Hello there fellow humans!
I am very happy to have found a good reason to finally get in touch with the Edgeryders community. My name is Julia, and I have been on the fringe of your network for quite some years. At the end of the month I will leave my position as Head of Media Developmenta at Sourcefabric and will have some time to deep dive into an interesting project.
I am still thinking about how to frame the topic I would like to work with in relation to this call, and I will share a few thoughts with you now, and I hope you could give me some pointers in the comments, as to what direction would be interesting to follow. I could imagine to work around a rather broad topic, such as “collaboration”, with sub categories like;
Technical challanges
How does collaboration look like in a distributed peer to peer network? What technical challenges are there to be solved? What initiatives are working towards solutions and how far are they? Are solutions compatible? How energy efficient are they? How private, and how hackable?
Lately I have been in touch with worldbrain a privacy focused browser extension to annotate, search and organize what you’ve seen online. I had some interesting conversations with them about the challenges you face when working collaboratively in a distributed network, and found it a very exiting topic.
Open data collection
What data is collected, and what is deliberately not collected, is a very political topic.
I am interested to talk to initiatives that have been collecting open data collaboratively, such as safecast, who maintains the largest open data set of background radiation measurements ever collected. The organisation maps open data connected to the environment and (radioactivity, airquality) and was founded as a reaction to the lack of information on radiation after the Fukushima disaster. I would like to find out more about what blockers and what strengths they experienced in setting up the organisation, as well as their ideas on how this kind of data will be accessed in the future.
With the rise of the climate change, collecting data, especially around environmental issues, will become increasingly subversive, and will need to be both transparent and protected in safe structures. I would like to look at a few open journalistic investigations as well if going into this direction.
I have a few other thoughts on the collaborative process as well, more in line with how infrastructure and incentives can push the process and result in different directions, and where also the psychological aspect of who owns your data, and who facilitates our communication play a part.
Please let me know any of your thoughts around these topics in the comments.
A few more words on who I am: I am coming from a background working with local communities, activists, media, journalists and tech, and I have acquired skills and a network which I believe could be relevant in gathering interesting content for the research and festival you outline in this call. I also have experience in publishing a magazine and editing content, as well as facilitation of open workshops, processes and seminars. Sometimes on the serious side, sometimes more bordering art and performance.
Looking forward to hear from you!
Julia