GCNP: Ways Forward?

From: Garth Graham <[email protected]>

To: GCNP <[email protected]>, [email protected]
CC: David Reid <[email protected]>, "Graham,Bill" <[email protected]>,
        Henry McCandless <[email protected]>, Richard Labelle <[email protected]>,
        Silvia Senen <[email protected]>
Subject: [gcnp] Re: [gcnp]GCNP: Ways Forward?
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 15:24:33 -0400

This is going to be an omnibus response to recent postings

by Alain Ambrosi, Michael Gurstein, and Daniel Pimienta and

others.  Things go quiet for a while (hopefully a sign of

impending self-organizing criticality, rather than

indifference?), and then, wham, much to think about!

RE THE WAY FORWARD FOR GCNP

I cannot do better than repeat Robyn’s remark, “The ongoing

value of the GCNP has been in my personal connections with

some great people on this group who have generously shared

their experiences and advice.  Thank you to all of you who

have at some time done this for me.”  Like Robyn, I’m

thankful that a community of practice exists for me where

thinking about community networking can and does evolve in

its own way.

Prior to the GCNP Montreal Conference, 2002, I posted an

essay of 'ideas' about GCNP's role to the GCNP list.  I

intended it as food for thought on some of the issues that a

statement of what GCNP is about must address.  I received

helpful critical comment on the essay from several people

and I had a number of conversations about the themes in it

at Montreal.  Subsequent to getting that feedback, I revised

it as A Manifesto for Daily Life Online, Draft 2, October

22, 2002.  It’s available as a microsoft word download from:

http://globalcn.tc.ca/bucharest/Manifestod2.doc

I suggested that GCNP should be an advocate for three

structural principles shaping the social networks of an

“information Society” and the realities of daily life

online:

1. The importance, and the absence, of the role of

“community” as an essential element of public policy

2. The importance of self-organization in dynamic systems as

a completely different aspect of governance

3. The absolute need to defend (non-negotiable) the Internet

as a commons

Or, for a summary of what’s in it, you couldn’t do better

than Matt Wenger’s burst of outrage, 24 Aug 2003.  In one

passionate page he’s expressed exactly what I was getting at

but took 12 pages to do.  Of course, then I was still under

the illusion that my audience deserved some diplomacy

because I hoped that something in the WSIS process might be

able to read and react to what was being said.  I rapidly

discovered that addressing that task far exceeded my own

capacities and any others with which I could collaborate..

Like Robyn Kamira and Matt Wenger, I too have decided that

my skills can best be applied locally (besides, I learn my

way forward faster that way!).  In my case, I have relocated

to the same “region” as Matt, Canada’s province of British

Columbia.

Since, in Canada, even marginalized social groups are often

very well connected or rapidly headed that way,

participating in the activities of BC’s community networking

associations is and will continue to be an eye-opening

experience.  There are things going on here related to

community control of broadband that seem to me to be as good

as it gets anywhere on earth.

But it’s just not Canadian to appear overtly political.

While deeply committed to social action, these groups,

apparently unlike Daniel Pimienta’s report from MISTICA on

concerns in Latin America, are suspicious of the utility of

clearly stating social action as a goal. They do not want to

“explicitly claim that we mean to use the technology as a

tool aiming at the transformation of societies.”   They have

“reflected” on social change.  But they are reluctant to

express those reflections because, and this is a guess, they

might appear inflammatory in the pragmatic reality of their

relations with existing institutions.  To stand their ground

in defense of a social change agenda might divert their

attention and very scarce resources from the real battle -

gaining hands-on control of local and regional

communications infrastructure in a fluid situation where

monopoly is still amorphously present but rapidly weakening.

While I do agree that confrontation is the very last resort

of radical struggle, I’m not sure I fully understand or

agree with their reluctance.  I believe it is socially

irresponsible to leave a social change goal unstated in a

situation where individual participation and group action

has social consequences.  In Canada, radical change agents,

if they cannot be co-opted or bankrupted, are merely further

marginalized.  There are countries in which the consequences

are more drastic.  To be fair to new participants in

community networking associations, it should be clear up

front that participation in action to increase capacity for

applying ICTS in the service of local development is radical

practice for social change and not just access to “tools.”

The “Manifesto for daily life online” was intended as an

example of what GCNP would have to say about the essence of

its practices if we did go to forums like WSIS.  By the time

I revised it to incorporate people’s comments, I already

knew that we weren’t going to that one.  In effect, the sort

of voicing of the experience of GCNP in that forum that the

document contemplates was hopeless.  But I certainly don’t

regret the effort to think through and share a synthesis of

what it is that the existence of a GCNP represents.  I

especially valued the affirmation of the point of view that

subsequently occurred among a substantial group of very

thoughtful people.  There is no doubt that an online

community of practice about community networking exists and

is rapidly learning its way forward.

