Consumer Focus: From broadcast to conversation – making open data work for you workshop

Spent this morning at the consumer Focus "From broadcast to conversation – making open data work for you" workshop aimed primarily at the voluntary sector making use of Open Data. First speaker Mark O'Neil from the cabinet office and part of the recently formed Government Digital Service (DGS) - he talked about the 'single domain' which is the governments replacement of direct.gov. The website is built around a API allowing data to be shared, however it is currently a beta and provides services. He also talked about 'agile delivery' methods, which equates to the wisdom of doing things quickly in a focused manner, rather than spending years building a massive system that is either inappropriate for use or no longer relevant. (Which is a bit similar to James Wallbank's promotion of 'good enough ICT') Mark stressed that he spent a lot of time talking to users, which seemed primarily to mean business users who provided services to what I would call the 'general public'. Within government he identified four areas of operation, at the level of citizen, business, inside government and specialist area of operation. He was then asked about the issues of read /write access and admitted we are a long way of that yet. He was up for email conversations though, contact mark.oneil@digital.cabinet.office.gov.uk.

Next up was Ed Parks who also worked for the cabinet office (is there a theme developing ?), in the transparency team. He talked a bit about the process which promoted Open Data to its current position as an explicit part of Open Government project (this came about as a result of a request from the PM), and although a project of transparency and citizenship, was mostly justified against business metrics. As he stated "Open Data as an engine for growth". Someone in the audience queried the method for deciding which datasets are released, as his company had come into direct competition with another government agency. The point was that the decision to publish particular datasets is driven by financial and political agendas, and that Open Data was used, as the last speaker said, 'as a Trojan horse'. Ed mentioned the the public data group was recently set up to offer the possibility to query the governments policy, and we should all take part (address here) He also mentioned a recent Guardian article (here is a response to it) that addressed some of these concerns, other initiatives included the setting up of the Open Data Initiative in Shoreditch, to help small business take advantage of Open Data, the Open Data/Privacy white paper and the Open Business forum and the government consultation group that featured the stars of Open Data promotion in this country (Rufus Pollock (OKFN) , Tim Berners-Lee W3C and Nigel Shadbolt. Cynically Harwood's  "people who are awaiting power'  springs to mind.

Next up was Dan ? from Nominetrust ?. He consulted with charities in their possible use of Open Data. These included wheelmap.org, RSPB and Barnsley hospital. He gave the example of the toilet map whereby a service (http://toiletfinder.org/about)  (there is also one built by  a charity around incontinence issues) also acted as a campaign tool, as in 'Why are their no toilets here". Dan cited the Indigo Trust as an organisation that had done considerable work in making use of and talking about the difficulties of implementing Open Data practices in charities.

Javier Ruiz Diaz from the Open Rights Group talked about the realities of Open Data publishing. He talked about three basic types of government data, PSI (Public Service Industry) this is core data - geotagged public data, this is where the money is (OS, Census etc). The second Policy/Accountability and the third public services. He also made reference to the use of Open Data as a Trojan Horse under which government ministers (Francis Maude) could include plans to share welfare data with private company Experian to reduce welfare fraud. He cited a recent UK based survey that the majority of the public want public data to Open and available. And again referring to the usability of Open Goverment data he cited the example of the publishing of a central government data set which contained all the expenditure for a particular year which was largely unusable due to the lack of metadata to contextualise it. So the metric used for volumes was not detailed 300 what ? the frequency per year/month/week ? etc, rendering much of the data unusable. He also pointed to some non commercial projects which have made use of Open Data, the Europeana has published Open Data about may of the cultural archives held across Europe, and on speaking about broken data cylces (i.e. the government not allowing read/write privileges of open government data) he invoked a distributed methodology whereby the dataset with the most users would be the one that was used, and would be default by the one that was most uptodate. Some interesting companies were mentioned most prominently Swirrl who provide consultancy to large public entities, in this case Hampshire County Council.

Show Case

The early afternoon session featured a showcase of projects: Crabgrass an alternative social media platforms for protest groups, Briar, a secure news and discussion system, more can be found here. Of interest to me was the presenter of Lorea's reference to the mindset of programmers who would prefer to make software from scratch rather than make use of what is available, which tied into a slightly macho - mines better that yours attitude. She also mentioned the book "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" by American feminist Jo Freeman, which might worth looking at. The classification of a distributed system as federated servers - or Disapora as a federated social network, and from Elijah Sparrow (Crabgrass) that Disapora was once a P2P network but the programmers could not make it work, so they went to a federated network solution.

