First short overviews of each example
@Federico_Monaco @Ezio_Manzini I agree that focusing on the methodology is lower priority, it’s also what I suggested in the beginning of this thread.
Please see my structuring and additions made to the document initiated by Federico here, and a go through each example, in short. They all have references to the conversations. Let me know if it’s something we can depart from. Thanks!
First round on the googledoc
Hi there,
thank you @Noemi
to whom likes to be involved: please comment and add in the shared document (especially what you think be relevant as literature to be considered in the references) your ideas about the content and approach.
Don’t forget to add yourself as author!
Next week we could move to shape collectively the core of the paper in order to understand the aim of the abstract needed.
Thanks for bringing your collaboration and inspiration
Sure
Dear @Ezio_Manzini ,
sure. You are right. Here is a final part from the lead of the call: “We invite the authors to come up with concrete examples of the collective action methods and the mobilizations implemented by these social movements and citizens structured around this “collaborative culture”. It will be necessary to investigate what these new practices surrounding these immaterial goods do to the experience of “producing together”. How do different collectives experiment, today, new forms of mobilization, combining collaborative actions and practices? How do they manage the material goods and the knowledge they collectively produce?”.
Maybe we could have a comparative analysis of 3 examples of OP3NCARE stories and 3 examples of the team work production (the infrastructure itself in terms of design, management, communication strategies…) to describe and research what is in common and what not and how the infrastructure and the different roles (“cultures”) interact.
Just asking.
I would give the proper attention to how care is infrastructured (and designed) as common by the collaboration of transdisciplinar and heterogeneous team, therefore there are aspects from the team work i’d like to research on.
Although we are still in a brainstorming phase i have sketched some ideas to start to shape and organize the paper so we can all have a concrete ground of discussion (i mean what i wrote in is just a weak start and not unerasable statements, so free to comment and change: be critical and challenging).
I’ve just sent the link of the googledoc with editing option to your @polimi.it email account.
first draft for a abstract
Hi there,
i’ve just written down a first possible abstract we can shape according to the ideas and backgrounds of all the people involved in the paper.
See you in Rome.
back on the paper
Dear Noemi, Federico and all, sorry for having disappeared, I was travelling and I have been much more busy than I could imagine. Now I am back. I have quickly read the draft document and the abstract: what a big work you did! Thanks of that!
Now I will take the time to read it attentively and I will send some feedback and some contributions as soon as possible.
In any case, for sure we will meet in Rome: should we set a precise date/time for working on it?
Draft proposal for the abstract (and for the full paper) …
Dear @Federico Monaco and @Noemi, I read everything and here I am with my proposals.
I will start with the abstract, that is the most urgent thing to do, and then I will propose some considerations on the full paper, … if we will be accepted.
Regarding the abstract
My impression is that the proposed one is a bit generic … To make it short, I make another proposal.
The first 7 lines are taken from the same OpenCare proposal (and I think they work quite well). The final part largely rephrases a paragraph of the call-for-paper.
The core of the proposal stands in the two final points + conclusions. The challenge is: will we be really capable to do it? 
Given that, this is my draft Abstract proposal:
Infrastructuring spaces of possibilities. Open care, from on-line conversations to on-site collaborations
ABSTRACT (max. 500 words)
The article is based on the OpenCare first results. Where OpenCare is an on-going European research delivered by a consortium of universities and the grassroots hacker community. OpneCare main goal is prototyping a community-driven model of addressing social and health care. It is based on three elements: advances in collective intelligence research, to lend coherence and summarize large-scale online debates; advances in digital fabrication and cheap-and-open hardware technology; and the rise of a global hacker community, willing and able to look for solutions to care problems. At this point of time, OpenCare I arrived at half of its journey: the prototype of care-oriented digital space is already working at the real scale; different kinds of conversations are taking place; in-depth observations on them, and on its overall functioning, can be done.
This article moves from these conversations-in-their-environment and discusses when and how an initial trigger (such as a post presenting an idea or a story) generates an online conversation that, in turn, may evolve and become – in our case- an in-situ care-related activity.
According to the OpenCare nature and intentions, these events are not directly generated and/or supported by the OpenCare team. Nevertheless, the way in which the digital space is organized, and the affordances that characterize it, play a role in when and how conversations start and evolve in collaborations (that, in turn, can, or cannot, move from the digital to the physical space).
