She knew she wasn’t going to join Noisebridge, finding it both messy (“completely offensive to all my design sensibilities,” she once remarked) and unapproachable (“I was into all the soft stuff and [Noisebridge] was into the hard stuff,” she explained).

Recent research has focused on hackerspaces as grassroots organizations for producing ad hoc, self-made tools (Toombs etal., 2014) and as homes for emerging technical entrepreneur-ship (Lindtner etal., 2014).Founder Sho Sho Smith built HackerMoms to identify with this ethos, what she called “true creativity”: making without a purpose or necessity, without people trying to elevate themselves or their career.2 Although she has admitted that she first associated hacking with criminal activity, she soon found it essential to the kind of life she desired

Finally, Rosner became an

Craft, according to Adamson, became “a strain of activity that responds to and conditions the putatively normative experience of modernity, in many and unpredictable ways” (Adamson, 2010: 5). It was not outside modernity “but a modern way of thinking otherwise.” In the writing that follows, we show how a logic of failure became a means for “thinking otherwise” about the hacking ethos.

Since the rise of early sites of computer hacking like the Chaos Computer Club, a German technology collective founded in the 1980s promoting open information infrastructure, the term hacking has fit aspirational ideals of technical cleverness and creativity perpetuated by engineer-ing cultures. Women-operated hackerspaces have opened an alternate view: enliven-ing connections between hacking and histories of women’s craftwork rooted in a feminist politics of fracture (Barad 2007; Haraway 1988).

Critiquing such claims as sensationalist, recent work identifies a problem of demarcation by which people control access to technical agency and who counts as innovative (Irani, 2015; Lindtner, 2015), illuminating differ-ent and multiple hacking histories. Gabriella Coleman (2011), for example, compares the protest movement Anonymous and the whistle-blowing project WikiLeaks to clarify the varying political sensibilities and practices from which hacking develops

Organizers promote cultural change using the tools of industry — taking up the masters’ tools to defeat the master. While organizers of repair events reject estab-lished modes of mass consumption, they posit device-level electronics repair as mecha-nisms for envisioning new people and societies.

Accounts of hacker cultures often highlight bug fixes (Coleman, 2011; Nafus, 2012), portraying failures as integral to the inventive, creative process of design and engineering (Petroski, 2006). Mothership HackerMoms began to address failure differently from these productivist tendencies. In addition to viewing failure as central to achievement, members identified personal failures and failures to transform hacker cultures, formulating failure as a moment for reflection. To make this argument, we examine two empirical contexts of failure: first, failure as members conceptualize it in the Failure Club project of narrativizing the self; and, second, failure as expressed from the outside through online “hate mail.” By tracing how members redefine failure we show how HackerMoms became a site of resistance: hacking the very ontology of hacking.

Unlike that of other hacker-spaces, members’ focus was not primarily hobbyist engineers. They built HackerMoms to serve mothers. Although as hobbyist engineers, writers, illustrators and artists these moth-ers could ostensibly join any other “traditional” hackerspace, members of HackerMoms claimed those sites became unaffordable or unmanageable without opportunities for childcare. The HackerMoms environment promised not only childcare but also a safer space to breastfeed and express milk, a sliding scale for membership dues, and access to a community of restless and curious moms.

By integrating feminist legacies of craftwork with the centrality of failure — exposing personal failures and failures to transform hacker cultures — members not only energize new modes of hacking activity but also hack the very ontology of hacking.

This model suggests three important research directions to analyze the role of appro-priation in technology evolution. The first would explore conditions that permit and encourage appropriation, ranging from technology architecture (e.g. technology openness) to legal and policy regimes governing how users are allowed to modify and apply technol-ogy in ways not intended by producers. The second direction would further examine appro-priation practices. Particularly fruitful would be further articulation of user/producer power negotiations that unfold during the appropriation stage and of the resulting innovation modalities. A third research direction would investigate how innovations that emerge from appropriation are later incorporated or blocked by producers through the repossession stage. Together, these three axes will further articulate the user/producer dynamics at work through appropriation, leading to a better understanding of the innovation process.

Teenagers in Sao Paolo’s favelas, who cannot afford airtime, use their device as a “media locker,” passing them on to friends after once loaded with recorded songs and video (Bar etal., 2011). Similarly in India, Bluetooth is used to load and exchange music, completely avoiding download expenses (Kumar and Parikh, 2013).

The emergence of text messaging abbreviations and languages is another form of creolization—in this case the literal creation of a creole (Castells etal., 2009).

Open source smartphone operating systems (including Android, Tizen, or Firefox OS) open up greater potential for creolization practices.

Creolization, however, does not seek or avoid conflict but aims to transform tech-nology or come up with new practices so that the technical systems better serves user needs. Creolization draws on bricolage practices (Lévi-Strauss, 1966), identifying the components of the technology that can be re-used, modified, or recombined to create something new. Creolization finds users more deeply involved in transforming technol-ogy than baroquization.

In these and many other examples, users appropriate technology by personalizing mobile phones as allowed by providers, using their mobile “as intended.” Their actions do not conflict with the interests of technology providers but generate revenue for device manufacturers, service providers, and third parties. User actions do, however, go beyond mere adoption and constitute active modification of devices or services. Taken together, these actions add up to a rich layering of modifications using customizable spaces cre-ated by the supplier in a process reminiscent of “baroque infiltration.”

Today for US$25 a month, a smartphone user can acquire a realistic “invisible boyfriend” whose messages are crowdsourced from hundreds of thousands micro-task workers, who customize their responses to the users’ preferences (Dewey, 2015). More substantive examples include the multiple mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) that customize the generic service from the main mobile carriers to fit particular lifestyles.

Upon closer examination of the appropriation phase, we distinguish three modes of tech-nology appropriation: baroquization, creolization, and cannibalism, by analogy with cul-tural appropriation. Baroquization is the filling-in of technological spaces that providers intentionally leave blank for users to personalize devices and applications; creolizationis bricolage, the recombination of the technology’s components to create something new; and cannibalism is creative destruction, an innovative act that requires breaking down the existing to invent something new.These three forms of appropriation correspond to increasingly confrontational stances users take vis-à-vis technology providers, within a context of asymmetric power. Baroquization is docile, where users follow an appropriation script laid out for them by the provider. Creolization is playful and unpredictable, where users re-mix the providers’ script with their own, in ways that may clash with providers’ interests. At the extreme, cannibalism is deliberately hostile to the providers’ interests. These various appropria-tion modes correspond to progressively deeper user involvement with technology, requir-ing increasingly sophisticated technical skills. All three modes represent creative ways for users to assert greater control over technology, mold it to fit their lives, and make it their own.

First, the range of possibilities explored depends on the latitude for experimentation afforded by the technology. Second, the intensity with which innovations are explored reflects the

In fact, the manner in which providers negotiate this transition (how they handle the power shift) matters to the future success of technology and to the likelihood that users will further adopt and experiment.At the end of the repossession stage, a new or modified technology becomes availa-ble, upon which new rounds of adoption, appropriation, and repossession take place

User practices that create new uses represent forms of technology appropriation: whereas during the adoption stage, users simply used technology as it was given to them, here they modify technology to make it their own and invent practices around its possi-bilities. In doing so, users re-negotiate the relationship tying them to technology provid-ers: claiming technology as their own, they strive for greater control, with results that may not necessarily be congruent with the provider’s interest

Users do new things in new ways. Users explore new possibilities, including some beyond what motivated initial adoption. For instance, users personalize devices and applications to integrate them within their practices. Some users will re-arrange devices in ways that reflect their personalities

Initially, user practices do not change fundamentally: users do old things in new ways. For example, users make calls on a mobile phone instead of a wired phone or a public phone, but they carry out similar conversations, with the same people. New technology may allow existing practices to become more efficient—cheaper, faster, less place-bound—but not fundamentally different.

Our three-stage cycle of technology evolution begins when users adopt a technology and employ it to support their social or business activities. In a second stage, users appropri-ate technology: they experiment, try possibilities, and shape technology to fit their needs. In the third stage, providers take back control and repossess technology to re-configure it, reacting to the changes introduced through user appropriation. A new technology results, entering a new cycle as users adopt, appropriate anew, and prompt further repos-session, and so on (Bar, 1990).

