These articles re-affirm that internet infrastructure is not neutral, code is not neutral and nor is software!They also speak to the necessity of citizens to be actively engaged in the creation, maintenance of their communication infrastructures.  In the very least, to be criticially aware of what the corporations that facilitate that communication are doing.

The Global Network Initiative was created in response to cases such as the Yahoo in China where

Tao is now serving a 10-year prison sentence for passing on a briefing document from the Chinese government to an American campaign group. He emailed the file - which explained how Beijing officials were ordering journalists not to write about the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre – from a Yahoo account, which was then traced back to him with the company’s assistance.(1)

Yahoo actually handed over data that led to the arrest of dissidents.

Yahoo had earlier denied cooperating with the Chinese government in the prosecution of dissidents by helping to identify them. The company claimed it had no choice other than to comply with a request from Beijing to share information about the online activities of the journalists. Yahoo handed their email records to the Chinese government.

The journalists, Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao, are serving 10-year jail sentences. Wang was accused of "incitement to subvert state power" after he emailed electronic journals advocating democratic reform and establishment of a multiparty system to replace the present authoritarian state. Shi was charged with passing on information that was designated a state secret. They both sued Yahoo in April.

Wang’s wife Yu Ling claimed Yahoo had turned over information that helped identify her husband and that he and others were "subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, including arbitrary, prolonged and indefinite detention, for expressing their free speech rights and for using the internet to communicate about democracy and human rights matters". (2)

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have joined forces to produce principles which

provide a valuable roadmap for companies like Yahoo operating in markets where freedom of expression and privacy are unfairly restricted. Through the collective efforts of industry, advocates and government, we will continue to see technology and the internet as a way to improve people’s lives, said the statement. (1).

These companies have however allowed profit to win over freedom of speech in the deployment of their technologies in some countries.  They developed architectures and infrastructures that can snitch on users, that disable the use of certain types of terms in blog interfaces or agree to hand over records about individuals.  Yahoo has given data about users to the Chinese government and Google filter internet searches to eliminate query results regarding topics such as democracy or Tiananmen Square.  Microsoft has come under attack for blocking the blog of a prominent Chinese Media researcher who posted articles critical of a management purge at the Beijing News Daily.   Skype-Tom has been allowing the Chinese government to archive the conversations of citizens (see Citizen Lab report). Attitude to human rights by these companies have been considered

"arbitrary, opaque and unaccountable", and [Human Rights Watch] argued that technology corporations should be among the last to succumb to government demands. 

Amnesty International however has not signed onto the initiative claiming

it had been involved in earlier discussions over the group but had dropped out after receiving final drafts of its principles in August.

"Following careful consideration of these documents, Amnesty International has come to the conclusion that – while they represent a degree of progress in responding to human rights concerns – they are not yet strong enough to allow Amnesty International to endorse them," the statement said. (4)

Amnesty International has been involved from the beginning of the process

However [they] recently decided to withdraw. Clear outlines of company compliance and accountability were inclusions that [were] definitely wanted in the text of the Principles in the end - the Principles signed were weak in these areas. [Amnesty International] felt that the Principles signed had too many loopholes and too much ambiguous language for [it] to endorse them. [They] wish to remain engaged with the companies and feel that from outside the Initiative [they] can exert more pressure for further development of the Principles. (Amnesty Australia)

Also, the World Organization for Human Rights, the organization that took Yahoo to court in the Chinese Case have released a statement against the Global Network Initiative:

Human Rights USA, Reporters Without Borders, and other human rights group take the position that while the Code represents an important first step demonstrating the Internet companies’ awareness that they must deal with the human rights impacts of their action in a more meaningful way, it is woefully deficient in a number of important respects.

The Code of Conduct provides little more in its present form than an expression of general support for the principle of freedom of expression on the Internet. It fails to provide sufficient guidance on how specific issues should be handled, does not cover many aspects of U.S. companies’ Internet operations abroad, and lacks specific mechanisms for ensuring that these guidelines will be followed.