RE: MICHAEL GURSTEIN’S CIRCULATION FOR COMMENT, 20 AUG 2003,

OF “EFFECTIVE USE: A COMMUNITY INFORMATICS STRATEGY BEYOND

THE DIGITAL DIVIDE.”

Michael, the paper is great, right through the analysis of

the roots of the digital divide concept, and up to and

including the definition of effective use:

“Effective Use” might be defined as: The capacity and

opportunity to successfully integrate ICTs into the

accomplishment of self or collaboratively identified goals.”

I wish I’d said that!

But then you fall away from that high point, rather than

build out from it.  I suspect that reliance on Andrew

Clement and Leslie Shade’s “access rainbow” as an analytical

framework is the problem.  It won’t carry the weight of

where you correctly set yourself up to go with that

wonderfully lucid “self-identified goals.”  It’s a

mechanistic unpacking of the parts and it takes you away

from your thesis (which is also the thesis of MISTICA’s

“Working the Internet with a social vision”) which, I take

it, is:

“In practice as well, effective use is not done solely

within an individual context.  As with other forms of

effective behaviours, “effective Internet use” takes place

within larger social contexts including the family, work

groups and communities and the design of systems for

“effective access” are those which take into account in

their design parameters the fact that access is a socially

situated behaviour and phenomena. It is thus a Community

Informatics approach, which firmly situates the design and

implementation of ICT systems in their community and social

context which most usefully provides a conceptual and

methodological foundation for designing for effective use.”

The problem, as we both know, is that the social situation

process and the technical design process are inextricably

entwined.  The Access Rainbow doesn’t succeed in what

Clement and Shade were trying to do.  It doesn’t let you get

away from the assumption that the technology is the prime

driver, rather than the interaction of technical and social

processes.  It keeps you trapped at, for example,

sector-based analysis (eg e-health) rather than social

context or community-based analysis.  What then happens in

that trap is that:

1. Development gets left in the hands of external agents as

interveners in community, rather than in the hands of

communities as self-organizing structures.

2. It ignores the powerful influence of “Net Culture” by

separating its wholeness into layers.

3. In concluding by ref to “financial stability and an

enabling regulatory framework” I suspect you’ve abandoned

the opportunity you’d opened up through that effective

access definition to reflect on the social context that

would make those two things self determined rather than

externally imposed (i.e. real inputs, rather than artificial

inputs, are the drivers of sustainable systems).

SOCIAL ACTION IN AN “INFORMATION SOCIETY”

I was greatly encouraged by Daniel Pimienta’s circulation,

22 Aug 2003, of the MISTICA document on "Working the

Internet with a Social Vision."

http://funredes.org/mistica/english/cyberlibrary/thematic/eng_doc_olist2.html

After finishing the “Manifesto,” I was in despair that the

quiet voices coming from the experience of daily life online

were going to be completely absent from WSIS.  Now I see

that something profound is occurring in the community

networking movement itself such that, if they are absent, it

doesn’t really matter.  This is a wonderfully useful and

approachable document.  When MISTICA says:

“We do not see the network of networks only as a

technological platform. Rather, we consider it as a new

space of interaction between human beings, which we have

created for our own benefit.”

…. that is entirely congruent with Michaels statement that

effective use is “The capacity and opportunity to

successfully integrate ICTs into the accomplishment of self

or collaboratively identified goals."

I would like to be able to say, in parallel with the MISTICA

document’s collaborative expression of a vision, that

“Manifesto” represents GCNP’s collective vision.  But the

process of creating it is stalled at what MISTICA describes

as the stage of “submission for discussion.”

( see: http://globalcn.tc.ca/pipermail/gcnp-values/)

As further food for thought, I’d like to list some points

where I think the assumptions in the MISTICA document and

the Manifesto depart from each other.  These are really

elaborations, because I share the basic commitment that the

document so effectively expresses.  As a note of warning I

admit that, as only a checklist of over-the-edge topics,

this list is going to be a bit “abstract,” even by my

standards:

1. Writing as a Canadian, in a society with very high levels

of connectivity, I’d guess we’re a bit further into the

centrality of social action online than the MISTICA

document, based on the Latin American context, correctly

anticipates.  We’re at the point where real communities are

answering for themselves the questions MISTICA asks. The

premise of the “Manifesto” is that real community networks

can be analyzed to reveal some of the essential practices of

daily life online, and therefore to express an “Information

Society” in being rather defining a future based on already

superceded assumptions.

2. MISTICA says that social action has agency and that

Internet does not.  I say, rather, that culture and

acculturation have agency and that both social action and

Internet are included within those processes.

3. I hold that the categories of civil society, governments

and the private sector are the product of traditional views

of social patterns.  Whereas community online is a new type

of relationship, one more typical of “Information Society”

structures.  Because the Internet creates and sustains

spaces of social interaction that are distributed,

self-organizing, and local (in the sense of coherent group

learning in a community of practice), action at the “global”

level is neither relevant nor desirable.  It should be seen

as just one more iteration on a fractal scale.  Action at

the global level seen as hierarchy? action that generalizes

and centralizes, rather than particularizes ? can only be

destructive of the Internet’s value as a messenger and

instrument of social change.  On the Internet, first there’s

community, and then there’s nothing else.