Harry Halpin

Harry Halpin - UnlikeUS 2012

Harry Halpin woke everyone up from their late morning slumper by shouting into the mike alot - it worked. He is a member of the W3C web consortium which tries to lobby on web policy. He sort of presented a history of the 'like' button, but included lots of other tasty net historical elements. These included the fact that the 'Like' button includes RDF code. So when your browsing choices are being logged it using the structure of RDF, the only problem is the 'who' of who is looking at a particular piece of content is being saved back to FB closed database. Halpin also pointed to a interesting document which outlined the vision for social media in terms of the social graph from 2007, all of which has been implemented by FB with a few pertinent changes (one of the documents collaborators David Recordon now works for FB). He also stated that "Facebook is capturing your ontology - your Life world" which provoked a few chuckles. 

Software Matters

The mid morning session concerned the various modalities of Facebook operation. I had at the start of the conference tried to count the number of times "Facebook" was mentioned, but after a frequency of 3 a minute I gave it up as fruitless. Points of note were the consideration of different CSMP characteristics, FB is about intimacy, Google search about expansion. The various economies that have informed the expansion of the web - The 'hit' economy, the 'link' economy and what we have now - the 'like' economy' which sees an expansion of FB outside of its traditional walled garden through an externalisation via the 'like' button (which previously only appeared inside the platform (Anne Helmond & Caroline Gerlitz) -this has externalised the open graph turning it into a social graph, which is impossible to opt out of because of the passive interactivity of social plugins such as the 'Like' button. David Berry author of 'The philosophy of software' made some points of note: he talked of 'nudge behaviour' as being promoted by web bugs (social plugins), he cited a Pew statistic 73% of Americans did not want to be tracked online". He mentioned a project by Mark Merino called 'Scaler'  His books include, the forthcoming Critical Theory and the Digital (due 2012), The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (2011), and Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source (2008). He is co-author of Libre Culture (2008), and editor of Understanding Digital Humanities (2012).

UnlikeUs Morning Meeting

I attended the UnlikeUs morning meeting - I felt like a sneak sitting at the back making notes. I wasn't though, just interested how they planned on moving forwards etc. Two things of note, Geert Lovink compared social media to pop culture, which is why it was not taken seriously, or was perhaps easy to dismiss. This relates to a point I have made in my research about artist taking leave from it as it doesn't constitute a serious platform, or location of inquiry. Whilst I understand both sides I just do not feel comfortable to remove myself from it. The other notable point was that the Netherlands was as equally fucked financially as the UK academic scene.

Public-Private

The afternoon session was divided up into a discussion of public - private affects of social media. The first speakers Nusta Nina talked about different CSMP user catgorisations and practices including the digital narcissism or vulnerable narcissism of  'The Nexters' (young people). I.e young people do not at this moment in their lives, care about privacy. The idea of a 'distributed identity' and how concepts of OpenID had still to take hold. Another point that I have mentioned in my research is the idea of terms & conditions creep. In that the terms and conditions you sign up to in 2005 change over the years, and generally you are not required to resign up or are given the option to leave (with all your data which related to your initial sign up), which ties in to a call for a greater media literacy amongst users. Arnold Roosendaal made the point that the 'Like' button works in a passive manner, and does not need to be clicked to record data (something that is now illegal in parts of Germany). He then went on to talk about ID construction, in particular mentioned the Gary Walker experiment which exposes the ease of ID forgery, and also the reliance that third party platforms, such as Spotify have on Facebook Connect, which during a recent server collapse meant that Spotify was down as well.

Missing Projects (UnlikeUs)

Some of the artist showcase were missing from the afternoon session. Tobias Leingruber's project did (until it was taken down as part of a cease and desist order from Facebook) engages with the idea of global identity management, whereby he issues real world ID cards which approximate those the FB offers using Facebook Connect, and devalues those produced by countries in the form of passports. Other projects can be viewed here  and a discussion here.
What is of note is that the critique of Facebook as global identity manager is happening from inside Facebook, not as a result of an exodus, and this marks it out as different from the norm.

Artists Use, misuse or dissertion of social media

The afternoon session featured a collection of artists who in some manner had engage in social media through their practice. Walter Langelaar spoke about his group moddr who made the popular Web Suicide Machine artwork (which was actually preceded by a burger King advert). The next piece they are working on is the GIve Me My Data plugin that allows users to download all their data from the walled garden of platforms such as Facebook. Speaking afterwards to Walter we talked about his exodus from CSMP commercial social media platforms, and the fact he will not be returning, as well as the difficulty of working with communities with FLOSS, as a way of staging an alternative rendering of social media practice.

