Transferblog

The first day of the doctorial symposium Open2009 in Helsinki was under the motto “Making Openness”. In the following I will summarise the sessions.

BTW: whoever wants to follow the Open2009 (until Friday afternoon) there are several possibilities:

• livestream
• Twitter feed
• Quaiku feed

1st session: Open collaboration

The session was about modells for collaboration and participation in decision making processes that affect society, a community or a company. The outstanding talk came from Peter Tattersall about Wiki planning for urban development: Peter Tattersall has taken the difficult task to develop more co-creation and public participation in urban planning. He wants to offer laypeople the opportunity to make positive suggestions and not just complaints as it is the case in most of the current citizen consultation processes. Therefore he developed Wiki-planning as a process of co-creation. Despite the name, the process works offline. The method: Invite the local community, take a room with 4-5 tables. On each table is a design task and some wooden blocks, sweets, coloured paper, etc…. A group of 4-5 people at each table, working for 10 min on the specific design task, using the materials on the table and then moving on to the next task until everyone has worked on every task. At the end there is a discussion. Afterwards an architect interpretes the results, makes plans and visuals and feeds them back into the community, asks them whether he was able to capture their ideas. Tattersall has meanwhile done about 30 workshops with incredible results. pictures of a Wiki planning workshop can be found here. We definitely want (and need) more of these simple low-tech approaches!

2nd session: Art and Museums

This session was about openness in the art context. First a very short talk by Mariana Salgado about museums and openness. She is an interaction designer and artist and worked a lot in museums and reflects on the ongoing discussion about more audience participation. There were not really a lot of new insights other than maybe that openness (opening up the museum for participation) and inclusiveness (giving access to people with special needs) are often dealt with by different people in the same institution.

Next there was the presentation by artist Petri Saarikko (Open-Ended Engagement) who worked with the Kiasma museum in Helsinki on a project. The details were a bit complicated but generally the whole exhibition project was meant to be about openness. Petri was brought in by another artist. At a certain point a conflict about how far openness should go developed between the curator and the other artist on one side and Petri on the other side. For Petri’s taste it didn’t go far enough and at some point he was forced to end the working relationship. However as part of his understanding of openness he now presents this conflict rather as a case study of curator-artist power relationships than as a complaint. Some more info about the project can be found at OpenKiasma.

Linda Kronman presented her MA thesis “Killer Fashion Revolution” with the help of a video. The project is an example of hacktivism (hacking an existing system or software and appropriating it for a political cause) but related to fashion and textiles and not to software. She realised that there are a lot of fashion items that relate to wars such as  camouflage clothing, Palestina scarf or trenchcoats. Her idea is to transform these textiles into helpful piecs that promote human rights. An example would be to transform such textiles into a backpack for a deprived school child. More about the project here.

3rd session: Methods and Boundary Objects

The overall topic of this session was slightly blury. Patrizia Hongisto was presenting “living laboratories as human-centric innovation environments”. Living labs are a user-centred approach to developing services for people and communities based on their particular needs and feeding from real life experience. You can find out more about it here. As a case study she was looking at a community project in an agricultural region of Finland.

Andrew Gryf Paterson’s starting point (case-study of a fan-based board-game production) is allotments. Not only have they been an escape for city-dwellers but in the recent years they have turned into a kind of political statement  — guerilla gardening — and have become a venue for direct political action and artistic intervention in public spaces. In this tradition Paterson and a few artists “hacked” and appropriated a popular board game, Carcasonne, that is. They modified the look (the skin) but kept the rules. The various new designs obviously included allotments in one way or the other. The game was then played in public several times. However Paterson couldn’t really tell how the game deals with issues relating to the allotment movement. Nevertheless he gave some interesting insights in the boardgamegeek culture where people discuss board games and how they modify or hack them.

Hans Pöldoja’s project (EduFeedr- Redesigning the Feed Reader for an Open Education) is positioned in the domain of education and proposes a new tool for online courses which is called EduFeedr. In the recent years more and more lecturers have opened up their courses to online participation (Example). ”Traditional” E-learning environments such as webCT and Moodle are more or less closed. Recently more and more Web2.0 tools have been used in this context. Accordingly EduFeedr tries to redesign the Feedreader for Open Eucation. The new tool that they are currently developing is supposed to have the following five features:

1. Signing up for the course.
2. Visualizing the Process (e.g.: progress chart of how people commit their assignments)
3. Visualizing the social network (links between the blogs can be visualised. People with no links obviously need feedback and support)
4. Writing notes about the blog posts
5. Archiving the course (some participants will soon delete their blog after course)

Overall it has so far been a quite interesting experience, particularly with the side-by-side of presentations and microblogging backchannels. A lot of the discussion centers on the properties of openness and how far it can go. Terms such as cheating and stealing have been mentioned in this context but also the role of democracy and hierarchies. How much rule and institutional guidance do we need and how far can societies and communities organise themselves independently and what tools do they need.