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]]>Large digital technology corporations offer “free” tools to help make their data useable but only if those companies can control the data, and to use it for their own commercial ends. All this led Juegos del Común – a project designed by the Arsgames Association and launched in Barcelona in 2017-2018 – to research and develop mechanisms to transform open data into clear, accessible information.
This in turn gave rise to the development of an interactive experience based on game dynamics, with the aim of promoting citizen empowerment and participation and encouraging critical thinking about the function and value of data and information in our society.
Screenshot from Last Hope, a simulation of homelessness
Juegos del Común developed four game prototypes and an online service providing access to open data sets about the impact of tourism on housing in the city. These prototypes aim to encourage reflection based on real data provided by Barcelona City Council, and the processing of this data.
The online service aims to provide access to open data with a focus on housing and tourism issues through game drivers such as Construct2, Godot, Unity, Gdevelop, GameMaker.
Four video game prototypes have been developed: Rambla Rush: a run along the Rambla in Barcelona based on the average cost of rented accommodation and the city’s many cultural festivals; Flatsweeper: a minesweeper in search of rented flats in Barcelona; PimPamPom: A pinball game that you have to win in order to be able to pay the rent; and Last Hope: a simulation of the everyday life of a homeless person.
These four prototypes have helped forge links between different local communities, and are enabling Barcelona City Council’s open data to be used in a creative and impactful way.
“The fact that this initiative is explicitly linking experts in video game design and
human rights activists for a common objective is very inspiring – and should be replicated! At the same time, the focus on using official data for socio-political use sheds relevant light on current discussions around the “smart city” mantra that private-public partnerships are trying to impose around the globe.”
-Evaluator Lorena Zarate
Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us.
Or visit arsgames.net/blog/
Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.
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]]>The post Cultivating an Open-Data Mindset: the CAPSELLA Project appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>‘It is important to approach open data and open technologies with an open mindset. Citizen- and farmer-generated data can lead to major breakthrough in policy making, providing insights and evidence for better informed environmental management and nature conservation. In the context of climate adaptation and mitigation, open data can also become a powerful tool in the hands of communities of practice, advocacy groups and small companies which can use it to generate solutions that address problems at regional, national and global level.’
These were the summary remarks of Pavlos Georgiadis, ethnobotanist, social entrepreneur and participant of the CAPSELLA, Harvesting Innovation event in Milan in May. Part of Milan Food Week, the event was hosted in collaboration with OPERA, the Italian Observatory for Agroecology. The guiding question was: how can ICT and open data innovations be used to further agroecological and agrobiodiverse farming practices?
The meeting was a culmination of the Horizon 2020-funded CAPSELLA project, the Collective Awareness PlatformS for Environmentally-sound Land management based on data technoLogies and Agrobiodiversity. This project emphasises communities of practice and bringing together diverse food system actors from tech and open data specialists, to scientists, farmers and academics. Under the principles of co-design and open innovation, the project experiments with the different ways technology can be used to further sustainable food systems.
ARC2020 has been tracking this project from the start, with Oliver Moore presenting at the CAPSELLA launch, two years ago. Helene Schulze went along to the closing event to think-through and present on the ways that innovation and open data for agroecology may be incorporated in policy-making.
CAPSELLA – linking agroecology and technology?
Concepts of social digital innovation, co-design and co-innovation, emphasise the significance of how ICT innovations are designed, how a need is identified, who is involved in the design and innovation process and who has access to the final product(s).
This is the key potential opportunity and potential obstacle for AgTech innovations aligning with or furthering agroecology. How can we ensure that this technology (such as data from satellite imaging) does not fall into the hands of the existing power concentrations within the global food system, Big Ag? Instead, how can technology empower small producers? The CAPSELLA project emphasises that this technology must be designed and built with the active participation of those for whom it is intended.
Policy promoting AgTech
With a range of researchers in agroecology, farmers representatives and innovation, ICT and policy experts, I was asked what policies are needed for data to drive innovation in sustainable agriculture and food systems.
I first addressed the need for nuance – when we talk about AgTech, we are talking about a large swathe of different innovations and interventions. These range from using drones to measure CAP compliance to grassroots open-source technology movements to large agribusineses collecting and purchasing satellite data. Accordingly, when faced with the question of what policies encourage innovation, we must think about the kind of innovation we want to see. What innovations enhance and further agroecology? How can those innovations be supported?