The World Organization for Human Rights has provided a full analysis of their response to the Global Networking Initiative in a BACKGROUND PAPER ON U.S. INTERNET COMPANIES CODE OF CONDUCT.

The crazy dangerous topic, context and titillation aside this is a really interesting way to do research, to share results and to do investigative journalism. It is also an interesting exercise in directing the story with a semi structured survey method and then share the videos to let them tell the stories. Talking to the Talking to the Taliban: Graeme Smith.

Read the full program here.

Counterpoints: Edward Said’s Legacy
October 31 to November 2, 2008

University of Ottawa and Carleton University

This bilingual English/French colloquium celebrates the works of one of the world’s most compelling intellectuals, the Palestinian-American thinker Edward Said (November 1st 1935- September 23rd 2003), author of Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, and Out of Place among other famous books.

The colloquium revolves around the theme of "Counterpoint," extensively used by Said as the interplay of diverse ideas and various "discrepant" cultural experiences. As Said writes in Culture and Imperialism: "As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts." Following Said’s legacy, this colloquium envisions a polyphonic, interdisciplinary engagement from fields as broad as comparative literature, sociology, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Diaspora studies, musicology, and political science with a special focus on Middle Eastern politics.

It really rained!  But i got myself outa bed, went for breaky with JuJu, then went to hear Steven Pinker talk about his book the Stuff of Thought as part of the Writers Festival.  Wonderful, he is really funny and even referred to Calvin and Hobbes in his talk!  Then with my head full of ideas, walking in the rain, wearing orange socks, purple pants and a red turtle neck, thinking about data and its role in culture, as culture, as heritage, and as artifact as I walked up to Enriched Bread Artists 2008 open Studios.  I met my pal Ken in his studio, doing his thang, eating sausage, olives and good cheeze! Then I went on the studio tour.  I just love that place.  I have much to say, particularly about Cindy Stelmackowich’s work,which

explores the inter-relationship between art and medical science. Incorporating new and old medical diagrams, laboratory equipment and medical reference books, medicine’s bodies of knowledge have become the direct material and conceptual sources for her own incisive explorations. Often taking the form of experimental sculptural assemblages or wall installations, this work often combines the language of sculpture with the language of science in order to beckon us to reconsider the discourses of medical science and its orders of objective knowledge. (1)

but i am just too tired right now and really need to think about her ideas before I do!  We had a great conversation and she has really inspired me to look at Foucault.

I posted a bunch of EBA studio photos here.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

As I unpacked some random boxes of books last night I came across my copy of Vincent Mosco’s The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace.  The day before I was reading a bizarro yet interesting paper that linked myth, metaphor, public policy and spatial data infrastructures.  The next day I came across a creative commons video that typified the concepts in the paper.  Later that afternoon I attended a talk about a geoscientific experiment in the prairies.  As I tried with all my best to pay attention, I realized, simply, that scientists can be terrible story tellers. Today I picked out a few other boxes from the locker room, and et voilà, as I opened the the flaps, at the very top of the stack, I re-discovered the Power of Myths by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers.  I recalled listening to the audio years ago in Fujino-Machi (Wisteria Fields) in Japan, especially Campbell’s captivating voice.  So, I am happily reading away on the bus on my way to the worst ritual ever - parent teacher interviews.  As I climb the old stone sculpted stairs of Ottawa’s oldest collegiate, dressed in the suitable props to perform the professional mother at an upscale high achieving school look, my head is full of converging ideas which get rudely disrupted by the reality of the teacher parent student child interaction. 

The talk was fine until which time the teacher wanted to know if I was going to take my son with me on take the kid to work day?  The teacher was none too pleased when I explained that my son’s life is quite interesting as it is and that going to work with me was not going to make it any more interesting.  She then suggested that I find someone else to take him to work. Work!  All the kid knows is people working for goodness sakes!  Is that the best we can do for him? We agreed he would instead go to school that day and work on his math with her.  The next part of the exercise was to visit the VP and then the soccer coach.  Are these neo liberal western institutional contemporary characters our archetypes?  Shesh! We need some spicing up! I get back to my wonderful reading, at this point rushed, annoyed and jacked up on green tea.  