First, we view technology evolution as a three-stage cyclical process of adoption, appropriation, and repossession. Users drive adoption. Users and providers alternatively drive appropriation and repossession, as users lead appropriation, while providers react when reclaiming the resulting innova-tions. Second, we identify three appropriation modes—baroquize, creolize, and canni-balize—that represent increasing degrees of power contestation by users. And third, we identify three repossession modes—co-opt, combine, and block—that represent increas-ingly antagonistic reactions by providers and mirror users’ appropriation strategies.

for analytic purposes we next order them from the less confrontational baroque to the more radical cannibalism, with creolization somewhere “in-between” (Santiago, 2001). While they are second nature for Latin Americans, we observe them throughout the world. Together, these modes offer a powerful taxonomy to understand innovation through mul-tiple appropriation strategies.

Born in the Plantation, the Hacienda, the Latifundio, and the Mine, creolization is now “scattered in those sheet plates and concrete mazes where our common becoming is adventuring itself, in favellas and mega-cities” (Glissant, 1995: 87). Alive and well, cre-olization can be found where Latin Americans live, in the spaces where they are exposed to new technologies. Born of avoidance (like Internet Protocol (IP) packets that find a route around obstacles) and mixing (like mashups and re-mix), creolization fits the realm of ICTs.

Latin Americans often resort to mixing and re-mixing in a process of “creolization.” The Americas are the con-tinent of mestisaje and hybridization. A reality that implies a process, hybridization can become an identity and the basis for appropriation.

The baroque succeeded because it expressed something all Latin American people (Indians, Africans, mestizos, and even sons and daughters of Spaniards born on the con-tinent) had in common: the rejection of the domineering and distant center. Carpentier (1995) explains that to understand “Why is Latin America the chosen territory of the baroque?” we must look at the people and processes that allowed them to finally own the continent: “Because all symbiosis, all mestisaje engenders the baroque. The American baroque develops [...] with the self-awareness of the American man [...] the awareness of being Other, of being new, of being symbiotic, of being a criollo” (p

They tried to preserve some of their world within the interstices left by conquerors. Direct confrontation was seldom successful, but infiltra-tion could be practiced in everyday life, in many aspects of cultural production. Power was always at stake.The baroque practice originated in Europe, where it was encouraged by Rome within a Counter-Reform strategy in which movement, dance, and popular art were used to counteract protestant rigor. In the Americas, the baroque took on a new life as it infil-trated spaces intentionally left vacant by the Iberian conquerors (Zamora and Kaup, 2010) and created an opportunity for the oppressed to state their presence, insert their messages, and suggest their views of the universe.

Gil, who later became Brazil’s Minister of Culture, described tropicalismo as “No longer a mere submission to the forces of economic imperialism, but a cannibalistic response of swallowing what they gave us, processing it, and making it something new and different” (Dibbell, 1989: 78). Within this historical perspective, Gil’s ministry support for Open Source and Free Software takes on its full meaning.

Three strategies deserve particular attention for their symbolic value: cannibalism, baroque, and creolization. Cannibalism is appropriation trough dismembering, absorption, and chemical transformation. Baroque—an infiltration strategy—is the artistic appropria-tion of spaces through filling and layering. In-between, creolization is appropriatio

Throughout history, Latin American populations have had extensive experience with the appropriation of objects, people, and ideas from abroad, most often in unfavorably asymmetric situations. This tradition continues to pro-duce a culture of its own, born from multiple resistance and appropriation strategies.

Likewise, the interplay between economic, cultural, and political tensions remains largely unexplored.

Surman and Reilly (2003) focus on appropriation of networked technologies in a strategically, politically, and creatively innovative manner oriented toward social change. In this context of advocacy, effective technology appropriation includes strategic Internet use for collaboration, publishing, mobilization, and observation. Here, the delineation between the use and appropriation occurs when technology is adapted to reflect goals and culture. Camacho (2001) describes appropriation by civil society organizations at the pinnacle of a technology use ladder. In the middle of the ladder, organizations focus on adoption of conventional technology. Toward the bottom, organizations and individuals with constrained access or slow adoption rates lag behind and seek access to technology. At the pinnacle, however, pioneers and activists appropriate technology to promote causes, for instance, creating flash mobs through mass text messaging to instantaneously organize large groups of people for social protest

Appropriation considers both learn-ing-by-using and learning-by-doing as central to the development of new processes (Rosenberg, 1982). Learning-by-doing in particular assumes that knowledge emerges through bricolage—tinkering with and recombining technology elements, thus enhancing one’s understanding (Lévi-Strauss, 1966). For Tuomi (2002), learning through appropria-tion is a user-centered process whereby users meld culture with material resources to innovate.

The nexus of appropriation shifts away from user empowerment through technology to users as technology developers, echoing others who view users as designers and developers (Eglash, 2004). The design perspective fur-ther recognizes that not all appropriation is successful. Notably, technological appropria-tion fails when users decide not to explore capabilities or to evaluate a technology (Carroll etal., 2002).

Rogers (2003) defines diffusion as the process through which an innovation is communicated and spreads over time. Rogers theorized diffusion as a one-stage process, whereas appropriation adds a more detailed view of actual technology use (Fichman, 2000)

Users may modify a device, download, or program new applications, invent unintended uses, or develop new practices that leverage its possibilities. This experimentation constitutes a re-negotiation of the power relationships embedded in the technology. This creative re-negotiation is the core of appropriation, the process through which users take something external and make it their own.

Second, we posit that users adopt technology because it makes a difference to their lives. In the case of mobile telephony, the technology opens up new socio-economic opportunities by increasing connectedness to others. Usage, in turn, reveals the politics embedded within a technology’s configuration, disclosing who controls what

We first emphasize that technology is not neutral. The design of products, applications, and services embodies choices, largely made in early development stages by equipment producers and service providers, about how devices ought to be used, by whom and for what purpose. A technology’s architecture embodies power relationships between equipment makers, service providers, and users. Relationships between various stakeholders have social and economic implications

This article frames appropriation as a political process.

Users re-invent technology when they test features, tweak devices and applications to better fit their needs (Papa and Papa, 1992), invent new ways to use services, and develop novel social, economic, and political practices around technology’s possibilities (Venkatesh etal., 2012). As new practices develop, we need to better understand the dynamics of interaction between social, economic, and political influences

For a technology to evolve in accordance with users’ needs, aiding social and economic development, the focus must move beyond mere adoption. When users appropriate technology and make it their own, new uses and innovations emerge. The appropriation process is a contest for control over a technological system’s configuration, as users, designers, and manufacturers battle over who can use that technology, at what cost, under what conditions, for what purpose, and with what consequences. This confrontation, we argue, constitutes a powerful innovation mechanism.

Appropriation is the process through which technology users go beyond mere adoption to make technology their own and to embed it within their social, economic, and political practices. The appropriation process is a negotiation about power and control over the configuration of technology, its uses, and the distribution of its benefits. The negotiation surrounding technology appropriation echoes earlier creative tensions in the New World regarding the appropriation of cultural objects and ideas from abroad.

Yet de­spite my flaws as a pro­gram­mer, with Racket I’ve been able to ren­der big­ger ideas into pro­grams more quickly, and with fewer bugs, than any lan­guage I’ve used be­fore (and there have been many—Ba­sic, C, C++, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Python, and oth­ers). Since I haven’t got­ten a brain trans­plant re­cently, there must be some­thing spe­cial about Racket as a language.

I like to think of Pollen markup a way of capturing not just the text, but also my ideas about the text. Some of these are low-level ideas (“this text should be italicized”). Some are high-level ideas (“this text is the topic of the page”). Some are just notes to myself. In short, everything I know about the text becomes part of the text.In so doing, Pollen markup becomes the source code of the book.

The nicest thing we could say about XML is that its intentions are good. It’s pointed toward the right goals. But its benefits are buried under atrocious ergonomics.

In conclusion, these articles highlight elements of a broader story of increasing democ-ratization of hacking and making. This plurality will likely continue to grow and confront global, structural, and technological challenges worldwide.

François Bar, Matthew Weber, and Francis Pisani advocate for a cul-tural model of technological appropriation drawn from Latin America. Appropriation draws attention to how users interpret, manipulate, and repurpose technology in creative and unexpected ways. Their cycle of evolution suggests cultural mechanisms of appro-priation: baroquization, creolization, and cannibalism. This new vocabulary to understand technological appropriation un-moors the notion of “hacking” from Western modernity. It encourages us to think about how users and cultures are central to a technology’s life-cycle. Beyond just signaling difference, Bar, Weber, and Pisani suggest that innovation on the periphery is a powerful process that merits consideration.

