On infrastructuring

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Andrea Botero

We  found this interesting Brazilian researcher (Miguel Said Vieira) who gave a keynote in a recent conference on the commons with the tile “New Infrastructures for Commoning by Design” which rings a bell of similarity to ours :)

Since some people have asked what do we mean with the “infrastructuring” in the title we are adding this note here. When deciding the title of the seminar we are inspired by this line of work (all linked to digital information systems and media):

origins:

  • Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information systems research, 7(1), 111–134.
  • Star, S. L., & Bowker, G. (2006). How to Infrastructure. In L. A. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.), The Handbook of New Media – Student edition (pp. 230–244). Sage Publications, Inc.

recent work:

  • Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., & Hillgren, P.-A. (2010). Participatory Design and “Democratizing Innovation”. In Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference (pp. 41–50). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1900441.1900448
  • Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., & Hillgren, P.-A. (2012a). Agonistic participatory design: working with marginalised social movements. CoDesign, 8(2-3), 127–144. doi:10.1080/15710882.2012.672577
  • Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., & Hillgren, P.-A. (2012b). Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design Challenges. Design Issues, 28(3), 101–116. doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00165
  • Karasti, H., & Syrjänen, A.-L. (2004). Artful infrastructuring in two cases of community PD. In Proceedings of the eighth conference on Participatory design: Artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices – Volume 1 (pp. 20–30). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1011870.1011874
  • Pipek, V., & Wulf, V. (2009). Infrastructuring: Toward an Integrated Perspective on the Design and Use of Information Technology. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 10(5). Available online http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol10/iss5/1

We look forward to elaborate this more in the coming months!

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Four conceptual notions on the commons (By Helfrich and Bollier)

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Andrea Botero

In their keynote address for the Economics and the Commons Conference Silke Heilfreich (and David Bollier) propose 4 interesting conceptual points to fine tune a more coherent definition of the commons that they see is missing.

The 4 points are explained in more detailed in the post / video of the presentation but I will summarize them here to help us adding in preparing our own work and seminar:

1. The commons is not a resource, but a process.  Their point suggest that resources are not simply “ commons”. A commons is a relational quality that depends on actions and decisions taken by a group of people.  The implication for this is to  focus more attention on the processes – commoning – and not on the “resources”.

2. the common categorization of the commons needs an upgrade. in their view the common classification and distinction made between categories such as (material) commons and “cultural commons” or “digital commons” (immaterial commons) is unhelpful as analytical strategy. Their view is that every commons has a material and knowledge basis. There are no ‘pure knowledge commons’ as much as the ‘natural commons’ are inseparable from the knowledge that is needed to manage and steward them.

3. Every commons needs protection (or: going beyond openness).  An access rule in the commons is mostly a means to make sure, that there is fairness in the commons. They propose that we need to recognize that openness does not guarantee that things will remain open.

4.  The commons does not “scale up,” but rather slowly crystallizes instead of being obsessed with “scaling up” isolated things they see the challenge laying more in unleash the potential of the commons through commons-enabling infrastructure, laws, platforms and technologies that support things to extend horizontally and interconnect.

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From new forms of production towards building commons! A direction for the SIG

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Andrea Botero

As a continuation of the theme “co-creation, co-governance and peer-to-peer production on public services” the co-p2p SIG continues its work now focusing more on “commons” (see e.g Ostrom 1990) as a framework to expand our understanding of emerging considerations for the design, provision and maintenance of “public” services and urban space.

During 2013, several researchers both at Aalto ARTS and Aalto ENG will be working on this topic through this initial set of questions:

1) How to move from existing marginal and grassroots initiatives towards building and sustaining a “commons”? (see Salet, Bertolini & Giezen,2012; Savini 2011). How to enhance the collaboration between these initiatives and different public bodies/institutions?

2) Can  design research contribute to the development of new types of actions and vocabulary?  For example it has been suggested that “communing” is a needed intervention that pose interesting connotations that go beyond what mere outsourcing or crowdsourcing concepts imply, and that at the same time offer a new perspective on the pervasiveness of the “privatization” discourse (see Hellfrish & Bollier 2012). What is needed to opening up, design and develop services that contribute to a commons?

3) What is the role of digital Media in the co-creation of the commons? What should be developed in areas such as community informatics (see e.g Cindio & Schuller 2012) , participatory design and other frameworks?

Stay tuned and let us know if you want to contribute towards a seminar we are planning for the fall 2013

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Book release: Towards Peer-production in Public Services: cases from Finland

Posted on June 1, 2012 by cop2p

We are happy to announce that the book is ready and looking nice. The PDF of the book can be freely downloaded from :

1) This website you are visiting (p2p-public-services-finland-2012) (PDF 1.9MG)

2) From the online bookstore of Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, by visiting this link.