Later, I am invited to the Writer’s Festival to hear a reading by Austin Clarke from his book More. In the lobby I meet a local writer friend who goes on to explain his experience of farting out Beatles songs a couple of days ago! Eventually this man from Barbados, with a round tummy, black blazer, blue cotton pants & worn brown leather shoes donning a magnificent mane of grey dreadlocks walks to the podium. He transports me to the streets of Toronto, into a Caribbean woman’s reflections of garbage, belongings, homelessness, invasion, blackness, police brutality, scents, touching, pastors, cognac, sermons, enrapture, the absence of men, loneliness, a basement apartment, Jona in the Belly of a whale. He also talked about a guy in Barbados making fake poop songs with his hand under his armpit.  I loved his irreverence!  There he was loaded with stories, and the poor white lit prof who was all stiff and formal could not add lib beyond her scripted questions which he just did not bother answering and instead told unplotted stories.  Turns out is writing is musically inspired and the readings I heard invoked a sense of place and geography and he took me there with wonderful sweet language, accent, rich descriptions of smells and metaphors.  Wonderful! 

As I listened, geography, data, narrative, scents, stories and wonderment raced though my brain! I pondered the absence of metaphor in my daily life, sooo needed to keep me inspired, to help me understand my place in the world, what life is all about, to make tangible the complexity, to continue the journey, unravel the signs, to accept destiny, enabling narrative to unfold and to discover the myths that can/do unite us at this time so that I may attach meaning to what I do.  It is this meaninglessness that has stagnated me, this invisibility, and I can see that I need to good story that includes a band of merry animated characters with interesting traits, a few incredible flaws and huge hearts to keep them and me together on this collectively shared journey.

Oh! Yah!

Creative Commons is about many things including

laying the infrastructure ground work for this new kind of culture, a new kind of folk culture…

it is this bridge to this future you have to move away from thinking about content to thinking about communities, communities that develop around content, and the sharing that the licenses allows communities to come together…

a physical commons is like a park where anyone can enter equally, the commons with intellectual works is actually much freer…

it really is going to be the pillar for communications between people for cultural exchange

a space for more speech more free expression and that is the kind of commons the creative commons is trying to create.

Excerpts transcribed by moi from the CC A Shared Culture Video.  The video is part of the CC fundraiser.

I watched the video serendipitously after reading a great paper by  Yola Georgiadou,  and Vincent Homburg, 2008, The Argumentative Structure of Spatial Data Infrastructure Initiatives in America and Africa yesterday.  The paper was about how

policy, including technology policy, is made of language. Politicians, bureaucrats, and consultants use language to shape action and ways of thinking by fabricating rules that enable individuals to deal with unresolvable contradictions of everyday life.

The CC video is an aesthetic bricollage of moving images and narrative loaded with language invoking physical metaphors to make tangible the intangible world of creative ideas.  Geougiardou and Homburg

analyze[d] and critically examine[d] the myths that underlie Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives as they mutate while traveling from distant think tanks to various real world settings (2008:32) and

how myths become domesticated across space and time (2008:34)

They looked at how myths are invoked, what myths represent, how they contribute to established bases of meaning and experiences and they listed some recurrent features of myths.