These questions were asked at the start of the day and the answers seemed clear: community-driven, bottom-up and accessible innovations. Innovations designed and built with the eventual user. An important part of agroecology is about decision-making capabilities, questioning and problematising the power dynamics embedded in the existing food system. This is why, when we talk about innovation, this term should refer not only the technological innovation but innovation in the decision-making structures, innovation in the way we make policy.
We need more participatory policy making where all sorts of actors and stakeholders are folded into all stages of the process, right from the very beginning in formulating the questions of concern. A purely top-down decision making approach is not agroecologically aligned, will likely lead to a situation where AgTech and digitisation reinforces existing vertically inclined or hierarchical decision making structures. Such structures may allow for increased corporate consolidation of the food system, or at least do not pave the way for a more equal food system.
Access to best practice
In what ways could AgTech counter such power dynamics? One solution is improved knowledge dissemination. In the words of participant and speaker Dr Andrea Beste,
‘Organic farming and agroecological farming systems depend on knowledge. We have so much knowledge spread around the world but it is fragmented. If you can put this knowledge together on the internet or on a platform where you can change or share something, then this knowledge will spread very fast around the world.’
The internet is a space which facilitates easy, fast and affordable access to knowledge such as best farming practice.
An example of how CAPSELLA proposes that AgTech might help knowledge dissemination is the SOILapp. This builds upon a very old soil quality measure, the spade test. Here the farmer digs up the top 30cm of soil with a spade. The app will then ask a series of questions to help the farmer understand the quality of the soil, these include soil moisture and texture as well as vegetation coverage. The data is then uploaded onto a map allowing the user to track changes in their own soil quality as well as compare with soil quality in other areas.
Open-data and open mindsets
The open-data mindset as used in the CAPSELLA apps requires a reframing in the way we think about knowledge. It requires a shift from a system based on competition to one encouraging cooperation. What might a food system look like where skill-sharing, knowledge dissemination and collective learning empowers individuals and communities rather than placing them at a too-risky competitive disadvantage?
The open-data mindset was framed as a response to the question of how to scale up agroecology. Professor Yiannis Ioannidis from the ATHENA Research and Innovation Center, argues that
‘By coming up with connections among the communities and people involved, helping them to communicate best practices and reuse data from a different environment and in general raising awareness… Openess and connectedness is key and technology is a perfect tool to be able to achieve this.’
There is a long way to go to reshuffle power dynamics in the food system. Bottom-up, community-driven AgTech innovations are small ways powerful actors can be challenged nonetheless. Through access to data and knowledge such technologies may facilitate, in the long-term, a food and farming culture more oriented toward cooperation, collaborative learning and the collective good.
CAPSELLA – participatory science and open data for field, seed & food
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]]>The post How to power shared mobility startups with blockchain technology appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>This opinion piece by Boyd Cohen explores how a new blockchain layer for mobility could allow shared mobility startups to quickly launch their services and have immediate access to a network effect. Cohen is the co-founder of IoMob, which combines open source and blockchain technology to decentralize mobility, and the dean of research at the EADA Business School in Barcelona.
Boyd Cohen: Shareable readers are well aware of the overlapping interests between the blossoming sharing economy and the need to support the urban commons and Sharing Cities.
Luckily for us urban dwellers, a growing array of sharing economy projects have emerged to help, at least in some cases, reduce our resource consumption, and shift to circular and shared access models. Perhaps no part of the urban landscape has been more embraced by sharing economy entrepreneurs than mobility. And with good reason. Our cities have become all too congested and contaminated by the 70 percent of vehicles commuting as the single occupied variety. Our cities’ physical infrastructures and investments have been spent on enabling personal vehicles to travel, park, and refuel (with fossil fuels for the most part), instead of allocating such precious resources to other and better uses.
The shared mobility space is huge. We have witnessed in recent years all kinds of business models for shared mobility such as bikesharing (municipal or P2P), carsharing, carpooling, parking space sharing, shared access to EV charging stations, and more. In fact, in Barcelona alone, according to Sharemrkt there are more than 50 such shared mobility operators in the city.
The question we ask ourselves at IoMob however, is how can this growing number of shared mobility startups compete with the entrenched larger and multinational mobility companies (Uber, Cabify) and even the more benign, larger peers like Zipcar or municipally run bike-sharing schemes? The current shared mobility marketplace requires that each startup build their own underlying tech for handling payments, user registration, reputation management and the like, while also spending their scarce resources to build their brand and user base. It is an uphill battle for sure.