In order to do that, some experiences of “doing together” (in the digital and in the physical space) are analysed and the relationships between them and the digital environment affordances are observed and discussed. In particular, the paper presents and discusses:
The article conclusions introduce some thread of research to be developed in the next months, inside the same OpenCare, and after its conclusion. (346 words)
Regarding the whole article.
Premise. I think it will not be easy. Looking at the bibliography RESET proposes, this call-for-paper appears emerging from a cultural background at the crossroad of technology and political sciences. For sure this is not my one. I don’t know if someone of us has this specific background and therefore can guarantee that our paper will have all the references that RESET will recognize as correct and up-dated.
Examples to be considered. I think that the 6 examples proposed until now are not enough to make meaningful considerations. Therefore, what to do? I think we should change our focus and consider not only the collaborative result-oriented conversations (as the 6 proposed ones), but also other kinds of conversations, even though they have lower degree of collaboration and do not bring (directly) to care-related actions in the digital and physical world.
In other words:
I think we should consider all the kinds of conversation: (1) conversations for knowledge (maybe in different forms) and (2) conversations for action (in the digital world and in the physical one). Given that, we should present the digital space as an environment where several conversations for knowledge can happen and evolve towards becoming conversations for action.
Do you think that, in principle, it could be done? If the answer will be yes, we can go on in this line…
Quick chime in
It’s down to authors, of course, to decide where the paper goes. Should you decide to take it in the direction @Ezio_Manzini is proposing, you would be right at the crux of where opencare, as a project, wants to go:
This article moves from these conversations-in-their-environment and discusses when and how an initial trigger (such as a post presenting an idea or a story) generates an online conversation that, in turn, may evolve and become – in our case- an in-situ care-related activity.
This is the heart of the matter. Does knowledge sharing help taking action? How, exactly?
Re: new proposal for how to approach this
@Ezio_Manzini I think the abstract is solid and I copied it into the original google doc so that we can tighten it up - I think paragraphs 3 and 4 can be shaper and I made some suggestions.
I am assuming that the 6 cases presented are not enough because they cover too few posts and comments to give us a detailed picture? If so, I think this can be solved: if we will be looking at participants worldviews and predispositions to approach the conversation collaboratively (their other posts and other posts where the same topics are addressed) does give us more content to work with.
If you think they are simply not enough to talk about “conversations for action”, then Ok, we will need to see what other cases are there where people specifically talk about collaboration (“conversations for knowledge” in your breakdown). I would prefer that they are related to the cases we start from - perhaps written by the same authors, involving some of the same people, so that we have a stronger ground to argue that they can in fact evolve to real life action. Thanks for this!
core concepts still to focus on
Dear @Noemi and @Ezio_Manzini ,
i hope others will join as soon as we go over this first round of the table, very interesting as it shows how much OP3NCARE be embedded in seamless and heterogenous practices not easily to be summarized or simply described in few words.
So the question is: what are we looking for as focus of the paper?
About the abstract: i thank @Ezio_Manzini for his one very detailed.
About the premise, maybe @Yannick likes to jump on the bandwagon, the doubts on whether the paper will ever be accepted or not are concrete. As far as i understood, the ground for this type of studies goes back to a critical approach of technology (check for instance Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” or Andrew Feenberg’s “Overview on Critical Theory of Technology” ). So it’s about “mobilization” and “commons” what we chose and OP3NCARE might be a case study easily included in the track by these two concepts.
I consider the open, scattered collective design and negotiation experience among the team and the participants in a emerging and growing environment. I agree with @Ezio_Manzini avoiding Latour’s instauration as it turns openness and distributive practices to obliged passage points and enrolment that might work on a semiotic level, but it misses the goal of describing how we make experiences about and by the web and re-shape social practices (like design) and in this case the processes of caring. So the question could be: how do we mobilize to obtain a change of the processes of caring thanks to the web and why fostering open practices (commons) it can make the difference.
I’m glad we will meet in Rome on the 3rd to talk and have some progresses together on it.
Core concepts proposal
Dear @Noemi , @Federico Moro. @Alberto and all,
I see the discussion is going on and we are converging: very good!
For the next days I propose to concentrate our discussion on the abstract, and work on its writing, in order to be sure to conclude this activity in the meeting we will have in Rome the 3rd February.
In this perspective, my contribution is on three points: (1) Main question and working hypotheses, (2) Theoretical background, (3) What could make this paper unique?