Dimitry Kleiner - UnLikeUs 2012

Other practitioners of note were Dmytri Kleiner who presented various projects made with in association with telekommunisten. Of particular note was the project thimbl a micro-blogging application that relies on the finger protocol , which was developed in the 1970's, and is included in all current server releases. A case of certain communitarian principles being in place early on and then being included, but not used as these principles were realigned. As Kleiner stated ' capitalism will never fund P2P networks as there is not place for the cash booths'.

Reification 2.0

In the second part of the morning session of the UnlikeUs conference Dylan Wittkower gave is presentation. His research focuses on the sociological appraisal of the social graph invoked by social media. He noted several phenomena ranging from the marketing of products to friends within social media (in order to win a prize) to the real focus of his talk, the methods that are used to construct and expose identity see:

"Wittkower also discusses four main strategies of identity construction on the spectrum of proactive, reactive, unitary and divergent. An untidy identity – found at the corner of proactive and divergent – relies on the actions of others, such as tagging, in the making of an individual’s online preseence. A spectacular identity – proactive and unitary- draws on Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle. It is an experience of the Self as a thing, protecting itself outwardly and ridden with interpassivity and simulacrazation. A distributed identity – reactive and divergent – is constructed on the walls of others, on group pages or on fan pages. A lurking identity – reactive and unitary – does just that: lurks aroud the Web and takes no further action. Wittkower believes that some of these strategies will resolve into more meaningful forms of interaction. Whereas friendertainment might lead to teleboredom, asking the network may very likely lead to fruitful conversation."

Bits of Freedom

The police picking up their Big Brother Award 2011

On arriving at the UnlikeUs conference we popped into the last session of the Thursday, bits of freedom were talking about various projects - particularly where they had influenced legal precedent in respect to Facebook and privacy laws in Europe. All of this points towards the campaign Europe versus Facebook, where the incompatibilities between FB and European law are played out, for example in requesting your data from FB, see here. Bits of Freedom also host the big brother awards which celebrate those agencies and players most culpable in abuses of freedom and privacy.

unlikeus conference amsterdam day one [tmorning]

Todays conference was really good, and the venue was the upstairs from the subterrarian pit where yesterdays presentations took place. after a great breakfast Gert lovink gave a really good intro calling for a form of web sociology.

Jodi Dean (usa) spoke very interestingly about the constitution of the social in social media critique. she gave three definition of the contention that society does not exist. Her first the neo-liberal version as espoused by thatcher, the second a rendering provided by ANT/Object theory and third the version provided by Lacau & Mouffe. Her point was that social media is a mirror each of these contentions and the motif of the network, as the representative of the social, is a simulacra of these relationships. her claim was that if society did exist then there would not be a need for social media platforms.

She consistently problematicised social media critique for always talking of dispersion, privacy and identity concerns (a position she stated it shared with the neo liberal dismissing of society) what she asked would their version of social media look like ? was not more a fact that these critics had - from a psychoanalytic viewpoint - had issues with trust, that they did not trust these vast conglomerations.

So for dean it was not the issues of the vast numbers of users, the bottleneck, but rather that these were concentrated into the hands of one person/company. And that dispersion is more likely to produce the 'one' of neo liberal politics, as she said, 'no long tail without the strong one' - and there is in fact an underlying desire that people want to be part of a whole. for instance in the claim that twitter enabled the recent arab spring protests was dismissed as confusing the form, which allows for collectivity, and focusing on the content. FB then is the private ownership of this form of collectivity and that is the problem with FB.

Topology: Spaces of Transformation Topology: Secrets of Space Topology: Embodying Transformation 5 November 2011–16 June 2012 Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium Bankside London SE1 9TG

I went to this on saturday @ Tate Modern: Artist Olafur Eliasson in conversation with Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Chaired by Catherine Malabou. It was good, and in part quite funny. Latour and Weibel completely disagreed about the construction of space, for Latour space is inscribed, which he related to art history, Weibel made use  of graph theory, after Weibel had explained his position Latour said 'I disagree with everything you have said'. Somewhere in the middle was Eliasson, who has worked and made work with both Weibel and Latour. The discussion was pretty stunted as a result of their intransigence, although Eliasson acted as a good glue between the two, the chair was pretty poor.