Blockchain technology offers a powerful alternative to this scenario by engaging a range of mobility stakeholders and an open-source set of technologies for startups. Larger companies and public transit operators — any shared mobility service operator, really — once validated as complying with local laws, could be made visible to any user who uses apps that are connected to the protocol. Instead of requiring each mobility provider to launch their own apps, the Internet of Mobility (IoM) allows for an open ecosystem of operators to share access to infrastructure and user bases. You may ask, for example, why would a larger operator be willing to share their users with a shared mobility startup? For a couple of reasons:
-
It supports customer retention by ensuring customer needs are met.
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A previously established agreement between the providers — or one approved instantaneously — allows the provider offering access to their user to get some revenue based on previously agreed relationships with mobility providers. This would establish how much commission is transferred for each shared customer.
We don’t believe all mobility providers will embrace an open, transparent ecosystem, at least not in the beginning. But you can imagine over time the network effect for having a range of public and private mobility services sharing users in a city.
One step towards this has already begun, and is referred to as Mobility as a Service (MaaS). MaaS models are great in that they aggregate a set of public and private mobility services in a package for residents who can pay a monthly fee for a set amount or unlimited amount of services in a given month. We embrace MaaS models, which can easily be connected to an IoM protocol, as a great improvement over existing models. Yet, blockchain and IoM allows for an even better model. Embracing open protocols and open source software, shared mobility startups and established mobility providers can share access to users and the base tech in a way that is not exclusive. MaaS models tend to be run by private companies using proprietary software and partnering with the largest mobility services in the city. This leaves little room for mobility innovation or for the startups to gain access to the local mobility market.
We have even begun envisioning how you could blend MaaS and our open IoM thinking in the following way: Any validated mobility operator could work with an open hub aggregator to develop a monthly pricing package based on each user’s personal travel patterns. In this model, a new user could go to a website, either describe their travel patterns or have the system track them for a period of time, and then discover any mobility service, large or small. A drop-down menu would give users the option to pick and choose any service and see how much it would cost to add that service to a monthly package. Think of it as a Personalized Mobility as a Service (PMaaS).
Blockchain technology poses the potential to decentralize and democratize our economies. The Internet of Mobility could significantly enhance urban mobility users’ experience, while creating a vehicle for shared mobility startups to launch innovative services more rapidly and gain democratized access to urban mobility users.
Graphic courtesy of Boyd Cohen
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]]>The post Could Sharing Research Data Propel Scientific Discovery? appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Ambika Kandasamy: Cognitive neuroscientist Christopher Madan says open-access data or data that is freely shared among researchers to use in their studies can not only save time and money, it can enable scientists to “skip straight to doing analysis and then drawing conclusions from it,” if the datasets they need already exist. Madan works as an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham in England, where he studies the impact of aging in the brain, focusing specifically on memory. He started using open-access data in his work about three years ago.
Given the stiff competition for funding, scientists like Madan are turning to open-access data as a way to expedite their own research process as well as the work of others in the field. Madan says there are various benefits to using open-access data in research — namely, it provides researchers with large and diverse datasets that might otherwise be difficult to obtain independently. This pre-existing data could help them make inferences about generalizing the results of their studies to larger populations, he says. Making research data freely available, however, isn’t such a straightforward process. In some cases, especially when researchers use patient data in studies, they must take steps to anonymize it, he says, adding that “we also need to have balance, so we don’t become too dependent on specific open datasets.”
We spoke with Madan about how he uses open-access data in his research.
Ambika Kandasamy, Shareable: I attended a talk you gave at the MIT Media Lab in August about some of the benefits of sharing research material such as MRI datasets with other researchers. What compelled you to move towards this open and shared approach?
Christopher Madan: To some degree, I’m more a consumer of open data than adding to it. The main plus is that the data is already there. Instead of, I have an idea and then I have to acquire the data — both applying for grants or somehow getting the money side sorted and then having a research assistant to put in the actual time to get them — people to come in and be scanned. Scanners are kind of expensive. All of this would take, on the optimistic side, I’d say several months or more into years, if I wanted to get a sample size of like three, four hundred people.
But for the sake of just looking at age, datasets exist. It can take a few minutes to download, maybe into hours depending on which one and how much other data I have to sort through to organize it into a way that is more how I want the data organized to be analyzed. It’s still in the scale of hours and maybe days versus months to years. Then the analysis on that going forward is the same at that point.
In an article in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience journal, you wrote that “open-access data can allow for access to populations that may otherwise be unfeasible to recruit — such as middle-age adults, patients, and individuals from other geographic regions.” Could you elaborate on that?