(1) Main question and working hypotheses
In the abstract I proposed, the core question was drafted in this way:
@Federico Monaco, reformulated it, and proposed:
I like this question too. But I find that it is more general than mine. And that my one can be seen as a step forwards in the line indicated by the Federico’s one.
In fact: the Federico’s question “How do we mobilize to obtain a change of the processes of caring thanks to the web…”, could already have an answer in the way my question is formulated and in the working hypothesis on which it is based (and that, in my view, are also the OpenCare working hypotheses).
In short, if the general question would: “how do we mobilize to obtain a change of the processes of caring thanks to the web”, we could state that our paper (and the whole OpenCare research) has been developed on the basis of 2 +1 working hypothesis:
Given these hypotheses, and given the prototype of care-oriented space of possibilities OpenCare realized, the paper core research specific question is: What can we learn from the first months of experience? Are the 2+1 hypotheses verified?
In order to do answer this question, OpenCare team observes how full scale prototype od space of possibilities worked, considering: (1) the dynamic of the conversations and (2) the role of the space of possibilities and its affordance in making that dynamic happen.
The paper presents these observations and verify the the assumed hypotheses validity.
What do you think?
Theoretical background
This one, in my view, is the most difficult point. We must be (and to show to be) interdisciplinary. But, at the same time, every paper should have a theoretical core and utilize a set of theoretically grounded conceptual tools. Therefore, where could our theoretical background be?
Ethnography. Could ethnography be our main theoretical background (as, I think, it is for the whole Open Care research)? Have we possibility to use it at this scale of observatons? Could we refer to both the digital ethnography and the traditional “physical” one? Who could take the lead on that?
Language/action perspective. Writing the abstract I used the notions of “conversations” and, implicitly, of “conversation typologies”. I think that this language could work. But: I started to use them 30 years ago, having learnt them from Winograd, his language/action perspective, and the idea of a society as a mesh of conversations. Now, I must admit that I always used these terms as conceptual tools, in a rather colloquial way. And that my knowledge on how this thread of research evolved and on the bibliography it generate, are far from being up-dated. What to do? If we will use it, there is someone theoretically stronger than me on this point?
Other proposals (on the main theoretical background)?
What could make this paper unique?
I don’t know. But I am quite sure that no one aims at adopting such radical positions, in terms of openness and hacker-oriented approach as OpenCare does. Maybe, we should make this uniqueness more visible in order to give the paper not only more consistency, but also a kind of “special flavor”. Is it possible? What could it mean in practical terms?
This could be another original contribution of our work. What do you think? If you agree, we should urgently start a discussion on this point …
Total support of this
Ladies and gentlemen, my congratulations. It seems you are zeroing in onto the core question of opencare: can “open” really help “care”?
Let me chip in, following @Ezio_Manzini 's scheme.
With all that said, you do the work and you make the decisions. Feel free to discard or ignore my suggestions.
Authorship in progress…
@Alberto there is no way why you or @Amelia can’t join in if we get to write this.
Other than that, with Federico and Ezio we will be looking at other opportunities and calls. The European Sociological Association Conf (ESA) in Athens this year is closing their call Feb 1st… 
only saw it now, though the fitness with one or two tracks is anyway not so natural.
Terms to be used
Dear @Alberto , @Noemi , @Federico and all,
I think that the theoretical background is a complicate issue.
I don’t know if other colleagues agree in assuming my 2 +1 proposed working hypothesis. In the positive case, we should find the theoretical background and use the corresponding language. From your (Alberto’s) feedback I understand that your specific background cannot help for the hypotheses 1 and 2. But maybe you could give some ideas on the +1, that is a strong Edgeryders’ point and the one that should make our proposal unique: would it possible?
In this framework, (for everybody) a very specific, but for me urgent question
Having a digital space of possibility, what could be the most general term to name everything happens in it?
Until now I referred to “conversations” (and I like this term), but I don’t think that everything that happens there can be defined a conversation. In the OpenCare website, when somebody upload a case, this is called a “story”: is this a term usable by us, with some theoretical background? Other times other terms are used, as texts, interactions, behaviours, … … …
Waiting for your feedbacks, here a naïf proposal (it is naïf because I have not seriously verified the terms I will use - I just invented them for the sake of going on in our conversation):
OpnCare is a care-oriented digital space where a constellation of care-oriented events happens. These events have different characteristics. In my understanding they could be roughly divided in this way:
It is important to observe that these categories are fluid: they can evolve, from one to the others. Therefore, if today we would observe them in the website and register them, this would only be a frame of a movie. It would give an idea of the state of things at this given moment, but we know that everything will change immediately after that.