Richardson argues that “open design” in the maker movement encourages diversity and collective participation in the production process. Being “pre-hacked” provides an alternative way to think about participation in technological produc-tion. The maker movement tenuously embraces open design, even if they have less success in considering how these practices might scale.

“Civic hackers” are a diverse range of individuals who improve community life by creating and modifying digital infrastructure. Policy-makers optimistically describe them as driving new economies using government data. Critical scholars note how they precariously labor for waning institutions. Yet, we may misunderstand civic hackers because they transgress established political categories of libertarianism and liberalism, and adversary and unitary democracy. Andrew Schrock charts a middle ground by argu-ing that civic hacking—and its fraught, even contradictory politics—partly emerged from a history of progressive informational practices. In the shift from “information” to “data,” the original goals of these practices became muted, even as new possibilities for civic engagement emerged. “Data activism and advocacy” describes a fraught but diverse range of political tactics of amateur experts working for change, often within the political system. He argues these remediated practices carry the impulses of political reform, even as they are often tied up with conflicting imperatives.

Hacker and maker spaces are community workshops that promote notions of open-access and equal participation. Yet, they tend to embrace a contradiction. Their egalitar-ian goals paradoxically reflect a masculine geek identity anchored by an exclusionary “meritocracy.” Addressing democratization requires questioning how power and identity in hacker and maker spaces can be reconnected and re-programmed. Daniela K. Rosner and Sarah Fox illuminate just such a rich counter-narrative in the feminist hackerspace Mothership Hackermoms. Rosner and Fox argue feminist hackerspaces emerged from legacies of craft, engineering culture, and emotional style through failure. They argue that histories of craft and domesticity don’t just undergird engineering cultures—they provide concepts for women to re-imagine maker spaces in a feminist mold.

Critiques have emerged over how these prototypes are rarely effective or adopted in addressing the very problems they inspire. Thomas Lodato and Carl DiSalvo suggest that this disillusionment stems from a misunderstanding of the process and outcomes of hackathons. They argue that issue-oriented hackathons create “props”—material tools for thinking through issues—and cohere “proto-publics” through material participation. These implicit outcomes appear almost in spite of their explicit format and goals. Hackathons therefore provide the ability to articulate issues of shared concern and col-lectively work towards alleviating social issues.

democracy requires space for collective action. As technologies and their communities of practice changed, new spaces were needed that reached beyond established collectivities of group, community, and organization. Hackathons and hackerspaces are two such genres of collectivity that encourage participation and collaboration towards explicitly egalitarian goals

Inconsistencies in ideological perspective are not uncommon in activities which attempt to balance individualism and communalism. These very frictions might belie possibilities for a greater imagination or shared experience. However, we argue that it is only in the disputes and frictions between pluralities of publics that democratization emerges. Dissensus across making and hacking communities allows people to experiment, eventu-ally finding communities and processes in which they feel comfortable and can identify. These very migrations, connected by fluid narratives and practices, drive the capacity of communities to develop and innovate.

Many movements have become somewhat unsta-ble and decentralized. This instability allows for fluidity and moments where cultures become complicit in neoliberalism and globalization. This complicit exploitation is espe-cially visible when we consider the relationship between maker publics and technolo-gies. In buying, creating, and re-purposing technologies, hacker and maker groups engage capitalist enterprises that span the globe.

The public has become aware of the popularization of hacking and making mostly through moments of emergency and scandal. Forgetting serves a function for the public, allowing them to get on with their own interests. Concurrently, this public forgetting allows hackers to regain their spaces of creativity and action. Maker culture, too, forgets in order to find a perpetual sense of novelty in their very existence. Forgetting, an important social and cultural project, is also part of the democratic project. Democracies forget to put aside old tensions and re-form in order for the public to sup-port them.

We have framed the theme of this issue as “The Democratization of Hacking and Making” to draw attention to the relationships between action, knowledge, and power. Particularly, hacking and making are about how practices of creation and transforma-tion generate knowledge and influence institutions. These acts concentrate and distrib-ute power through publics and counterpublics. Yet, the very mutability of hacker and maker relations makes them a challenge to identify and research. Hacking and making collectives have proven capable of constituting and reconstituting themselves in physi-cal and virtual spaces. They integrate across infrastructures, collaborative systems, socio-economic divides, and international boundaries.

.Theopendatadefinitionthatemergedfocusedoneightqualitiesofdata:completeness,pri-macy,timeliness,easeofphysicalandelectronicaccess,machinereadability,non-discrimination,useofcommonlyownedstandards,licensing,permanence,andusagecosts.

civic hackers often act as the “slow food movement” of digital political action, embracing local sourcing, ethical consumption, and pleasure of community work. Civic hackers are hardly responding to a new narrative of technological change.

The more pressing threat is that a fear of solution-ism and neoliberal connotations of “open data” together might dissuade political par-ticipation. Systemic social disparities are often intractable. The route to alleviate them has never been detachment or abandonment. Looking forward, we should pay attention to how data activism and advocacy might result in meaningful systematic change beyond the usual claims of “transparency.” To fulfill the possibilities for meaningful social change hinted at in their history, civic hackers might have to coordinate around specific mechanisms for change and articulate a deeper sense of democracy than the language of technology provides.

To put Giddens in conversation with Morozov, the threat of civic hackers is not that they naively employ “solution-ism.” Quite to the contrary, they debate ethics of technology design, seek collabora-tions with local organizations, and attempt to re-think how government services might be more sensitive to resident needs.

Might “utopian realist” be applicable to the practices of civic hackers, intertwined with particular repertoires, technologies, and affective publics? McKenzie Wark (2014) sug-gests that the relationship between utopian and realist might be mutually constitutive rather than dialectical. He re-frames utopia as a realizable fragment or diagram that re-imagines relations. From this perspective, civic hacking gets traction not because they were ever intended to be the sole “solution” to a problem, but they are ways of acting and creating that are immediately apprehensible. Prototypes capture the imagination because they are shards of a possible future and can be created, modified, and argued about (Coleman, 2009).

Civic hackers might be most appropriately described as utopian realists (Giddens, 1990: 154), a term Giddens employed to capture how assuaging negative consequences in a risk society required retaining Marx’s concern of connecting social change to insti-tutional possibilities while leaving behind his formulation of history as determining and reliance on the proletariat as change agents. He positioned utopian realists as sensitive to social change, capable of creating positive models of society, and connecting with life politics.

civic hackers seek to ease societal suffering by bringing the hidden workings of abstract systems to light and improve their functioning. Part of the academic discomfort with recognizing civic hacking might stem from their activities cutting across political categories that have traditionally been passionately defended: unitary and adversary, citizen and consumer, horizontalist and institutionalized, and prefigurative and strategic.

Contesting refers to the creation of crowdsourced data or prototypes for not yet existent uses for data. It is similar to modeling but with an oppositional rather than persuasive tone.

That “hackers” can model beneficial process disrupts the often presumed subversive nature of hacking as much as it does easy assumptions about a Foucaultian notion of governmentality. Prototypes act as working evidence to lobby for changing government process, particularly those that improve digital infrastructure or direct communication with citizens. The capa-bility of code to act as a persuasive argument has long been noted, and modeling can produce charged debates about the very meaning of “civic.”

The most popular apps to date have been highly instrumental ways to request services to fix city infrastructure, such as SeeClickFix, a platform that lets residents take pictures of issues that need repair, that are delivered to the appropriate city department as an actionable item. We might think of this as a base-level civic act similar to picking litter off the ground or paint-ing over graffiti. Other activities are thicker modes of participation by generating data or metadata. The primary effort of the 2014 CodeAcross effort was to map exist-ing sources of open data. The leader of the event, D.W. Ferrell, described “our role as citizens is to complement” efforts by the government and organizations such as CfA. Contributing to data repositories served purposes for multiple stakeholders:

dis-putes over community as a particular category threatens to distract from a general focus on solidarity by activating “social bases of discursive publics that engage peo-ple across lines of basic difference in collective identities” (p. 374). A mutable, popu-larized hacker identity may have this potential, capable of processing and interpreting abstract systems of regulation.