• Myths are ubiquitous,
• they rest on soft data – selectively drawn,
• they use soft logic – persuasively drawn,
  
• and they win over competing ideas by persuasion in communication processes rather than hard evidence.
• Myths can be contradictory and unstable – susceptible to fashion, style and fads, 
• they are inclusive of metaphors and the correct choice of metaphor often taps into or builds shared modes of thinking; 
  
• inclusive of metaphors that use imagery of physical infrastructures. 
• Myths are used in the development of policy,
• they are inseparable from the context within which they have been created, used, interpreted,and they are
  
• imitated and copied between contexts, or from authoritative templates, while also
  
• being repeated in new contexts which depends on institutional contexts, depending on which actors are privileged to speak, and the timing of the speech.   
• The authors introduced Sahlin-Anderson (2008:34) two patterns on how myths are imitated and related to the repetition of myth is the imitation of ideas and practices in different contexts:
  

• 1) imitative behaviour is normalized in goals and technologies which are ambiguous,
  
• 2) interests of international bodies as a source of held beliefs about what uses and technologies are appropriate

The A shared culture video is a classic example of an artifact loaded with myths, and metaphors assembled & designed specifically to meet the CC objectives of changing policies regarding creative content and to make the uptake of this complex idea easy, immitatable, memorable and accessible to ensure it gets repeated. It also seems to contain all the recurrent features listed in the paper.  Jesse Dylan’s video was very clever indeed!  I hope it helps sell the idea and raises some funds for the project.  Myths and metaphors are most persuasive.

Via: hugmacguire.net

Since my son’s read Shake Hands with the Devil I thought I should also!  Dallaire was my hero before I read the book and saw the films (Shake Hands with the Devil, Hotel Rwanda, Un Dimanche à Kigali) and even more so now.  I cannot imagine the trauma this man went through in Rwanda (map) during the Genocide, then reliving it again by writing the book, in the creation of the films, watching what he suspected would happen after the world did not act in the great lakes regions of Africa as he suggested and if they did not deal with the transboundary issues (re-Congo, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and also Zaire), his ongoing work with child soldiers and the toll on his soul and his family.

I have been arguing for years for access to information and data to inform decisions (health, social, environmental, social justice, human rights, humanitarian, etc.) and then to implement those decisions to create new knowledge eventually, once embedded in social structures leading to wisdom.  What I have missed sorely, is what happens when people ignore the knowledge to serve their personal and institutional instrumentalism? This is what Dallaire made very clear in his book, all the data and information were plainly there & disseminated to the right decision makers, there to save peoples lives and avoid further suffering - yet the apparatus, structures, institutions, rules, laws, egos, tunnel vision & competing interests of stakeholders, will and priorities led decision makers to continually fuck up while the veterans on the ground watched the slaughter.

My observations of East Timor (map) were the same.  We knew the slaughter and destruction were coming before the referendum for independence and we waited until it (referendum, destruction, displacement, rapes, disappearances and slaughter) was over to intervene.  And then we sorta helped.  The same uncoordinated and competing interests of the aid agencies were and are at play just after the referendum.  Dallaire’s descriptions of inaction were the same as what I saw from a distance about East Timor.  In the case of East Timor (ET GDI Paper) I discovered numerous instances where agencies were at odds and impeding each others work.  Further, I also discovered that much of the intel gathered by these organizations left the country on the laptops of the consultants, NGO & UN staff and did not remain in East Timor.  Meaning a knowledge infrastructure was not created to help rebuild the nation in an informed, sustainable (social, economic, environmental) way.

Why is it hard to cooperate, work together, align mandates and coordinate resources? What does it take to absorb that info and embed that into practice? You’d think we could get so much more done by sharing, working together and pooling resources yet we don’t?  What is required to make that happen?

When I went to Architectural Technology school in the 80s, CMHC and if I recall correctly NRC were conducting studies on solar energy, CMHC in particular explored passive solar energy.  The programs were scrapped shortly thereafter much to our chagrin then and now. We had a great methods and materials prof who introduced this batch of college kids to passive solar energy and I recall happily drawing the blue prints with my Koh-I-Nor 2h drafting pencils on Mylar and digging through the CHMC library on Montreal Rd. for standards and specifications.