The maybe more surprising one of those is the middle-age adults. People in their 30s to 50s could generally have jobs and families and are busy, so it’s harder to get them to be in research studies. If we’re interested in aging, getting young adults that are effectively university student age, they’re relatively easy to be recruited in university studies because they’re walking down the halls of the same places that the research is done. Older adults, to some degree, can be easier to recruit. … But middle age adults have a lot less flexibility of their time. Even if they’re interested, they have a lot of other commitments that they have to balance. It’s just harder to get them into research studies. Now, it’s not that they’re impossible to get. It’s just effectively lower odds for that demographic. If people have already spent the effort of trying to get them in, then we should take advantage of that data and not just use it for one study and that’s it, but answer multiple research questions and try to get more out of the same data that’s already been collected.
In the article, you also mentioned that you keep a list of open-access datasets of structural MRIs on GitHub. Have other researchers contributed to this list?
Yes, they have. I initially made a list of basically just stuff that I knew. One morning, I was like, “maybe I should do this.” I was keeping track of things, but every so often, new datasets get shared. How much can you keep in your head or keep the PDFs related to these in a folder? It’s not that great of an organization. So I thought, maybe I’ll make a list where I’ll say the name — some of them have shorter abbreviations, so a spelled out version, a link to where that data actually is, a link to the paper that kind of describes it, some notes about what kind of MRIs are with it or how many individuals are included in it, the demographics — is it all young adults or old adults — that sort of information. I basically just made a list of it and put that online. Other people found it useful. Some people needed parts of that but not others, or generally didn’t think about open-access data as much until that point. Here’s a list of them. You can look up what’s there and what might be useful to you and take advantage of it.
Since then, some that I basically didn’t include, that I didn’t know of or didn’t think of or whichever, that other people are involved in, they requested to add themselves to the list, and I approved that. Other ones, people that aren’t just involved in the data collection of it, but knew of that weren’t in the list, contributed to it. It’s grown a bit since then, particularly I’ll say from other people’s additions, which also shows other people are looking at it and making a note of it. At least you can have people favorite it for later. I think it’s about 2,000 or so people have. I think maybe eight, nine people have actively added new things to it, so it’s growing a bit. Again, it is a bit of a specialized topic and resource, but other people have found it useful, so that does kind of show that it’s not just a list that I made for myself, but other people have found some benefit in this as well.
How could this kind of open-access data accelerate the process of scientific discovery?
I think the main thing is just after having some idea about what datasets exist — as soon as you have some sort of research idea and you can match it onto something of that sort — you can just download the data. In some cases you have to do an application, so maybe there’s a week or something when someone needs to approve that you’re using this for valid purposes, but you can skip straight to doing analysis and then drawing conclusions from it and writing up a research paper if it went somewhere, rather than having things be drawn out for probably several years.
From your own experience, have you noticed any trends over the years in data sharing among researchers?
There’s definitely more open data now than there used to be. That’s great, both in terms of more people using it, but also just more people sharing whatever data they’ve been collecting anyway. From more personal analysis, talks with researchers that have not shared data yet, but have been thinking about it for data they’ve already been collecting — can they share it because in terms of consent of what the initial participants gave? Would that include sharing of their data when that wasn’t explicitly asked? Even if that doesn’t and they’re working with more medical kind of patient data, then you can still plan forward and say, “okay, what do we need to add?” A couple of extra sentences to the consent form to allow for this at this point forward even if we can’t do it retrospectively. People are thinking about it even beyond just what’s kind of more apparent in terms of what data is actually available today — little more behind the scenes. The field is shifting in that direction. It’ll just continue along that trajectory.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Photo of Madan [top] by Dan Lurie and [left] by Yang Liu. This is part of Shareable’s series on the open science movement. Further reading:
How the Mozilla Science Lab is improving access to research and data
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]]>The post EU “copyright reform” threatens freedom of information, open access and open science appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Frankenstein reproduction right
With the original objective of “protecting equality, press and informed news”, the proposed “publishers right”, or “ancilliary copyright” could very well turn into an unbounded and unrestricted ‘frankenstein reproduction right’ that goes far beyond existing copyright’s “orginality requirements”. The proposed “reproduction right” is radically different from existing copyright law where the originality requirement prevents the appropriation of facts, ideas and non-original expression which are usually not considered to be protected by copyright. Many amendments on the table today before the Legal Affairs Committee aim at prohibiting the use of even the smallest bit or snippet of any text, image or sound from a press article, from public information or from an academic text without the prior permission of the publisher. The negative impact on access to information, access to knowledge and scientific scholarship could be devastating. We are facing a clear attack on our democratic rights as European citizens.