He proposes that “monitorial citizens” act as a watchdog for specific issues, ready to take action. From this perspective, civic hack-ers could be considered a monitorial elite, watching data streams and processes of algorithmic regulation for injustices and engaging directly with local politics. “The local” operates as a point of collaboration (Dunbar-Hester, 2013) and point of entry for geeks to engage with neighborhood issues

After all, “government transparency cannot be defined as only the information that governments deign to share

Civic hackers widely view machine-readable data as more useful because it drives a wider variety of potential uses, even as the shift from informational uses raises the bar to the literacies required to interpret it. In civic hackathons, knowledge of government operations was as useful as technical knowledge.

Data activism and advocacy ranges from civic engagement (Putnam, 2001) to more oppositional activism (Jordan, 2001). In this sense, it is a spe-cific association of technologically mediated participation with particular political goals (Lievrouw, 2011) resulting in a wide range of tactics. Although open government data is still evolving and is constrained by predictions for economic growth and self-regulation, I argue it enables civic hackers to participate in civic data politics. This is particularly important because data-driven environment is often distanced from pro-viding individuals a sense of agency to change their conditions (Couldry and Powell, 2014). Data activism and advocacy can take place through organizing on related top-ics, online through mediated data repositories such as Github, and in-person events such as hackathons.

Obama appointed Aneesh Chopra as the first chief technology officer (CTO) of the United States and released executive orders defining open government in 2009 as entailing transparency (“conduct its work more openly and publish its information online”), participation (in decision-making), and collaboration (both internal and external). In 2013, he emphasized machine-readable data as a “default for govern-ment.”

Open data, like open information before it, promised fixes for bureaucratic problems and leveling power asymmetries (Fenster, 2012). Municipal governments strapped for funds and in dire need of more efficient frameworks have, of course, welcomed the message that open government data can alleviate time-consuming FOIA requests, make services easier for residents to use, and drive hack-athons as a form of public outreach.

Swartz objected because transparency for transparency’s sake shifted labor from government entities to eve-ryday citizens, and the connection of transparency to accountability had been irrevo-cably altered: “the pipeline of leak to investigation to revelation to report to reform has broken down.” In their opinion, flows of information became detached from their uses to gain leverage against corruption.

Crowdsourcing is often used as a metaphor for open data initiatives with emergent and vaguely defined goals of collaboration rather than specific ones (Brabham, 2013). Open data came increasinly referred to an ecosystem of production rather than accountability. In The New Ambiguity of Open Government, Harlan Yu and David Robinson (2012) note that open data signals a movement toward “politically neutral public sector disclosures that are easy to reuse, even if they have nothing to do with public accountability” (p. 178).

The emphasis on innovation is also vis-ible in Tim O’Reilly’s (2010) influential notion of “government as platform,” which positioned systems of governance as being similar to technical systems, subject to con-stant observation and tweaking to improve inefficiencies. He applied a biological model to government, where “information produced by and on behalf of citizens is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation” (O’Reilly, 2010: 14).

The computational shift of open government data refers to the move from governments fulfilling information requests to automatically releasing data to fulfill a range of more speculative uses. While promises about the Internet (Morozov, 2013b) encouraged this move, so too did notions of open government from previous decades. For example, David Osborne’s notion of “reinventing government” involved hallmarks familiar to open data initiatives: “catalytic” public–private relationships, connecting with communi-ties, and decentralized collaboration (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992)

On the level of municipal governments in particular, the movement from information to data focused on new uses that emphasized collaboration and utility over accountability (Yu and Robinson, 2012), signaling what I term the computational shift of openness.

The open data definition drafted at Sebastopol describes data’s completeness, primacy, timeliness, ease of physical and electronic access, machine readability, non-discrimination, use of commonly owned standards, licensing, permanence, and usage costs. This description made it clear what the proper-ties of data were, even as outcomes, fitting with an open-source model, were more

His stance was not cyberlibertarian (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). As his successive refutation of transparency in this shift toward open data indicates (Lessig, 2009), he was quite concerned about efforts with software becoming distanced from tangible outcomes. Lessig might regarded as a hacker in the mold of Tim Jordan (2008), taking a progressive perspective on how we might regulate technologies—alongside laws, norms, and markets—that affect behavior.

In the early 1990s, govern-ment transparency became something of a fad, spawning similar legislation overseas. Leading transparency activists started to view the potential of the Internet for increasing accessibility as a natural extension of this freedom of information movement. The efforts of Carl Malamud and the Sunlight Foundation applied right to information principles to the Internet, facilitating public access to vital information on law and government before individuals requested it. They took a more overtly ecological perspective on openness where information could be integrated into as-yet unforeseen processes

First, FOIA provided accessible tools to put abstract ideas into practice. Everyday citizens started to attach various political notions to these activities. Second, information flowed into a journalistic ecosystem that was prepared to process and interpret it for everyday citizens. Information obtained through FOIA was being interpreted in stories that changed public opinion (Leff etal., 1986). Third, ability for individuals to request information led to alternate uses for activ-ists, public interest groups, and non-profit organizations.

FOIA was only strengthened after Nixon’s resignation in 1974 when it was amended over Ford’s veto. Even afterward, it didn’t match with the complete vision of ASNE. At times requests to comply stretched well beyond 10days and requests are still frequently denied. Despite claiming to embrace openness, Obama’s presidency has been notoriously secretive, with record numbers of whistle-blower cases and FOIA requests being denied or censored.

Harold L. Cross to write The People’s Right to Know. Cross concluded that “there is no enforceable legal right in public or press to inspect any federal non-judicial record.” This text was published in 1953 and circulated mostly at the federal level, promoting the idea of freedom of infor-mation within and outside of journalist circles as being beneficial to the public good. Congressman John Moss’ commission then garnered the attention for President Johnson to sign FOIA into law on 4 July 1966.

The replacement of FOIA requests by open data is still touted by data platforms such as Socrata as a savings of labor and money (Quigg, 2014). Participants in civic data hackathons conceptually connect open data with accountability, to “keep city hall honest” as one participant put it.

Journalism historians Stoker and Rawlins (2005) extended Brandeis’ metaphor of light to describe this as a move from “searchlight to flashlight”—a narrower and less powerful beam that only illuminated what corpora-tions wanted. Yet they also critiqued progressive beliefs that publicity was synonymous with purification and backers such as Adams for placing “too much faith in information’s power to produce public action” (p. 186)

In 1902’s What is Publicity? political professor Henry Adams described publicity as “an essential agency for the control of trusts” (p. 895).

Open government data therefore provides a specific lineage to compare and contrast with the multitude of “open” concepts in circulation, including open standards (Russell, 2014), open source (Coleman, 2012a), and open systems (Kelty, 2008: Chapter 5). While the open government data movement in the United States is kin to these other lineages, it is conceptually and historically distinct. It also bears mention that this history is con-fined to the United States. Practices with openness have been differently interpreted by grassroots participants across the world, from Asia (Lindtner, 2012) to the global South (Chan, 2013).

Yet, the natural equating of “openness” or government transparency (Hood and Heald, 2006) with accountability increasingly became dubious (Tkacz, 2012). The move to “open data” was often an imperative that didn’t make clear where the levers were for social change that benefited citizens (Lessig, 2009). Still, I argue that civic hackers are often uniquely positioned to act on issues of public concern; they are in touch with local communities, with technical skills and, in many cases, institutional and legal literacies. I conclude by connecting the open data movement with a specific set of political tactics—requesting, digesting, contributing, modeling, and contesting data.

Coleman suggested scholars consider the diverse range of ways individuals organize, mobilize, and act politically. This move toward how political notions evolve within specific collectives can also be seen in Nathanael Bassett’s (2013) writing on activist hackathons and Molly Sauter’s (2014) work with online civil disobedience. Their mode of inquiry, and the one I follow here, focuses on a specific collective with a specific and traceable history with attendant tools, practices, and tactics.

In each case data was framed as repressive of notions of civil society or enforcing an impoverished or constrictive notion of citizenship. The perspectives of Tufekci and Cheney-Lippold provide valuable insight into how algorithms and data are powerful shapers of modern life. Yet, they leave little room for a different form of algorithmic citizenship that might emerge where indi-viduals desire to reform technology and data-driven processes. As Couldry and Powell (2014) note, models of algorithmic power (Beer, 2009; Lash, 2007) tend to downplay questions of individual agency. They suggest a need to “highlight not just the risks of creating and sharing data, but the opportunities as well” (p. 5). We should be attentive to moments where meaningful change can occur, even if those changes are fraught with forces of neoliberalism and tinged with technocracy.

