OKN Conference - Berlin

Spent the last week at the Open Knowledge Foundation conference in Berlin. I was interested to find some methods for taking the data from Landscape-Portrait and locating it in the public realm. The OKN has it's own tool CKAN,  which allows users to publish database into their data catalogue, where public databases are listed. Of interest also was Wiki Scraper. This site customisable provides tools to scrape data from websites, and publish them in a user friendly format. Tools are also available on the Wiki Media site www.toolserver.org and freebase.org, which is a location for open data databases. Google also offers Google Fusion tables whereby users can upload their datasets. Concurrently Google is beta testing Google Public data, where they offer a set of tools to operate 'approved' governmental data, specifically in a temporal.

Several conceptual frames applied to Landscape-Portrait. The notion of digital artefacts, such as public databases, would compromise the commons. The invocation to move public data into a more usable format through exposure to the semantic web. And it is within this semantic frame whereby the provenience of the data might be included.  Also URI (Universal Resource Identifier) through which each piece of data is assigned a fixed URL, and this combined with contextual data, allows the data to make that much talked about movement from data to information onto knowledge.

Richard Stallman from the FSF was in equal part interesting and slightly amusing.  He talked passionately about a no compromise approach to Free - as in freedom of speech not Free beer - which involved slightly dissing Linus Torvalds and the open source movement. In particular his differentiation between proprietary and non-proprietary software. Stallmans 4 essential freedoms seem to have been taken on board by the Open Data movement, they are:

Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program, as you wish, for any purpose.


Freedom one is the freedom to study the source code and then change it so that it does what you wish.


Freedom two is the freedom to help your neighbour, which is the freedom to distribute, including publication, copies of the program to others when you wish.


Freedom three is the freedom to help build your community, which is the freedom to distribute, including publication, your modified versions, when you wish.


These four freedoms make it possible for users to live an upright, ethical life as a member of a community and enable us individually and collectively to have control over what our software does and thus to have control over our computing.

Stallmans also made the point that if Open data can only be operated on by proprietary software then your back to square one. Stallman kept returning to his mantra 'Code is not Law'.

Applications of note were Diaspora, which employed a P2P methodology to a creation of a social media platform.
Although some commentators noted that it had moved from a solely P2P structure to a situation whereby 100 central users operated as a blanket of servers, housing all the content.
Michael Bauwens talked about social media not as a means in itself, rather as representing an ideological shift in western socio-economic traditions. The movement toward peer production, the claim towards horizontal sociality, the commons. Whereby the community determines the qualities of the artefact, for example open design, GNU licence, social charters.

Mentions of Interesting texts by Douglas RushKoff -

• 2010. Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age Ebook ISBN 9781935928164
• 2009. Life, Inc.: How the World Became A Corporation and How To Take It Back ISBN 9781400066896
• 2005. Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out ISBN 9780060758691
• 2003. Open Source Democracy A Demos Essay

Professor Nigel Shadbolt from Southampton University operates as a consultant to the government upon matters of open data, and made use of the example of the south pole project Old Weather, whereby old ships logs are being uploaded through crowdsourcing,  which I saw as part of Tom Corby's presentation at data landscapes symposium
My thought was that if he was interested in this he would also be interested in Landscape-Portrait.

An interesting anomaly was announced whereby open data has been released into the public realm, for example the number of bus stops in Sunderland, this data has then been cleaned up via crowd sourcing, adding all the missed or incorrect entries, so now you have an updated, clean dataset, but the government will not take this new dataset back into it's archives, as it cannot verify the agency in updating it.

This problem with write back also touches on the many areas not commented on by the conference. For example the methodology used in creating the data in the first place, its good on the means for dissemination, but poor in thinking about enabling accessing to the data. At the moment the act of publishing, particuarily by governmental agencies, is largely symbolic, the use of the data confined to niche operators as seen at this conference. Michael Gurstein from the Center for community informatics research development and training, commented on this, and talked about the 'data divide'. Making the point the literacy levels in the USA are generally at a Grade 8 level, and talked about using daisy standards of accessibility.


One thing, with the exception of Adnan Hadzi from Deptford tv, there were no artists invited to talk at this conference. At one point the Q&A turned to questions of the provenience of a particular dataset. Who had changed what, when etc. This very issue was the focus of the art work Logo_wiki, the artwork interrogated the IP address of users who had made changes to the Wikipedia, and flagged those that belonged to corporate and governmental agencies.

Jean Claude - Exeter University, Cure for Malaria - Speaker Cameron Neylon.
Check out TIM B L 'Ned' presentation in coalville.

Need to think about what type of licence Landscape-Portrait dataset is published under, CopyLeft, ODBL, art work, CC-BY-SA
Nee to think about what format the data is published in: Linked-data, RDF ? what are the pro's and con's of each.

Knowledge4all.com ?

Open formats for publishing video, Ogg and Googles WebM format, which is open source but is owned by Google, who make the choices for upgrade path etc.

Archive.org

www.papertiger.tv

Installing software of a memory stick rather than requiring users to install, as with project evidence locker.

There was lots of governmental agencies represented , legislation.gov.uk - which offers layers of tools, relating to different levels of complexity, for example data visualisation tools, SPARQL queries.