This observation permits me also to give an answer to the@Noemi point on which kind of examples do we want to consider. In my view, beyond the fact the events 4 and 5, at the moment, are not so many and not so strong, I think that, in any case, it would be better to consider all the kinds of events to observe their evolutions (and what made this evolution possible). Therefore, what we should explore is:
On the other hand, we should better understand what the OpenCare space really is and how it works. Again, my naïf interpretation is that it is space of possibilities, favorable for different oriented events to happen and – possibly – evolve towards “doing together”. I.e. towards conversations for action in the hybrid digital-physical space.
If this proposed conceptualization makes sense, we should find criteria to analyze not only the examples of different kinds of events, but also our OpnCare space, considered as a space of possibilities
Do we have the possibility to do it (if by chance you will not have already done it)?
Calling a spade a spade
How about:
Theoretical background again: Edgeryders has some stylized facts about hacker culture. But, again, I cannot provide any solid analytical method. I think you could apply methodologies from computational biology. They would work with agent-based models, where cooperative behaviour evolves from the dynamics of interaction across agents. But, as all models of this kind, you would need to take care not to predetermine the results by overengineering the assumptions. I will attempt some work on this sooner or later (with @mstn , hopefully) but not today.
The abstract seems fine. Two possible improvements:
Did you call me, master?
Hello @Alberto ! I noticed you mentioned me. Are you talking about the Monk Protocol? The general idea was cool and It would be interesting to see if it fits a more formal framework. In passing, I am following your writings about complexity and economics. I was going to ask you some questions.
Yes. And…
Hello @mstn , always great to hear from you. Should we make a Skype appointment or something? Also: where are you? Still in Germany?
I have not forgotten that little project. I even laid some of the groundwork: I took yet another MOOC and learned how to build agent-based models in Netlogo (here is my course project, which doubles up as part of a paper for my PhD). I think this is enough in terms of the tools: NetLogo is self-sufficient. Building a model that is interesting (i.e., one whose results are not a straightforward implication of its assumptions) is where the action is going to be.
Germany is too flat for me. So I decided to come back.
Yes, a Skype call is a good idea so that I can catch up quickly.
Emerging digital spaces of possibilities…
Dear @Ezio_Manzini
i agree with 2+1 working hypothesis. The role of digital technologies in the project, the metaphor (?) of space for digital and open networking (here the commons issue is of concern too), but mostly “(spaces of) possibilities” (i find be a winning concept) deal with infrastructuring (but i would say “materializing” as well) advocacies and practices (like discourses and narrations) other from those belonging to healthcare and social welfare systems. It’s a matter of giving voice and materializing experiences and relations of people that have an opportunity (a possibility) to be part of the big OP3NCARE narration. It is important to stay focus on the call, like for instance keeping aware that “the ambition of this issue of RESET is precisely to question how digital technologies, inserted in different contexts, produce new forms of political mobilization and organization, or stabilize old ones, while conveying multiple values and principles which are, in turn, transforming these technologies.”
Arenas, voices, policies, mobilization are political terms and we could spend them in a smart way if we consider how the process of infrastructuring consist of embedding politics, scripts and users in the digital technologies. The fact that it is a project funded by the European Commission is already a good answer, i think.
I could work more on the theoretical background. I’m checking if the co-production idiom (see page 13 and following) -about the intimacy between what we know and the technology we use- might fit in describing how and why certain aspects emerge in the development of the narration of OP3NCARE and how technology, ethnographical methodologies and stories are tightly interwined (this at the light of the hipothesis 2+1). Digital possibilities need a reflexive approach, already well understood and daily practiced by the OP3NCARE community in terms of openness.
I find interesting that is still not so easy to detect and describe in short what is all about. The heterogeneity and complexity are happening at many levels and this makes for us a further challenge, as we must try to share same ontologies possibly with same meanings, reach out agreements and co-produce connections among facts, theories and data.
Emerging digital spaces of possibilities - ABSTRACT DRAFT2
@Federico Monaco, @Noemi and all,
(1) Federico, I agree with, and like, what you wrOte. In particular, I like the notion of “materializing”, to be paralleled to the one of “infrastructuring”. Is the this term (“materializing”), used with this meaning in this context, based on some theoretical background ?
I also like the title of your post: Emerging digital space of possibilities.