Later, in Japan, I met passive and active solar enthusiasts and carpenters who were refurbishing old farm house thatch roof’s with solar panels and constructing off grid homes.  I was also exposed to the Whole Earth Catalogues.  I loved going through the hardware catalogues, looking at how-to sketches, visualizing projects and dreaming of cities taking this on as a way to demonstrate conservation leadership.  25 years later the conversation is still going but we have not made major breakthroughs as the incentive is not high enough!

Yesterday, I was having lunch with my friend Tina after digging up some garden beds and a whole for her new tree named the ‘Tracey Burning Bush’!  We were talking about her friend Malcom’s house constructed in such a way that it will not require any heating this winter.  We are supposed to go and see it soon!  Then today I come across a 3 page article in the Globe exactly about that issue. David Braden has built a house that

is so airtight and insulated it needs next to no heating. The house is so efficient, he claims, that it "doesn’t make any sense" to spend $4,000 on a furnace. So he didn’t. He hasn’t bothered to connect to the grid either, and meets electricity needs with a wind turbine and solar panels in his side yard.

Apparently, there is a trend called 

net-zero houses [which] occasionally draw power from the grid, they are able to get by most of the time using only photovoltaic panels or backyard wind turbines. When it’s windy or especially sunny they pump what is surplus to the home’s needs back onto the lines, offsetting the energy used from natural gas and balancing out power needs to zero.

There is also something called the green building continuum, a Net-Zero Energy Home Coalition (NZEH) and a CMHC EQuilibrium program which is a national housing initiative that selected Twelve homebuilding teams to build EQuilibrium demonstration projects across Canada. In 2008, these projects will be open for public tours.  The NZEH Coalition works with CMHC, NRCan, Industry Can and house builders.  It is

incorporated, multi-stakeholder organization comprised of Canadian champions in advanced energy efficient residential construction and building products, the utility sector, research and development and, manufacturing and deployment of onsite renewable energy technologies. The objective of the Coalition is to advance the benefits of the more efficient use of zero or very low impact resources including cleaner air and healthier homes, climate protection and, economic development opportunities resulting from the expanded manufacturing and deployment of energy efficient technologies and appliances and onsite renewable energy generation in Canada’s residential marketplace.

This coalition is aiming to build 40 000 net zero houses by 2018.  I have never really considered house ownership as an option for me, but I could see myself some day trading some life energy toward accumulating resources to build one of these houses.  It would be great to have a few clustered in a hip Canadian city.  Maybe even a coop that would combine permaculture design principles and using a pattern language and an innovative social structure to keep it going might be very cool indeed. Maybe even a village in a city! I like individual homes, but I have really enjoyed living in Coops and the community that comes with them and I can’t see why we can’t think of these projects at a large demonstration scale. I think living in a Coop is democracy in action as the social structure is about collective management of homes and community.  It is not always fun and easy, but I think it is a great way to raise a family and live together.

The Conservation Coop in Ottawa is one example albeit their social system took a hit when the Coop got downloaded to the city and they had to turn 50% of their units into Rent Geared to Income which meant that they lost control over membership and subsequently the principles of conservation living.  Just like a society is not sustainable when 50% of its population is below the poverty line, it is near impossible for a small housing coop to be successful.  Mixed incomes is what makes a coop successful and so far 30% RGI is the max to ensure smooth leadership and long term management of the coop. 

All that to say, that once I am done this PHD thing I might be able to dedicate sometime to this sort of project, and until then I can meet some people, do some side learning and maybe learn about financing.  This combines a bunch of my passions:

• social housing
  
• public input into infrastructure
• environmentally sound design
• architecture
• knowledge transmission
  
• extrasomatic memory built into the structures (physical and organizational) that is communicated across time
  
• information ecologies
• ways to live together
• building stuff
• building for the long term
• traipsing around construction sites just like when I was a kid
• wearing steel toed boots & working with construction workers
• shopping for tons of interesting stuff
• community building
• designing human urban habitats
  
• and the love of reading how-to manuals!

Interesting idea!