It should be noted that this new layer of copyright does not exist in the US nor in international copyright law.
“Closed science”, “Closed access” and “Closed data”
Many elements of articles 11 and 13 constitute a frontal attack on open science programmes as supported by the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament.
New filtering, policing, monitoring and payment obligations would significantly weaken access to valuable research content produced through public funding by creating extra costs, bureaucratical burdens and legal uncertainty for the academical community. These new legal obligations of intermediary liability would enter into direct conflict with the open science and open access policies that are being widely adopted in Europe and around the world. The aim of these policies is to increase access to research results in order to maximize the use and benefits of science across all sectors. To support open access and open science, universities, libraries and research organisations manage repositories in which researchers upload scientific articles, publications and research data so that everyone can benefit and use the results of research, including other researchers, industry and the public. A new filtering and payment obligations would significantly inhibit through legal uncertainty access to valuable research content produced through public funding, and greatly slow the progress of open science.
Crippling academic “open access” repositories
This new attempt at the enclosure of knowledge threatens the movement towards widespread availability of scientific results for the good of all, and the existence of over 1250 repositories that non-profit European institutions and academic communities use to disseminate academic output. It is important to note that, in the context of academic research, the creators of the content -the scientists- do not receive any financial compensation for their articles, yet publishers often demand that researchers sign over their copyright to the publishers.
Many universities maintain that a new intellectual property right for academic publishers would do “untold damage to the ability of researchers to share their findings and reference the world of scholarship in their published works” (LERU 2016).
Building walls around open data
Open data means that there are no legal restrictions to access to or use, modification and sharing of information for any purpose, subject at most to an obligation to attribute the source. ‘Open’ also means there are no technical restrictions to access and use, e.g. the data is offered in machine readable formats, and in open format rather than in a proprietary format. In contrast, Articles 11 and 13 directly and indirectly restrict the use of open data as well as difficulting open access which are flagship strategies of the EU and its Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework.
Restricting freedom of information
A key rationale that underpins freedom of expression is that the free flow of information is indispensable as it helps ensure that the best democratic decisions are taken. The right protects not just the imparting of ideas and information, but all phases of the communication process, from the gathering of information including a right to access sources, to the communication and reception of it. The legal implications of articles 11 and 13 could mean barriers to the access of citizens to news, public interest information and institutional data, all necessary for informed democratic debate. The public sector might very well automatically own a great deal of publishers intellectual property within its own publicly owned publications. To create exclusive rights in information for publishers will necessarily interfere with the freedom of expression of others. It should be noted that the European Charter of Fundamental Rights upholds a strict standard of scrutiny in the case of news and other public interest information.
In general the EU’s copyright reform has been hijacked by the publishing industry lobby and has been turned into copyright counter-reform that aims at further enclosing knowledge at the expense of our scientific, academic and cultural commons.
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]]>The post Mapping as Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Maps shape our perception, they direct our transitions and they inform our decisions. Whoever doubts the power of mapping, might think of Google maps impact on the lives of the many. But not all, because there is an alternative: Open Street Map. The difference between the two becomes crystal clear when asking: Who owns the maps? Who owns the data? And who reaps the benefits?
Open Street Map is based on free software. It is owned and governed by you. It is constantly in the making, and open to all those who wish to contribute to it on the basis of the collective Open Street Map community criteria. Open Street Map is the topographic sister of Wikipedia.
When TransforMap was initiated, back in 2014, the community sought to combine the Open Street Map approach with the ambition of making the plethora of socio-economic alternatives – TAPAS: There Are Plenty of AlternativeS – visible. We wanted to add to the many crowdsourced maps a possibility to see TAPAs unfolding at a glance, all at once, on people’s devices, in a user-friendly way without being patronizing nor concentrating data. That was and still is TransforMap’s ambition: to challenge both the dictatorship of corporate-owned data and the cultural hegemony of a an economy stuck in a neoliberal or neoclassical Market-State framework through bringing plenty of Alternatives to everybody’s attention, among them the Commons.
Countless mapping projects around the world have similar ambitions. Just like TransforMap, they are committed to enhancing the visibility and impact of all those projects, initiatives and enterprises that contribute to a free, fair and sustainable future. However, most of them receive little attention in mainstream media and general culture, because they are:
- utterly disconnected from each other
- partly enclosed on proprietary platforms – like Google maps
- built on different taxonomies, and
- (luckily) highly diverse in their mapping approach
In short: not interoperable.