Two overall framings of hackers’ engagement with the political have dominated discussion: “hacktivists” or activists who leverage instrumental uses of online technologies for direct political action such as protest and disruption (Jordan and Taylor, 2004), and geographically distributed communities of practice where principles of openness enable forms of political action (Coleman, 2004). Gabriella Coleman (2012a) argues that pragmatism enables action on issues related to informational freedoms and reflects liberal democratic tenets such as freedom of speech. According to Coleman (2004), explicit involvement in “politics” in a formalized sense is distasteful to free and open-source hackers, as it is viewed as “buggy, mediated, and tainted action clouded by ideology” (p. 513). Civic hacking represents a third mode of participation among a group that often explicitly engages with political causes through designing, critiquing, and manipulating software and data to improve community life and infrastructures of governance. Civic hackers therefore have distinct histories, con-tours, and conflicts from other genres of hackers, even as they share a certain family resemblance (Wittgenstein, 1953).

Civic hacking can broadly be described as a form of alternative/activist media that “employ or modify the communication artifacts, practices, and social arrangements of new information and communication technologies to challenge or alter dominant, expected, or accepted ways of doing society, culture, and politics” (Lievrouw, 2011: 19). Ample research has considered how changes in technology and access have created “an environment for politics that is increasingly information-rich and communication-inten-sive” (Bimber, 2001). Earl and Kimport (2011) argue that such digital activism draws attention to modes of protest—“digital repertoires of contention” (p. 180)—more than formalized political movements

Organizations such as Code for America (CfA) rallied support by positioning civic hacking as a mode of direct partici-pation in improving structures of governance. However, critics objected to the involve-ment of corporations in civic hacking as well as their dubious political alignment and non-grassroots origins. Critical historian Evgeny Morozov (2013a) suggested that “civic hacker” is an apolitical category imposed by ideologies of “scientism” emanating from Silicon Valley. Tom Slee (2012) similarly described the open data movement as co-opted and neoliberalist.

Other definitions capture broader notions of civil society. A 2010 study backed by the Open Society Foundation described civic hackers as “deploying information technology tools to enrich civic life, or to solve particular problems of a civic nature, such as democratic engagement” (Hogge, 2010: 10).

I conclude civic hackers are utopian realists involved in the crafting of algorithmic power and discussing ethics of technology design.

Successive waves of activists saw the Internet as a tool for transparency. The framing of openness shifted in meaning from information to data, weakening of mechanisms for accountability even as it opened up new forms of political participation. Drawing on a year of interviews and participant observation, I suggest civic data hacking can be framed as a form of data activism and advocacy: requesting, digesting, contributing to, modeling, and contesting data

What might Raymond Williams make of our ordinary hacker? He might be relieved to see the continued importance of hands-on work and reciprocity among ordinary people in hackerspaces, even if he found them too close to a drinking-hole (they are far from a high society tea-house). For their part, members would find much in common with Williams’ progressive embrace of technology paired with disdain for formalized education.

The durability of hackerspaces is curious, given their relative fragility. Hodder grappled with the idea that over time we become progressively more entangled. Hacker and maker spaces as a particular model have survived ideological inversions, international deployment, and alternate cultural interpretations. The heterogeny of hackerspaces, far from being a limitation, lends a mutability and easy embedding in various communities and social contexts. Entanglementalso suggests dependences outside of the space itself.

Echoing an old observation in activism about the “tyranny of structurelessness” (Freeman, 1972), power became difficult to contest when you remove the mechanisms to contest action. New visitors who didn’t immediately resonate with the space were turned off from the cold vision of geeks silently co-working next to each other. Longstanding members became frustrated by frequent clashes between hotheaded personalities. Then there were issues about what went where. Who didn’t put the hand drill back in the bin? Technology was a source of drama, particularly when commitments were discussed on email lists or in passing and then forgotten. Who said they would get the laser cutter running? Although sufficiently meta and informal to be palatable to members, it was hardly a smooth way to run an organization.

Individual agency is the core of do-ocracy, fostered and filtered through projects, objects, and tools in the space itself.

n large part the desire for autonomy alongside warm community relationships can be seen as an extension of what Fred Turner (2008) termed “new communalism.” New communalists emerged alongside the new left and believed in a kind of hive mind while rejecting formalized politics and institutions. Hackerspaces, as a kind of “third space” (Oldenburg, 1997), provided a site for these ideas to expand. Democracy was seen as cumbersome and slow. Do-ocracy provided speed and the freedom to act without consultation.

Members strived to make the invisible, sinewy dependences in the space visible. Despite its utility, the set of target boards was eventually left behind a storage bin.

Projects, as an entanglement, are “open, partial and indeterminate” (Hodder, 2012, p. 159).They might be being showed off at the next open house, orentirely forgotten. Peter noted that his hard drive was filling up with “functionally dead” shelved projects that got boring or require expertise from outside the space. Yet, to Peter failure was an indication of project success. He believed, as scholars of innovation do, that embracing failure contributed to better ideas. Projects also carried an ethical charge. Michael, a quiet member and software professional, reflected at length on what he called the “philosophical” side of projects. He saw them an inroad to “participation in the fabrication process” that was empowering. In his words, projects were “manufacturing liberation.”

Counter to a high-minded association of “liberal projects,” projects in hackerspaces resisted a final form. The action in hackerspace is more bricolage(Lévi Strauss, 1962, p. 18)than engineering. Projects in Geekspace arose spontaneously. Their inertia drew people to the space, bringing their tools and ideas that would then supplement the ideas of others. This churn is captured by how projects were seen as a success of the new space even though very few projects were actually finished.

These more formalized gatherings were an attempt to get people working and collaborating in a space that had mainly turned into a spot for hanging out, drinking and foosball. The shift to the new space was seen as an opportunity to encourage members to use the space in a more productive way. The space needed members as much as members needed the tools. Members echoed a liberalist concern with increasing freedom of individuals to act, while retaining hobbyist cultures’ engagement with materialities. Often hackerspace members also described the need for a hackerspace as part of a shift in their city’s economy

projectors refer to “people who find a way out of their difficulties by coming up with novel ideas” (Novak, 2008, p. 3)

Members became entangled with ordinary things and people, developing dependences they found alternately pleasurable and frustrating. Tools came to the space to suit individual needs, including shaping of recreational interaction. The more taut the dependences they develop, the more closely members aligned themselves with the space, and the better for the group

Eventually she became more entangled with social relationships, which helped her work on technical projects that brought a comfort of similarity from previous work. Initially she didn’t identify with the term “hacker.” Only later did she came to understand herself as oriented around self-sufficiency and creative problem-solving. For her, the resonance with hacking as an identity came after participation and a deeper entanglement.

The hands-on nature of the work to her resonated with her family history, love of tactile assembly, and disdain of consumerism. Vicki, like many members, came to view hackerspaces as sites that rejected consumerism, even as they paradoxically engaged in consumer culture by purchasing kits and materials.

Hackerand maker spaces are meta-organizational assemblages. Entanglement – through the notion fo “do-ocracy” –stands in for typical organizational trappings of rules, hierarchies and roles. Hackerspaces morph and evolve to meet the desires of participants, draw on affordances of tools and materialities of the space itself.

Hodder suggests that entanglements attain fittingness, or a degree of phenomenological and emotional appropriateness for particular groups. Fittingness is attained through abstraction, resonance, and affordances of particular things.

Hodder pushes us to consider how dependence relationships emerge over time and result in people getting “trapped” in particular routines and ways of acting.

to explore how webs of dependences balance participation and organization in the context of hackerspaces. Ian Hodder (2012) defined “entanglement” as dependences between humans and things, which are “stuck together” in a web. He defined things as entities that are “contained and identifiable” (p. 7) by a particular person or group, which gives them a presence and longevity. Dependences refer to enabling and constraining relationships that are created partly from how people recognize and perceive the material and immaterial qualities of things, and partly from the interlocking nature of things with other things.

this case study hopefully reveals how hackerspaces might be considered as a particular genre of organization that defies traditional organizational practices.

the ordinary hacker emerged from the entanglement ofhackerspaces. Writing on hacking has a rich subtext of intertwined human and non-human agencies. Tim Jordancompelling argued that the essence of hacking deeply involves reciprocalinteractions between individuals and things (Jordan, 2008). Hackers are often thought to be exceptional masters of technology. According this narrative, they leverage expertise with hands-on work to reveal what’s inside “black boxes.” This chapter explores an intriguing counter-argument: things make the hacker. This process deeply involves affect, a sense of community, and identification with a personal narrative.

hackerspace members’ relationship with materialities. In response, this chapter advances an idea about how interactions between individuals and things (Hodder, 2012) can shape collective action. Hackerspaces’ horizontalist mode of organizing is oriented around material forms of participation and communication.