Are you proposing it as the title of the paper? (my original one was Infrastructuring spaces of possibilities.)
Maybe we could use the one you propose with a subtitle as:
“From on-line conversations to on-site collaborations. The OpenCare case”.
(2) Beyond this, I re-propose you a question already raised in my last post:
Until now I referred to “events” (as the most general term) and “conversations” (as the core of what we will consider in this discussion. In the OpenCare website, when somebody upload a case, this is called a “story”: is this a term usable by us, with some theoretical background? Other times other terms are used, as texts, interactions, behaviours,
(3) Given the 2+1 hypotheses I proposed seem to be acceptable (in their spirit, at least) I prepared (here below) a working document ABSTRACT DRAFT2. What you will find is only the integration of my DRAFT1 proposal with the 2+1 hypotheses: nothing else, coming for the followed discussion, has been integrated yet: could you work on it?
In any case, in my view a main point is still missing, both in contents and formal terms:
NB on length: at the moment, DRAFT2 , as it is now, is 521 words long. I think it should easy to cut/change it and free some spaces to add the other needed concepts.
DRAFT 2 - ABSTRACT (521 words – to bereduce to less than 500)
The article is based on the OpenCare first results. Where OpenCare is an on-going European research delivered by a consortium of universities and the grassroots hacker community.
OpneCare main goal is prototyping a community-driven model of addressing social and health care. It is based on three elements: advances in collective intelligence research, to lend coherence and summarize large-scale online debates; advances in digital fabrication and cheap-and-open hardware technology; and the rise of a global hacker community, willing and able to look for solutions to care problems. At this point of time, OpenCare is arrived at half of its journey: the prototype of care-oriented digital space is already working at the real scale; different kinds of conversations are taking place; in-depth observations on them, and on its overall functioning, can be done.
This article moves from these conversations-in-their-environment and discusses when and how an initial trigger (such as a post presenting an idea or a story) generates an online conversation that, in turn, may evolve and become – in our case- an in-situ care-related activity.
According to the OpenCare nature and intentions, these events are not directly generated and/or supported by the OpenCare team. Nevertheless, the way in which the digital space is organized, and the affordances that characterize it, play a role in when and how conversations start and evolve in collaborations (that, in turn, can, or cannot, move from the digital to the physical space).
These OpenCare research activities have been based on 3 main working hypotheses:
Given these hypotheses, and given the prototype of care-oriented space of possibilities OpenCare realized, the paper core research specific questions are: Are these hypotheses verified? What can we learn from the first months of experience?
To answer this question, OpenCare team observes how the realised full scale prototype od space of possibilities worked, considering: (1) the dynamic of the events (different kind of interactions and conversations) that are taking place and (2) the role of the space of possibilities and its affordance in making that dynamic happen.
The paper presents, some experiences of “doing together” (in the digital and in the physical space) and analyses and discusses the relationships between them and the digital environment affordances. In particular, the paper presents and discusses:
The article conclusions introduce some thread of research to be developed in the next months, inside the same OpenCare, and after its conclusion.
Paper discussion in Geneva
Heaven would be to arrive in Geneva with a shared view on who likes to do what and how to make the best out of the time available there. If we have a afternoon session on the 13th we can do even more perhaps (findings?), or leave to Master of Networks more room.
So, here is a Paper production canvas with authors ( @Alberto @Amelia @Ezio_Manzini @Noemi and Federico) and sections: i tried to figure out by adding X who could do what, but it’s just to start…so please change whatever you like. Then, a draft for the meeting agenda (if no other is available yet) follows.
|
Authors/Sections |
Amelia |
Alberto |
Ezio |
Federico |
Noemi |
notes |
|
introduction |
x |
x |
||||
|
research question |
x |
x |
||||
|
methodology |
x |
x |
x |
x |
||
|
theoretical framework |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
|
Core concepts |
x |
x |
||||
|
findings |
x |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
|
… |
||||||
|
conclusions |
x |
x |
x |
|||
|
bibliography |
x |
x |
Next:
I would organize the meeting for the paper in Geneva in 3 sections (about 1 hour each):
SECTION ONE – Brainstorming on the core concepts and proposals (10’ each one)
SECTION TWO - editing work - splitting the group to work on 2 different sections (except introduction, conclusions and bibliography) patchworking by reconsidering posts and parts of the abstract
SECTION THREE – reading and last considerations – agenda for the future (if the abstract be accepted, or moving to other calls?)