Working towards the interoperability of the countless alter-maps is widely perceived as a key element for enhancing their impact. Thus, the need for convergence and for atlasing maps based on a ‘mapping as a Commons’‚ as opposed to ‘mapping the Commons’. The former is a mapping philosophy and crucial for distilling the governance principle of emancipatory mapping projects; the latter is just one out of many ‘objects’ or ‘items’ to be mapped.
The following lines roughly sketch out our understanding of ‘Mapping as a Commons’. Later on, they might turn into a manifesto for ‘Mapping as Commoning’‚ for many, many maps and through a multitude of mappers. They are written in an un-imperative manifesto form, to be used from now on as a guideline or quick analytical tool to evaluate the own mapping practices.
Mapping as a Commons: what does it mean? (0.2)
The following is based on the raw notes from Commons Space at WSF 2016 and an initial summary by @almereyda. The principles are the condensate of globally dispersed, locally found initiatives which collaborate for building and maintaining a shared mapping commons.
1. Stick to the Commons, as a goal and a practice
The challenge is twofold: contribute to the Commons as a shared resource and do it through commoning. Your mapping project is not a deliverable, nor a service/product to compete on the map market. Hence, it is paramount to systematically separate commons and commerce and to integrate the insights (patterns?) of successful commoning practices into your mapping initiative. Strive for coherence at any moment!
2. Create syntony on the goal
Discuss your common goal and your understanding of “mapping as commoning” again and again. And again! Everybody involved should resonate in the essentials and feel in syntony with mapping for the Commons through commoning at any time.
3. People’s needs first
Maps provide orientation to common people but they also provide visibility of power and policy-driven agendas. Make sure your map doesn’t feed the power imbalances. People’s needs trump the desires of institutions, donors or clients.
4. Keep an eye on interoperability and use web technology
To map as a commoner implies caring for other mappers’ needs and concerns. You will take them into account through dialogue with partner-mappers and make sure interoperability is a shared goal.
5.Contribute to the Federated Commons
Mapping the World through Commoning is a double contribution: among commons projects and initiatives toward a Federated Commons and between Commons projects, solutions or initiatives and other socioeconomic alternatives.]
6. Provide open access
Always. To everything.
7. Use free software
Working with free software at all levels is critical, as it is not about the freedom of the software, but about your freedom to further develop your mapping projects according to your own needs.
8. Self-host your infrastructure
Only use technology which allows to be replicated quickly, and document transparently how you do it. Transparent documentation means understandable documentation.
9. Build on open technology standards
Ensure your map(s), data and associated mapping applications can be reused on a wide diversity of media and devices. Ergo: hands off proprietary technologies and their standards. Don’t consider them, not even as interim solution. If you do, you risk adding one interim to another and getting trapped into dependencies.
10. Make sure you really own your data
‘Mapping as a Commons’ strives for mapping sovereignty at all levels. In the short run, it seems to be a nightmare to refrain from importing data for geo-location or copying and pasting what you are not legally entitled to. In the long run, it is the only way to prevent being sued or having your data being enclosed. Make sure you really own your data. It prevents the real nightmare of at some point losing your data without being able to do something.
11. Use free open data licenses
To own your data is important, but not enough. Make sure nobody dumps your common data back into the world of marketization and enclosures. What is in the Commons must remain in the Commons. Free licences protect the result of your collective work at any moment. Make use of them. It’s simple.
12. Guarantee the openness of taxonomies
A taxonomy is incomplete as a matter of fact. It is one out of many entry points to complex social worlds. The more you learn about these worlds, the better you can adjust your taxonomy. An open taxonomy allows your peer mappers and users to search it for a concept, link them – via tags – to a parent category, to add missing concepts (if you allow), or to merge tag structures.
13. Make the Data Commons thrive through your usage
Link to WikiData and OpenStreetMap from the beginning! It’s just nonsense to maintain your single data set. There is so much to benefit from and contribute to the data commons. Explore abundance and contribute loads to our shared data.
14. Care for your Data Commons
Strive for accuracy and remember at the same time, that there is always subjectivity in data.
15. Protect the ‘maps & atlases commons’ legally as commons
Remember: each commons needs protection. Innovative legal forms help to prevent cooptation. Make sure the resulting maps and atlases own themselves instead of being owned by any specific person or organization.
16. Crowdsource your mapping
Do so whenever you can and for whatever is needed: money, time, knowledge, storage space, hardware, monitoring, etc.