We will also made it available in other places, as soon as we get time to do it. Meanwhile we are celebrating the launch with a 2 week long Facebook party, join us!

Book cover

Thanks for all the authors for their hard work and for sharing with us their thoughts and ideas on the topic. We are also grateful for our graphic designer Anssi Kokkonen who cope with us in the last weeks and made a magnificent job. The nice people at Aalto ARTS publications (Especially Sanna Tyyri-Pohjonen) should also be thanked for helping out with the process and all the details. With out the financial support of Aalto Service Factory there would have been no book.

Andrea, Andrew & Joanna

PS: Thanks also to our first avid readers for pointing out typos and to Heikki for helping fixing them :)

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Towards peer production in public services: Cases from Finland – Pre release teaser

Posted on May 23, 2012 by cop2p
The book is almost ready and we think is taking a nice shape. Our release day is the 31st of May so please come later to download your free copy. For now we would like to invite you all to take a peep in to the Table of Contents and Introduction of the publication.
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Cover

p2p cover image

” There are many challenges  and opportunities in designing, developing and maintaining services for participatory modes of governance, not to mention their co-creation and peer-to-peer aspects. We ask what can be learned from current research, and what is happening already beyond academia? With the aim to increase the opportunities for dialogue between the Finnish scene and the international context, we gather this collection of articles that deal broadly with the relationships between peer-to-peer dynamics, and public services. Most of the cases presented are illustrative of recent developments and discussions in Finnish society, however, also included are broader international perspectives, giving historical reflection and future-oriented speculation on what might be the outcomes.”
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A publication in the making

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Andrea Botero

We have been busy with all sorts of things and forgot to advertise that we are working on a ‘Towards Peer-production of (public) Services’ publication following the 2010 Seminar.

Our aim is to make an electronic publication, and made it widely available for free and with an appropriate license to let it fly!  There will be approximately 10 articles and it includes many of the seminar cases, but also a few new. The target are not only researchers working around this topics, also professionals in service-design, socially-engaged processes, cultural production and public service management. Everything from enthusiastic individuals to people interested in knowing more located in small to large institutions.

Our first drafts should come in on Friday 17th February and the final publication released in May. Stay tuned!!

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Upcoming and related events

Posted on November 11, 2010 by cop2p

Coprodnet, an interdisciplinary academic research network on
co-production, organized the Co-production: big idea for the ‘big
society’? conference in the Manchester Business School on 4 November,
2010. Find more information at the conference website.

The UnConference, with the focus on “co-production as an opportunity
to improve public services and create new working opportunities in
time of crisis” will be held in Milan, Italy on 15 November 2010.
The UnConference webpage holds more information.

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Documentation of the cop2p 2010 seminar available

Posted on November 9, 2010 by cop2p

The Seminar 2010 page has been updated and the documentation of the “Co-creation, co-governance and peer-to-peer production of public services” seminar 2010, including the videos of the keynote speakers, case presentations and discussions as well as the presentation slides, can be found there.

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There is life after the seminar: Thank you!

Posted on October 25, 2010 by Andrea Botero

The Seminar Co-creation, co-governance and peer-to-peer production of public services was very successful! We had close to 100 participants in Sampo Hall and thought we dont know yet the exact number of those following the live video stream, we know at least of a handful of people commenting on twitter and qaiku that where not here so it must have been also crowded there.


Participants came mostly came from within Aalto community, as our main aim was to stir the conversation and explore new avenues for research and cooperation. In adition we also had representatives from the city, other governmental institutions, NGO’s, companies, civil society and researchers form other institutions. Thank you all for the good discussions, suggestions and inspiring presentations.

In the next few weeks we will be updating the program section to include links to the presentations and videos of the seminar. Keep tuned!

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Almost there! online videostreaming, twitter and qaiku and the rest for the seminar

Posted on October 21, 2010 by cop2p

We are very happy with the number of registrations and interest created by the seminar. It seems the topic is very timely and the issues relevant and interesting not only with in Aalto University but also abroad.

For those of you unable to attend physically, we will be providing online streaming video of the presentations (YEAH). So point your browsers to this direction at about 9:15 am Helsinki time and join us.

http://lume.fi/lumelive.nsf/live_pick/sampolive

Some presenters are not totally sure they will like their interventions to be streamed so we might turn the signal off a couple of times, but for most we think we will be online all the time.

We also want to document thoughts and ideas collaboratively online

1) If you (here or online) are using twitter please use the hashtag #cop2p for your posts. So we gather them all here http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23cop2p
2) There will also be a thread in the seminar channel of Qaiku here: http://www.qaiku.com/channels/show/seminaarikannu/

CU soon!

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