Part of the 40 Years of Open Series
We are postponing the continuation of the 40 Years of Open series to save and redirect those energies towards meaningful solidarity efforts with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We will continue this programming when it makes sense to do so. Thank you for your interest.
In every corner of the open ecosystem from open publishing to open source code to open data, the promise of open access has been co-opted by extractive, for profit corporations, and surveillance arms of state apparati. This discussion explores efforts to name and delimit openness as investments in the future of open work.
Panelists speaking from experience across the tech ecosystem (broadly construed!) elaborate a future of open practices and tools that foregrounds strategic closure. In building an arsenal of offensive stratagems towards practical defense from corporate co-optation, state violence, and surveillance capitalism, we look for examples of obstruction, intermittency, and staged static in open work.
Across these examples, naming openness – open to whom, open for what – is a necessary rebuttal to a libertarian ethos that continues to hide violence behind ruses of “accessibility” and open participation. Speakers refuse the assumed neutrality in promises of open, and in examples of closing and closure direct attention to how open work could be used to foment specific impact.
Speakers:
Dr Karaitiana Taiuru is an Indigenous Māori from New Zealand. He is a leading authority and a highly accomplished visionary Māori technology ethicist specialising in Māori rights with AI, Māori Data Sovereignty, Intellectual Property Rights, and Governance with emerging digital technologies. More information at http://www.taiuru.maori.nz
Ceilyn Boyd is the Dataverse Development Project Manager at IQSS. This role collaborates with Dataverse team members and other stakeholders within the Dataverse Community to manage, coordinate, and support program activities including reporting, prioritization, and track deliverables. Previously, Boyd served as manager of the Harvard Library Research Data Services group. In addition to research data management, Boyd's Library work has involved taxonomy development; managing the large-scale digitization of manuscripts; library collections as data; and managing large, cross-organization strategic projects and portfolios. Boyd is also a doctoral candidate at Simmons University investigating the theoretical modeling of research data and how data curators identify, define, and repair research data in data repositories. Boyd's technical background also includes the roles of software engineer and project manager for projects involving scientific data visualization, computer graphics, and special effects at organizations such as SRI International, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pacific Title & Art Studio, Mitsubishi Electric, and BBN Corporation.
Majd Al-Shihabi is a technologist, turned urban planner, turned technologisturbanplanner. He is a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Geography and Planning department. His research is around the energy modelling that the City of Toronto uses to decide policy for its climate action plan,TransformTO. He is exploring how hecan use participatory modelling to understand the ontology of models, but also the ontology of modelling as a method. He thinks about how epistemic communitiea are formed, and how they become a part of the right to the city. Previously, he was the inauguralBassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellow, with the support of Creative Commons, Mozilla, and Wikimedia foundations. The fellowship enabled my journey withPalestine Open Maps, and a few other archival projects.