Last resort
17. Remember always why you are making the map and who you are making it for. Remember that everyone is a mapmaker. Share what you can and if everything looks dark, take a break, keep calm and continue commoning.
18. Archive the map when it doesn’t work for you anymore. Others might want to build on it, sometime.
PLEASE HELP US TESTING AND IMPROVING THESE PRINCIPLES.
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]]>The post Council of the European Union Calls for Open Access to Scientific Research by 2020 appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The argument that publicly-funded research should be made available to the public recently received a shot on the arm when the Competitiveness Council of the European Union reinforced its commitment to making all scientific articles and data openly accessible and reusable by 2020. As Creative Commons reports, the Council offered the following conclusions about the transition towards an open science system, stating that it:
- Acknowledges that open science has the potential to increase the quality, impact and benefits of science and to accelerate advancement of knowledge by making it more reliable, more efficient and accurate, better understandable by society and responsive to societal challenges, and has the potential to enable growth and innovation through reuse of scientific results by all stakeholders at all levels of society, and ultimately contribute to growth and competitiveness of Europe;
- Invites the Commission and the Member States to explore legal possibilities for measures in this respect and promote the use of licensing models, such as Creative Commons, for scientific publications and research data sets;
- Welcomes open access to scientific publications as the option by default for publishing the results of publicly funded research;
- Agrees to further promote the mainstreaming of open access to scientific publications by continuing to support a transition to immediate open access as the default by 2020;
- Encourages the Member States, the Commission and stakeholders to set optimal reuse of research data as the point of departure, whilst recognising the needs for different access regimes because of Intellectual Property Rights, personal data protection and confidentiality, security concerns, as well as global economic competitiveness and other legitimate interests.
In a recent interview with Shareable, Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley stressed that opening research leads to faster innovation and solutions to pressing issues around climate, public health and more.
“What if we were to say, ‘Let’s open cancer,’” he says. “What if we opened up all the research that relates to this work? Let’s shine a bright light on this disease that we’ve allowed to hide in the shadows and behind paywalls, and crush it with innovation. What would that look like?”
As the open movement continues to grow, with an increasing number of artists, scholars, researchers, scientists and ordinary citizens contributing to the commons, the Competitiveness Council of the European Union’s commitment to open data and articles marks a positive step toward a more open global culture.
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Photo: re:publica (CC-BY). Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter
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]]>The post Bologna. The relational ecosystems of the city becomes a commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The systems massively captures data in real-time from entire cities and transforms it into a commons, available and accessible by anyone, and manageable collaboratively. Data is captured from major social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare) and other data sources (such as census, land registries, energy, mobile traffic, and the many types of Open Data source which can be present in the city), and processed in near-real time using a variety of techniques (georeferencing, natural language analysis, emotional analysis, network analysis, data integration and fusion techniques, standard statistics techniques).
The result of these processes is a real-time Open Data source (a new immaterial commons) in which citizens become sensors, with their interactions and everyday expressions in the new and controversial space formed by social network.
Human Ecosystems, workshop at SESC Vila Mariana, S. Paulo
RTCM – Real Time Museum of the City , S, Paulo, SESC Vila Mariana
Who talks about collaboration in Bologna on social networks? And how? What are the more collaborative neighborhoods? Which topics are more discussed by citizens? What emotions are they expressing? Who are the hubs, the influencers, the bridges between communities and the experts of collaboration? In which languages does collaboration happen in town?
HUB – Human Ecosystems Bologna: emotional map
Matteo Lepore, Councillor for the Digital Agenda and the Promotion of the City, states that:“With this project we intend to concretely experience the use of big data. We have launched the new civic network in Bologna and the city wi-fi, extending the coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with free access, offering high speed connection to schools, theaters and soon to enterprises and homes. We are reaching now the European goals for 2020, with social networks at the center of our innovation policies. We are aware that the digital ecosystem is an infrastructure for development, growth and inclusion. But to make this leap, we have to learn to systematize the data we produce: with HUB, we are going in the right direction, in particular considering the transition of Bologna toward metropolitan area and the public investments to come“.
HUB – Human Ecosystems Bologna: visualizations
At the present time, most individuals generate data in ways in which they don’t realize or understand, and which they cannot understand, due to the opacity of collection processes, algorithms, classifications, parameters.And individuals are, currently, the only ones who cannot fully benefit from Big Data: to organize themselves; to create meaningful, shared initiatives; to understand more about themselves and about the world around them.