All this has led me to think about getting hold of the datasets for the Olympics, and maybe entering them into the BusTops project.
Are they available, if not why ?

Beyond Angels, Elephants, good intentions and red-nose rebellion

I attended the 'Beyond Angels, Elephants, good intentions and red-nose rebellion' conference in Bristol today, as I understood it the reason for the conference was to think about the next step forward, in light of the current political climate. Some fairly well known but interesting work was presented by Sally Tallan from the Serpentine, Mark Ball from LIFT, Andrea Schlieker, chaired by Paul O'Neill. Of real interest was the work, or more importantly the ambition of projects curated by Briggitte van der Sande, who joins an elite club of curators who have designated seemingly successful projects as failures, in spite of the pristine, context free presentation aesthetic of Powerpoint.

Whilst enjoying the conference I also think that it failed to address the malaise which already existed within public arts and which will/has been exacerbated via the current economic and political climate. In fact I would argue that presenting work in this pristine manner is part of the problem, the collaborators upon whom these projects depend are all but absent, which, in part, impacts upon the discipline and rigor of public art practices, further contributing to Public Arts not being taken seriously by the mainstream art establishment; something alluded to by Louise Owen in her talk about publics.

Furthermore, in using the same methodology to present collaborative, socially engaged works, such as you would to present gallery works (yet simultaneously not showing these works in a gallery, as is the case with the Serpentine) much of the discursive nature of public arts is lost.

This position was typified by the breakout session about 'regeneration and planning', where Gillian Fearnyough listed a set of public realm bodies and agency to whom public art practitioners could appeal for funding: yet anyone who has worked in this sector for any amount of time will know, these agency in the main - developers, planners etc - were reluctant to enter into meaningful collaboration when funding was plentiful, now there isn't any funding one is minded to ask what is the point ? It strikes me that one role of a critical public art practice in these so called 'austere' times is to act as critical buffer against all this talk of 'place making' and the 'bespoke' architectural features of developers, not negate the hard won experiences of the last ten years in allowing a co-option by a conservative agenda. We don't need permission from these agencies to make work, especially when there is little being offered by these agencies.

Maybe it's time to adopt a different methodology, perhaps from digital network practices, whereby P2P or collectivism invokes a much less hierarchical model of production than one that's either in hawk to the art market, such as is exhibited at the Folkestone Triennial or one that operates, in the worst case scenario, as a creative contractor within a 'place making' team of professionals.

Pattern Tracer

When the writing dies down a bit i really want to look at this:

http://www.visualanalysis.com/products/pttca.php


it relates to a work I have been thinking about for a while, to do with generating a top ten of consumer durables that are allowed to be stolen, then tracked.

research analogue

I recently pushed my analogue tv out into the street, it was one of those with small wheels and shelf underneath, upon which was the old video. I left a sign on it saying free to a take, it was gone in 30 minutes, the video was left behind. The image of the video outside my house, on the street, made me think about the impending London based digital switch over, the end of analogue. I was thinking to make a work which commerated the analoque, as cultural history. The use of old media to generate a critique of digital media, how in looking at the tv on the street I was reminded by how absent digital media has made me, us in our neighbourhoods. Would it be possible to have a street of tv's outside of houses, each playing a household selected choice of content. By creating what many critics claim that social media is, but using non digital means, a critique could be developed, the discrepancies between the hype and the reaility of social connections is explored......

Supervisors -

Met with my supervisors yesterday for a review of my Lit Review. It went well and lots of thoughts and ideas came out of it, most importantly NOT taking on to much, in terms of research question. In my mind its whittled down to something like this, SEA art practice involved the viewer as participant/collaborator, as a result the discipline developed a critique of 'publics' as part of its methodology; Social Media makes use of terms to describe and involve it's public - the creativity of the multitude etc - and much critique has been written about the commercial exploitation of this 'public', in defining these two bodies of practice and critique could a set of parameters and insights be generated when thinking about web 3.0 - the semantic web - as a site for cultural activity commensurate with a new media socially engaged art practice NMSEA practice.

Public Data Activities

Just looking at the latest post from the OKF blog, and this having coincided with my finishing a draft of my chapter about web 2.0 - it feels very much where my research is heading. That the  methodologies of Web 2.0 - as scholz has stated there is a history of social media outside of tose constituted by commercial web 2.0 apps, in part derived from OS and activist media practices, can be used to act upon the huge amount of data sets that are becoming available via initiatives such as OKF. The issue for me, as practitioner is how to interface with these datasets; in thinking of them as material I feel compelled to get my hands on them and much about, but do not have the technical ability to do this. I need therefore to learn this, and quick, but this would happen in a more informed and collective manner, borrowing from the  communitarian nature of OS, rather than some lone, fiddler, artist type, trouble is I might be that type.

Landscape-Portrait OKF

I submitted an outline of Landscape-Portrait to OKF, my thought was to see if there was any interest in taking the data produced so far and making it available via Open Data protocols. This has always been the objective, and hopefully with some help this will be achievable. One thing, my making it open the stories that the site contains are made public, to used in any manner, I need to think about this, and how participants of the work might feel about it.