[TOS] Start of the school year -- what are people doing for fall semester?

[Sebastian Benthall]

This is a nice thread, Mel.

What I think I'm up to in my own second year:

 * I'm tentatively "focusing" my work on "collective intelligence on the
internet" because it seems easy enough to shoe-horn other interests into.
Thinking of framing open source community practices as an example of that,
and a way of facilitating more of that.  Also, I'm very interested in
policy implications; how to contribute to greater 'collective intelligence'
in society at large (e.g., in politics).

 * Statistical machine learning course because its bound to come in handy.

 * A course on Qualitative Research Methods because I've realized that I
don't know anything about them and ought to have some sense of them in my
toolkit.  For the main class assignment I'm planning on interviewing people
involved in the building and spreading of GeoNode, a FOSS project I used to
have a hand in.  Will probably focus more on the implications for IT policy
and international development, and how FOSS intersects with them.

 * A course on "Technology and Delegation", dealing with questions of
social determinism of technology versus technological determination of
society.  Taught by a lawyer, so this is about ethical and policy
implications of designing and building technology.  Hoping to get
background theory for analysis of FOSS as a subset of this, and perhaps
remedy to abuses of technological power.

 * A course on constructivist epistemology, in the education department.
Because I love epistemology and need working definitions of "intelligence"
and "learning" if I'm going to talk about "collective intelligence" or
"collective learning".  I'm rusty on this stuff since my cog sci days.

 * Working on an information extraction toolkit:
http://github.com/sbenthall/bluestocking  Could be useful for a lot of
things, including analyzing content for, say, FOSS community mailing
lists.  I see it as a way to automate qualitative research when there is a
large existing corpus of behavior/documents.

 * Trying to keep a handle on the Free the Code campaign and other
developments around government's digital strategy and open source software.

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 6:00 PM, Ivaylo Ganchev <
ivaylo.ganchev at univ-paris8.fr> wrote:

> Hello Mel et al,
>
> > They both talk about a FOSS hacker culture that may have been more
> > present in the 90's or a bit past that; the waters nowadays are larger,
> > broader, far more complex, and don't hew to any one Grand Unified
> > Theory. I would love to see more things out there acknowledge the
> > shifting boundaries and multiple perspectives instead of trying to
> > trumpet an oversimplified One Right Answer as the only thing that ought
> > to be perpetuated.
>
> Indeed it would be nice to be a bit less ideological and a bit more
> pragmatic when addressing floss issues. There are some nice articles I
> fell upon lately : http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20120809-00 which is a
> resume of this paper : http://www.econ-pol.unisi.it/quaderni/645.pdf. It
> is question of the motivation that goes beyond financial, fame, etc... The
> author argues that the ethical motivation had a main role in the success
> of free software.
>
> I assisted last month a conference by Yann Moulier-Boutang -- a French
> economist and philosopher. In his latest book "L'abeille et l'économiste"
> (The bee and the Economist), not yet translated in English thought, he
> argues that our economy is turning into a pollination based one. During
> the conference he stated that the main value of bees' work is not in the
> honey or other byproducts of the hive, but in the pollination they are
> doing while producing the honey (thousand times more valuable in terms of
> money). He stated that the free software much in the same way pollinates
> the whole digital ecosystem and the main value is not in the programs but
> in the ideas, knowledge, algorithms spreading. I find this idea appealing
> and worth looking at it more in depth. Didn't read the book yet, but I
> think is worth it.
>
> On another account I think that the works of Michael Polanyi about
> knowledge (his concept of "tacit knowledge" is IMHO easy to be discovered
> in the floss practices) and learning are very interesting. Maybe it will
> help you in your quest of convergence. Indeed he was a rough critique of
> the reductionism in science.
>
> Best,
> Ivaylo
>
> PS I am still waiting for your answer about whether you could come to OWF
> in October (we have the budget) or you could recommend someone to us.
>
> --
> Ivaylo Ganchev
> System administrator
> Lecturer
> UFR MITSIC
> Université Paris 8
> tél: 01 49 40 64 08
> e-mail: ivaylo.ganchev at univ-paris8.fr
>
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