This overall scenario is what we confront with with our projects. Thanks to the City of Bologna today we are moving a big step forward.
HE – Human Ecosystems
www.human-ecosystems.com
“Collaborare è Bologna”
http://www.comune.bologna.it/collaborarebologna
http://www.urbancenterbologna.it/collaborare-bologna
“Human Ecosystems @Ars Electronica 2015”, on “Fastforward 2” by Motherboard, 1° episode
http://motherboard.vice.com/it/read/fastforward-ars-electronica
Human Ecosystems in S. Paulo (BR), documentary by Universidade Metodista
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEgKX-M4AOI
Human Ecosystems in New Haven (USA), documentary by YWF – Yale World Fellows
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXCeAHgKcHU
Credits
HUB – Human Ecosystems Bologna is a project promoted by:
LabGov – LABoratory for the GOVernance of the Commons
Concept and Realization:
HE – Human Ecosystems / AOS – Art is Open Source
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]]>The post Digital innovation or Biourbanism? Both, of course! appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The official definition of Biourbanism starts with the focus on “the urban organism, considering it as a hypercomplex system, according to its internal and external dynamics and their mutual interactions.”
In practice, as an almost total ignorant when it comes to architecture, urbanism, psychology and the like, I understand this to mean that Biourbanism proposes to make the places we inhabit decent places, that is places worth living in because they are:
- (self) organized, bottom-up
- taking their history and unique characteristics into account
- designed with a process which is biophilic, that is friendly to all the levels and sides of human life (family, personal relationship, emotion, work…)
- managed with little interventions, cheap and not invasive (biourban acupunture), that match the real needs and features of each place
The International Society of Biourbanism (ISB) has led, and continues to organize and propose with this spirit, several initiatives for the renaissance of italian villages and small towns, in the mountains and elsewhere, starting with Progetto Artena.
I discovered ISB by chance in the summer of 2013. Since then, we have done several things together, including the parts on education on digital matters and open technology of Progetto Leo. This cooperation has also led, among other things, to the reorganization of several courses, which I and others were already proposing, in a new package called Minimi Comuni Digitali, which is both autonomous but perfectly compatible with Biourbanism activities and educational programs. The package name, roughly translatable with “Minimal Digital Commons/Cities” hints to the possibilities, also for small towns, to benefit from knowledge and usage of appropriate, open digital technologies and communities.
Why talk of architecture, psychology and so on, on a website like Pionero (where the original article appeared), whose slogan is “Digital Innovation”? Easy: to suggesto a generic model just for digital innovation.
Italy (and many other countries, if you ask me) needs to be rebuilt from the foundations. ISB, if I got it right, proposes and practice a way to rebuild it based on the principle that, if you want a decent life, you should rebuild common spaces and services from the bottom, putting people in the first place, in the most efficient and sustainable way. They aren’t the only ones to say this, of course, but I like their approach and general vision.
Above all, since we should be talking about Digital Innovation, I like Biourbanism for a very specific reason I believe that, if you start to reboot a city the way Biourbanism does, things like Free Software, Open Data, Open Government, Fablabs, Maker Faires and so on surely enter the picture, eventually. You couldn’t avoid them even if you wanted. BUT, the point is, starting from Biourbanism those things would enter the picture in a way that is much more productive, sustainable and long lasting than all the other ways tried so far by us “digital maniacs”: only, that is, as the last thing, stealthily, in the smallest possible amounts, as an unavoidable consequences of the starting ideas, and actual needs, of local non-geeks. Stay tuned for more, but in the meantime do let me know your thoughts!
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]]>The post Visioneering an information system for P2P practice and research appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Poor Richard: I hope no one will mind if I indulge in a little visioneering here. I am imagining an information system of P2P practice and research. The P2P collaborative economy, free culture, and new commons movements are creating a lot of digital content. Most is in discursive and narrative form that is time consuming to read. Among this volume of content are case studies in a variety of formats (many very informal), business plans, proposals, and presumably many legal documents (charters, agreements, etc.).
I am imagining a semantic ontology according to which the key ideas and data of this content could be parsed and tagged to form a distributed database using semantic linked-data structures. This would help transition the collective knowledge base of the research, activist, and social entrepreneurial communities into a machine-readable, semantically linked, searchable form.
The P2P Foundation Wiki is an excellent searchable resource, and perhaps the semantic wiki extensions for the wiki engine could eventually be applied. “A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks. Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki
A fringe benefit of creating such data structures for existing content would be to provide common templates for future content creation and data collection.
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