As critics have noted, hackerspaces have only a thin veneer of democracy, made thinner still by a reliance on meritocracy. Members described the dominant ofrm of regulation in the space as “do-ocracy,”

Interactions through things, and perceptions about their potential, were ways to negotiate between seemingly conflicting imperatives of the individualism and communalism (A. L. Toombs, Bardzell, & Bardzell). Members would deliberately design activities that were incomplete to encourage a playful material improvisation. In these ways, the “material sensibilities” of members were particularly important. Similarly, reading a history of craft into software hacking, Lingel and Regan (2014) found that software hackers identified their work with craft as process, embodiment, and community. These sensitive readings of interactions with stuff seemed to more accurately capture the genre of hackerspaces, more so than action was guided by culture.

This work perceptively suggested that people often don’t arrive at hackerspaces with an identity fully-formed. Tools and projects, as socio-material assemblages, shepherded new arrivals in and helped them understand

economic vision didn’t seem to hold water, while a cultural perspective seemed insufficient to explain hacker and maker spaces as a particular genre of participatory organization. Recent ethnographic inquiry on hackerspaces grounded in social and material interactions provides a way forward. While hackerspaces may be inspired by online peer production, the transfer of this ethic to offline space is often imperfect due to the nature of physical things

economic vision didn’t seem to hold water, while a cultural perspective seemed insufficient to explain hacker and maker spaces as a particular genre of participatory organization.

Most members of western hackerspaces I encountered were fairly well-off and had day jobs. The last thing they wanted to do at the end of the day was come to a second workplace with deadlines and responsibilities

Challenges have been mounted to those who view hackerspaces through simple economic and political lenses. One comes from viewing hackerspaces as a whole with a coherent ideology.

Maxigas (2012) used political ideologies to claim a differences between overtly politicized lineage of European hack labs and only partly political hackerspaces. By his reading, hackerspaces either came from a lineage of activism or had activist potential that had yet to be fully activated. Others have taken a middle-ground, using cultural approaches to hackerspaces

As I will discuss shortly, hackerspaces pull people in, and it is often only through shared engagement that they understand themselves as hackers and makers. Unpacking emic terms members use to describe this entanglement — project and do-ocracy — is the focus of this chapter.

My more explicit framing of hackers as ordinary — approachable, common, and attainable — lets us consider how collectives and identities are forged among everyday people in unremarkable spaces and material contexts.

That hackers are created, not born, is hardly a new claim. In Coding Freedom Gabriella Coleman described how an open-source hackers’ identity emerged from a fervent brew of digital connectivity, technological concepts, and shared work (Coleman, 2012). Political awareness was connected to liberalism through open-source and code over time. Put simply, being a hacker is a trajectory with multiple points of origin and destinations. Neither is suggesting that hackers are ordinary meant to discard a concern with exceptional hackers. We should be concerned with the Chelsea Mannings and Edward Snowdens of the world, and the causes they have championed.

Worrying that hacking might be “gentrified,” as Scott does, brings up a further irony. Hacking’s expansion beyond circles of tech-savvy, affluent white males demonstrates diversity, not homogeny. Seeking an essence of hacking misses this diversification. There are also risks in separating the exceptional and everyday hacker. A wall creates artificial distinctions between “haves” (intelligence, political awareness, skills) and “have nots.” The more productive perspective to gentrification might be hybrid forms of hacker pluralism.

We may simply misunderstand what motivates them to do what they do as new groups adopt the identity. We presume they follow in a certain mold of hackers, or are Trojan horses for Silicon Valley.

A similar wall now exists between the exceptional and ordinary hacker. Journalistic and academic writing defines hackers as resistant geeks capable of bringing about changes in governments and corporations. The hacker is the powerful underdog, plotted against by the powers that be. Their anti-hero status is even more salient when viewing the trope of the hacker in popular media. We cheer for the exceptional hacker, as well we should. But in many readings hacking’s subversive nature is assumed to be diluted by its mainstreaming. Disappointment is rampant when hackers are found not to be sufficiently resistant. Brett Scott echoes this perspective when he writes about how the “wild and anarchic” hacker ethos was gentrified by “yuppies” (2015). Evgeny Morozov (January 13, 2014) interpreted makers as no more than commodified hackers lacking a radical edge. Hackers simply lost their mojo. It is only with a shrug and a sigh they are revealed to be dupes of a fraudulent ideology. At most dystopian, David Golumbia’s cyberlibertarian thesis, coming from critical studies, proposes that hackers’ espouse a technological solutionism that is responsible for the collapse of the political left (Golumbia, 2013).

Members often toutthat “anyone can be a hacker.”While this claim is dubious– participation is limited by technical inclinations, skills, and comfort hanging around rowdy spaces –hackerspaces certainly helpproduce an “ordinary hacker.” Theyare sites where we can observe hacking’s movement from subculture to mainstream, and from an edgy to popular identity.

Hackerspaces’ messy, heterogeneous interactions between people and things reflect an odd bundle of concepts. They are competitive andneoliberalist. Simultaneously, they are injected with feelings of community and liberal freedoms.To understand the logic that undergirds this confluence of concepts and where it leadsI argue we must return to Williams’ notion of ordinary.

Ordinariness– the everyday, unexceptional, and mundane – is a useful hermeneutic to view collective action and identity in hacker and maker spaces (or simply “hackerspaces”) (Schrock, 2014). This framing is a response toassumptions about hackers as exceptional. Two types of exceptionality have emerged. Critical scholars praiseactivism in hackerspaces(Maxigas, 2012)orotherwise bemoan the invisible hand of “cyberlibertarian” ideology(Golumbia, 2013). Then there are writers who look tohackerspaces as the key toeconomic profitability(Anderson, 2012). Thedefinitional disputebetween activism and corporatization bears more than a whiff of similarity toa previous such dispute; Pekka Himanen’s “hacker ethic”(Himanen, 2001) idealized hackers as labor for modernity, while McKenzie Warkpositioned hackers as a resistant class (Wark, 2004).

if stopped in their development and reified too early, are potential sources of hacks in the derogatory sense. The latter is, according to their stories, exactly what happened when, 40 years ago, the prototypes left the labs too soon, and entered the world of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, producing the accumulation of bad decisions that led to a world where people stare at smartphones.

To prevent misunderstanding: neither I, nor the engineers I research, think that the actual future can be hacked together singlehandedly by a bunch of engineers in Palo Alto or Oakland. But I do think that radical engineers such as Engelbart’s, Kay’s, or maybe Victor’s research groups, in their specific, highly privileged positions, add something crucial to the complex assemblage of forces that move us in the direction of futures.

If you are lucky, you have the conditions and abilities to work all this through in a long, non-linear process also known as bootstrapping, where you go through many iterations of hacking apart and hacking together, all the while creating fundamentally different ideas about what technologies should do, and could do, matched by a succession of devices and practices that help shape these ideas, and “demo” to yourself and others that some utopias might not be out of reach. This is what radical engineers do.

The black boxes will most likely also contain ideas about the roles of the different types of engineers, programmers, designers, managers, and so on. If you take all this apart, you might look at the elements, throw away a lot of them, twist others, add stuff from elsewhere, and grow some on your own. You will look into different, often historical, technological paradigms, other ideas about what will become technologically possible (and when), different ideas of social order, the good life and problems that need addressing, other books to be read, alternative uses of the forces of media, and different ideas about the kind of people and the nature of their professions or non-professions, who should take charge of all this.

That future is not given, but depends on the medium the group is imagining. It thus depends on the properties of the medium that the group is exploring, selecting, and practicing. On the one hand, technology enables a new medium, which is imagined as shaping the future, on the other hand the future is imagined as shaping the new medium, which then should drive technology.

Computing is to take the role of an infrastructure: much as books need light, but are not modeled after the light’s logic, the medium might draw, where necessary, on the computing possibilities provided by the OS in the background, but it should not be driven by them. Instead, the dynamic spatial medium should be driven by properties of the medium itself, and as such, it should drive technology.

The lab as a whole—its walls, desks, whiteboards, roofs, machines, and the people inhabiting it—functions as a first demo for an alternative medium.

