http://www.imgeorge.org/wiki/index.php?n=Topics.J2MEDevelopment
A wiki page I’ve started to document writing J2ME applications for mobile phones.

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/CuratingImmaterialitySystems/
The webcast of the Curating, Immateriality, Systems conference I attended at the beginning of the month, some really good presentations I will be working into my dissertation. I recommend the final questions panel if you want a quick overview of the day.

http://www.submerge.org.uk/industryawards/
Lucy and I have entered Pindices and Making a Difference at the University of Plymouth. Here’s hoping.

http://www.imgeorge.org/blog/assets/leavingparty.jpg
For all those following the R.C.A. Interaction Design shake-up – it’s official. For all the staff that have seen us through the past year – a very big thank you! For Lucy and Nina – there’ll always be a blog category here for you.

Today’s reading list comes courtesy of Iain Aitchison:

Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller’s The Pro-Am Revolution
Douglas Rushkoff’s Open Source Democracy

Both available as PDF downloads, these two Demos think-tank policy recommendations make interesting reading if you don’t mind the uneasy feeling that they haven’t researched every recommendation as much as they should have.

I’d also like to recommend Matt Webb’s presentation on Embedded Development, really interesting in relation to the conversations I was having with Kris Cohen about where user-centred design research sits when the audience becomes the designer.

Being really interested in phenomena that engage their audience in their mode of production (e.g. Open Source Software, Flickr, generative production, net-art, etc.) I spend most of my time at college contemplating software and online communities. I often get a lot of grief for this practice and I’m still not quite sure why, maybe it’s because it reminds people of the course’s old name – Computer Related Design. So imagine my delight to discover that for my latest brief I had been paired with Kris Cohen, a research fellow at the University of Surrey’s Sociology Department, Incite. Kris is currently researching photography on the internet, in particular photoblogs and Flickr and was effectively looking at my research (and dissertation) topics from a different angle. It was hard for us to stop talking during the 4 day project but the expectation that we would present something last Friday pushed us into quite an interesting experiment.

We spent most of our time looking at the difference between successful and unsuccessful attempts at making creative production more open or public and decided to create an experiment designed to extract people’s aversions to things like public publishing and Copyleft. Choosing Sociology as the test field for it’s strong academic ties and history as a peer-reviewed science we transferred a 1970s sociological study (including coding) from an impenetrable online archive to this Flickr account. We then interviewed several sociologists to see how they felt about the process of tagging (which is already common practice for many sociologists), interlinking and then publishing their data in a public space. We also wanted to get some feedback from the Flickrati to see how they felt about Flickr being used to tag text in this way. There are some comments over at Flickr and some on Kris’ blog and we have started to collate the responses for further study. Hopefully when we’ve both had time to digest last week’s conversations and interviews you’ll hear from us again.

I’d also like to give a big thank you to Kris for upgrading my Flickr account to a Pro account – I’ll be moving my old photo archive (colour and black and white) over just as soon as I get a chance.

Since posting the topic of my dissertation I’ve had some great responses from people I already knew and some that Google must have led my way. As part of the college requirements I had to produce a 1000 word draft that I wasn’t going to upload but because of all the interest I feel I should give something back. It’s really just a very brief summation of two of the books that have formed most my research to date: Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar and McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto. Ideally I’d like to just reference Raymond’s A Brief History of Hackerdom rather than waste words trying to summarize it in order to bring the average R.C.A. reader up to speed but re-writing it certainly helped me to digest it better. Anyway, download my draft, then read the whole of Raymond’s book (which really should have been, and be, required reading for both my undergraduate and postgraduate courses) then read A Hacker Manifesto to get to grips with the politics at play.

Also, if you’re interested, I’m hoping to present a paper based on my research so far at the Submerge 2005 symposium on Intellectual Property and digital production, 1st July 2005 at The L Shed, Industrial Museum, Bristol, U.K. more on that as it evolves.

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.