4. I’d prefer the word “learning” to the phrase “generation

of new knowledge.” If you think of access to knowledge as if

knowledge were an object, then the epistemology gets out of

whack.   The danger for effective social action is then that

you thereby help governments and the private sector to

succeed in their attempts at enclosure and commodification

of the imagination as property (i.e. intellectual

property).  If you are truly “in” the “Information Society,”

then you prefer the fluidity of the verbs informing and

knowing to the nouns information and knowledge.

5. It’s important to remember that the theory of learning as

social process is about group learning, not about the

“education” of individuals.  The open source idea of “rough

consensus and write the code” is a better approach to group

learning than is the idea of “previous cooperative

reflection” as a step before action.  This is because it

describes a social process that is iterative, recursive and

self-referential. There’s no “pause” button on experience.

You cannot turn off how being in the world occurs.  That’s

why “just do it” is an effective strategy.  To learn our way

forward collectively, we begin action first in the context

of present experience.  That is to say we must consciously

remain open to the interaction of present knowledge with new

experience.  The quality that matters is not the consumer’s

value of choice but, rather, the mature individual’s value

of confidence.  That’s because, in the full implementation

of the “open source” approach, it’s the social systems that

are open.  We, the community in being, are here, and we are

going to risk being there, and in the process will change

our identity through learning our way forward.  But,

regardless of imposed constraints or interventions it is

only “we” who learn our way forward.  No one, ever,

“enables” us to that task.

6. Rather than “The Internet can boost human development

processes that already exist,” I say that it “will” do that

as an expression of a cultural worldview.  So, enabling “a

space to speak with their own voices” is really a process of

getting out of the way, of setting free the creative

processes of dynamic self-organization in the context of

non-zero sum games (i.e. in the context of community).

7. MISTICA says, “the process through which knowledge is

generated does take place outside the Internet.”  But you

can’t have it both ways.  Either the “spaces” of social

interaction exist or they don’t.  The fact that the spaces

are “intellectual” ? pure thinking spaces ? not “spatial” or

physical, does not mean that they are unreal. Spatial

metaphors like, ”new space of interaction…building

knowledge,” get in the way of our understanding of new and

fluid patterns of social interaction.  Those patterns are

what I’d call “mindful” rather than spatial.  That is to say

their “design” is characterized by individual consciousness

of how networked group consciousness is governed.

8. The goal is not some open space within the Internet.

Within a social vision, all of it has to be considered open

space already.  The goal is to keep common that which, as a

cultural expression of conviviality, networking and trust

embodied in a technology, is already common.  Not “make our

own,” it is our own.  The danger is that, as “they”

comprehend its radical otherness, its radical challenge to

the existing will to power, they will attempt conscious

opposition that destroys or perverts its primary purpose (to

sustain self-organizing networks as social networks).  The

main tactic they will use to oppose trust is fear.

A community of practice called “deputy ministers” has just

as much but no more capacity to learn and know about public

administration in the context of the government they serve

than does a group of rural farmers about crop production

methods on the land where they grow rice.  Rather than apply

the spatial term “volume” of knowledge, I’d note that the

channel capacities that inform the behaviours of each group

are the same. All knowing is indigenous to the group that

knows it.  At every “level,” what the Internet interconnects

is indigenous knowledge.

It doesn’t really matter whether techies or social activists

bring the Internet into community from outside of it.  What

matters is ? how many new communities of practice does being

online allow us to experience?  Experience forms

dynamically.  Environment interconnects dynamically.

Experience interacts with environment dynamically.  If the

mix of that interaction is new, then rapid change (i.e.

learning) occurs in the worldview that experience encodes.

The problem is not to appropriate the Internet for social

purpose.  The problem is to struggle to retain the social

purposes that already exist within it.  Those who are

committed to human development already hold the high

ground.  Just assume that we own it socially already, that

the very moment its spaces are considered to be enclosed the

“tool” ceases to exist ? because its very purpose is new

open networks of social interaction. But, the danger

inherent in struggle is that, inevitably you become that

which you oppose.

A new generation of researchers and artists is emerging

whose whole socialization has occurred within the experience

of being online.  It’s going to be exciting to see how the

language they evolve to describe their experience transcends

the limitations of spatial metaphors.  I suspect that,

rather than retreating into what we now categorize as

virtual reality, their capacity to understand how encoded

experience and place interact to cause consciousness will be

far stronger than mine.  I suspect their capacity to model

the question of who benefits and who pays, and to “immerse”

the decision—making processes in the answer that results,

will tip the balance of power in entirely new directions.

Garth Graham

[email protected]

25-118 Aldersmith Place

Victoria, BC, Canada, V9A 7M9

250-721-5494