As such, bootstrapping can assume different scopes and directions. While Engelbart’s and English’s project might sound ambitious, they still believed, at least in the 1960s, that bootstrapping inside a research group would achieve the desired results. Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group extended this setting in the 1970s through pedagogy and McLuhanite media theory. By bringing children in, they aimed to achieve recursive effects beyond the lab, with the long-term goal of involving the whole world in a process akin to bootstrapping. Bret Victor and his research group’s form of bootstrapping resembles a multi-layered onion. The kind of people who should be part of it, and at what moments, can lead to intense internal discussion.

Simply building prototypes with prototypes would not be a smart recipe for radical engineering: once in use, prototypes tend to break; thus, a toolset of prototypes would not be a very useful toolset for developing further prototypes. Bootstrapping as a process can thus only work if we assume that it is a larger process in which “tools and techniques” are developing with social structures and local knowledge over longer periods of time. The processes are recursive, much like the “recursive publics” that Chris Kelty (2008:30) describes for the free software development community: in both cases developers create sociotechnical infrastructures with which they can communicate and cooperate, which then spread to other parts of life. Kelty shows how such recursive effects are not simply the magical result of self-enforcing positive feedback. Recursive processes are based on politics. And resources. And qualified personnel. And care. And steering. In short, they need to be continually produced.

in a continuous process of “augmenting human intellect.” According to Engelbart, the latter can be achieved through the process of “bootstrapping.” This is a term that can mean many things in the Silicon Valley, from initiating systems to kicking off startups, but in the context of Engelbart’s work, bootstrapping is the “…interesting (recursive) assignment of developing tools and techniques to make it more effective at carrying out its assignment. Its tangible product is a developing augmentation system to provide increased capability for developing and studying augmentation systems” (Engelbart and English 2003:234). Just as Moore’s so-called law, this is a dream of exponential progress emerging out of nonlinear, self-enforcing feedback. How much more Californian can you be?

☛ Risk: The Wikimedia global movement does not improve in cultural, geographic, or demographic diversity, leading to less relevant and lower-quality content for a global audience.

Each repository database has a table holding the username, privileges, and login credentials for users authorized to interact with that particular database.

Neither Apple nor Microsoft really captured the essence of what made the Smalltalk system powerful. They used it as a model to make computers more accessible, but they left out the aspect of letting people bend the system to their will, to customize it to be just what they want. Their systems were really an object-oriented facade over a traditional, non-object-oriented system. They lacked a consistent metaphore of everything being an object. The web has been even more stultifying in this regard (I mean the web interface), though Firefox has helped some, so I hear, with the concept of browser extensions.

Elaborating on what I said earlier, RoR has an appeal to web developers because, given the skills they have, it provides an "instant gratification" that's very real for them, in the same way that Squeak does for graphics and text. In that way it's approachable. That approachability makes it "worth the trip" to learn about more of it.

Smalltalk is simply data manipulating programs that are themselves data–it’s the inverse of the Lisp philosophy, but the end result is the same.

Furthermore, the results could focus on drawing the user into the virtual app space (immersive) or could use the portable nature of tablet to extend the experience into the physical space inhabited by the user (something I have called ’emersive’). Generative (emersive) Books that project coloured ambient light and/or audio into a darkened space Generative (immersive) Books that display abstracted video/audio from cameras/microphone, collaged or augmented with pre-designed content Books that contain location specific content from the internet combined with pre-authored/designed content

Jessica Helfand in her essay The Dematerialism of Screen Space (2001) critiques the phenomenon of design practise being led by developments in software engineering. She argues that designers should take the initiative: “design must submit to a series of commands and regulations as rigourous as those that once defined Swiss typography. Aesthetic innovation, if it indeed exists at all, occurs within ridiculously preordained parameters: a new plug-in, a modified code, the capacity to make picture and words ‘flash’ with a mouse in a non-sensical little dance. We are all little filmmakers, directing on a pathetically small screen – yet broadcasting to a potentially infinite audience. This in itself is conflicting (not to mention corrupting), but more importantly, what are we making? What are we inventing? What are we saying that has not been said before?” Helfand here is referring to the web, but her argument applies equally well to designing tablet publications. Designers of book and magazine apps should be asking themselves those last three questions. Since tablet publishing conventions are in the process of being formed (like child invention), we have a unique opportunity right now to influence their direction.

Some key themes arise from the two NNG reports on iPad usability: App designers should ensure perceived affordances / discoverability There is a lack of consistency between apps, lots of ‘wacky’ interaction methods. Designers should draw upon existing conventions (either OS or web) or users won’t know what to do. These are practical interaction design observations, but from a particular perspective, that of perceptual psychology. These conclusions are arrived at through a linear, rather than lateral process. By giving weight to building upon existing convention, because they are familiar to the user, there is a danger that genuinely new ideas (and the kind of ambition called for by Victor Bret) within tablet design will be suppressed. Kay’s vision of the Dynabook came from lateral thinking, and thinking about how children learn. Shouldn’t the items that we design for this device be generated in the same way?

The document argues that the use of illusionary surfaces and objects will lead to a more intuitive and pleasurable experience for the user. It also, yet again, looks to prior conventions for solutions rather than starting afresh.

A first list of projects are available here but more can be found by interacting with mentors from the Pharo community. Join dedicated channels, #gsoc-students for general interactions with students on Pharo slack. In order to get an invitation for pharoproject.slack.com visit the here Discuss with mentors about the complexity and skills required for the different projects. Please help fix bugs, open relevant issues, suggest changes, additional features, help build a roadmap, and interact with mentors on mailing list and/or slack to get a better insight into projects. Better the contributions, Better are the chances of selection. Before applying: Knowledge about OOP Basic idea about Pharo & Smalltalk syntax and ongoing projects Past experience with Pharo & Smalltalk Interaction with organisation You can start with the Pharo MOOC: http://files.pharo.org/mooc/

Each whale is a perceptive messenger of the state of its species, the state of the cetaceans, the state of the oceans as a whole, as close and determined observation by Mayo and many others has shown. Now each piece of baleen is making those animals into messengers from the past, as we are expanding our own range of perception to understand.

but scientists have found that biochemical traces of some of its experiences persist in its body, even long after death. Just as geologists decode the history of the Earth from rocky strata, or dendrochronologists interpret past climactic conditions from tree rings, so biologists are now learning to read a whale’s life history as inscribed in its baleen. This anatomical oddity, part of a class of animal tissues that are emerging as tenacious biological recordkeepers, could reveal a monthly, even weekly, historical record of a whale’s life events stretching back as long as two decades. Just how much it will tell us remains to be seen.

I’ve collected the following list of needs based on what I’ve noticed across projects. I’ve tried to roughly organize it from critical (bottom of Maslow’s pyramid) to legacy (higher on the pyramid).

So as long as a project meets the first criteria (i.e. is popular), we ought to move beyond questioning whether it deserves to exist, and instead focus on what we can do to ensure it is healthy and supported.

From far away, successful Bazaars look like moneyless anarchic systems, but up close, the bulk of responsibility falls on a couple of people, who are usually being paid to do the work.

Open source projects don’t start as communitiesMany would agree that open source projects don’t start out as Bazaars, but just in case, I’ll emphasize the point. Raymond himself wrote:It’s fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn’t try it. I didn’t either.Somebody has to be chiefly responsible for an open source project’s initial development. In Linux’s case, it was Linus. Somebody has to live and breathe the problem all day. Once that project is in a stable position, the community helps support it.

The whole github ‘no licence’ thing when they started was unbelievably naive and has contributed to a world where there is piles of software that purports to be available but it actually ‘all rights reserved’ to the author, because that’s what international law defaults to. I’ve had to explain this numerous times to people (and companies that really should know better!) who’s code I want to use who have no understanding of why it matters. This is a sad, and rather unnecessary, state of affairs (somewhat improved since github stopped that idiotic practice, but there are still people below saying ‘but I put it online so it must be OK for you to use’).

Interesting to see what some people think ‘open source’ is these days. Back when the OSI was created with the movement that wanted to call it ‘open source’ instead of ‘free software’, people said ‘don’t do that — it devalues the fundamental point’. And here we are 20 years later, with OSS being hugely well-used, but many of the contributors insisting that licences are irrelevant or just having available source is all that’s needed, or it’s all about the community. Well I guess those of us who though that the ‘Open Source’ naming was a bad plan are proved right about the downside. But of course we’ll never know if it would have been so successful if it had remained as ‘Free Software’ (I don’t see why not, because it’s the process and efficiency that has made it popular).

The public sector should definitely prioritize Open Source, as a fair ground for companies and individuals to compete for their business. This should drive cost down (and therefore taxes), while making local developers happy.

Open source is about emphasizing community over self. But today’s open source doesn’t really operate that way — at least not in the long tail of smaller, homegrown projects. Whether this is a symptom of “new developers” who need to be properly socialized, as some would suggest, or truly an evolution of open source culture, is still up for debate. I’ll leave that to you.

In open source, you can only have “my” in the associative sense. There is no possessive “my” in open source.”

I don’t want the culture of open source to be organized around a legal definition. I want to zoom out and look at the broader ecosystem (of which the legal definition is one, essential node). A friendlier, more accessible term would make it easier to discuss topics like sustainability, collaboration, and people involved. Those aspects don’t need to be included in the official definition, but they still matter.I still like the term “public software” because it allows more people (including those new to, or unfamiliar with, open source, even if they use or benefit from it) to quickly understand what open source software is and how it should be protected. It doesn’t change the legal definition at all; if anything, it enforces it better, because we would want to define and protect public software exactly as we would any other public resource.

Early open source was about the idea that code is ownerless, enforceable by license, which theoretically leads to resilient software.Modern open source is about 1) building and 2) collaborating in public.The conversation has shifted from protecting the rights of a user to adopt the software as they wish (now the norm) to protecting the rights of the author or community that stewards the code (still TBD).

I’m interested in figuring out a term that feels inclusive, easy to grok, and free of political baggage.

In my last post, I said that we couldn’t charge for Python any more than we could charge for English. The difference between English and Python is that one requires dedicated maintenance and upkeep so that it doesn’t break. It has millions of dollars, and even lives, riding on it.

By not charging for open source infrastructure, we protect the right of anybody with an Internet connection to teach themselves how to code and build. This is good for startups, and for you.

Those in positions of power have always craved a mechanism with which to expose the inner beings of citizens, to reveal ‘the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us’, as Foucault described it. There are, or seem to be, rather dangerous and wild expanses within each individual. If we are to be controlled, that must be made known, and tamed. There is no better way to divide and subdue a people, and seduce them into self-regulation, than to expose their perversions but promise absolution.

People unburden themselves to their followers in the hope that their needs will be validated, their opinions affirmed, their quirks delightfully accepted. The result is a growing conformity within camps, as well as a narrowing of the shared space for understanding and dialogue between them.

Later, according to Foucault, the institution of confession shifted from religion to a host of secular traditions, such as confessional literature, medical examinations and psychoanalysis. But they all operated on the same principle, which was to patrol the boundary between what was normal and acceptable, and what was shameful and deviant. ‘The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us,’ Foucault wrote. ‘On the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, demands only to surface.’

A man without shame, Plato says, is a slave to desire – for material goods, power, fame, respect. Such desire is tyrannical because, by its nature, it cannot be satisfied.

Having a smartphone and access to the internet does not automatically equip us with the tools necessary for effective and respectful collaboration, negotiation and speech, such as democracy requires.

the act of watching is itself a devastating exercise of power. It has the capacity to influence behaviour and compel conformity and complicity, without our fully realising it.

The American theorist Bernard Harcourt points out in Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (2015) that ‘surveillance state’ hardly fits the bill any more. He prefers to talk of a ‘tentacular oligarchy’, to include corporations now spying on us from numerous vantage points. To this we must add our audience followers, from colleagues and acquaintances to the public at large.

In the presence of ever-watchful witnesses, he said, physical coercion is no longer necessary. People police themselves. They do not know what the observers are registering at any given moment, what they are looking for, exactly, or what the punishments are for disobedience. But the imagination keeps them pliant. In these circumstances, Foucault claimed, the architecture of surveillances become perniciously subtle and seamless, so ‘light’ as to be scarcely noticeable.

That’s not to say that social media curbs our self-awareness, or that our internet selves aren’t highly artificial and curated. Nor that people living in oppressive regimes, or as minorities in societies where they know they will be targeted, aren’t justifiably anxious about what they say online. But the point remains that digital media have radically transformed our conceptions of intimacy and shame, and they’ve done so in ways that are unpredictable and paradoxical.

In the future, scholars who lean on digital helpmates are likely to dominate the rest, enriching our literary culture and changing the kinds of questions that can be explored. Those who resist the temptation to unleash the capabilities of machines will have to content themselves with the pleasures afforded by smaller-scale, and fewer, discoveries. While critics and book reviewers may continue to be an essential part of public cultural life, literary theorists who do not embrace AI will be at risk of becoming an exotic species – like the librarians who once used index cards to search for information.

Like many other AI practitioners, I’m a philosophical functionalist: I believe that a cognitive state, such as one derived from reading, should not be defined by what it is made of in terms of hardware or biology, but instead by how it functions, in relation to inputs, outputs and other cognitive states. (Opponents of functionalism include behaviourists – who insist that mental states are nothing other than dispositions to behave in certain ways – and mind-brain identity theorists – who argue that mental states are identical with particular neural states, and are tied to specific biological ‘hardware’.)

AI criticism is also limited by the accuracy of human labellers, who must carry out a close reading of the ‘training’ texts before the AI can kick in. Experiments show that readers tend to take longer to process events that are distant in time or separated by a time shift (such as ‘a day later’).

Even though AI annotation schemes are versatile and expressive, they’re not foolproof. Longer, book-length texts are prohibitively expensive to annotate, so the power of the algorithms is restricted by the quantity of data available for training them.

In most cases, this analysis involves what’s known as ‘supervised’ machine learning, in which algorithms train themselves from collections of texts that a human has laboriously labelled.

Consider the opening sentence of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967): ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ The complex way in which Márquez represents the passage of time is a staple of modern fiction. The time corresponding to ‘Many years later’ includes the fateful time of ‘facing’ the firing squad, which in turn is simultaneous with that final ‘remember’-ing, which is years after ‘that distant afternoon’. In a single sentence, Márquez paints a picture of events in the fleeting present, memories of the past and visions for the future.

The so-called ‘cultural’ turn in literary studies since the 1970s, with its debt to postmodern understandings of the relationship between power and narrative, has pushed the field away from such systematic, semi-mechanistic ways of analysing texts. AI remains concerned with formal patterns, but can nonetheless illuminate key aspects of narrative, including time, space, characters and plot.

The ‘structuralist’ strand of literary theory tends to deploy close – sometimes microscopic – readings of a text to see how it functions, almost like a closed system. This is broadly known as a ‘formal’ mode of literary interpretation, in contrast to more historical or contextual ways of reading.

Bazaars are rhetoric, not reality

As in any contract, there’s a balance of power. If the architecture of today’s web is any indication, that balance is skewed toward the designers. Unless we want to keep pinging around like Skinner’s pigeons (or like poor Michael S), it’s worth paying a little more attention to those whom our attention pays.

‘In the past, if you were an alcohol distiller, you could throw up your hands and say, look, I don’t know who’s an alcoholic,’ he said. ‘Today, Facebook knows how much you’re checking Facebook. Twitter knows how much you’re checking Twitter. Gaming companies know how much you’re using their free-to-play games. If these companies wanted to do something, they could.’

sites such as Facebook and Twitter automatically and continuously refresh the page; it’s impossible to get to the bottom of the feed.

At first, if you want to make money, you sell whatever is in the room. Maybe it’s excellent journalism. Maybe it’s a game or a recipe. Maybe it’s an item that will get shipped to someone’s house. In this model, the internet offers a straightforward transactional experience in digital space.Over time, instead of making money from whatever is in each room, companies begin to monetise the doors. They equip them with sensors. Each time you go through one, someone gets paid. Immediately, some people will start adding a lot of new doors. Other people will build rooms that are largely empty, but that function as waystations, designed to get as many people as possible to enter and leave.

But she argues that, when it comes to machine design, it’s not exactly about giving people what they do or do not want. What matters, Schüll says, is ‘the accentuating, accelerating and elaborating that happens between the wanting and the giving’.

Fact-based journalism now competes with false information for our attention while our cities and citizens become both more connected by technology and more divided by ideology and income. The values reflected in lines of code, whether it be at the ATM, when we search on internet or drive a car, are already affecting what we think, what we do and what information we share with those around us.