From nishant at cis-india.org Wed May 9 22:32:58 2012 From: nishant at cis-india.org (Nishant Shah) Date: Thu, 10 May 2012 02:02:58 +0530 Subject: Kick-starting new conversations : The next phase of CPOV Message-ID: <4FAAD47A.1040205@cis-india.org> Dear All, It has been almost a year since the Critical Point of View (CPOV) reader came out and it has been such an exciting one. The Reader, edited by Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz, and produced by the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam ) and the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore), has received great reception and has emerged as one of the key resources to understand the politics of open knowledge vis-a-vis Wikipedia. However, as the editors mention in the introduction, the ambition of setting up this group was not to only talk about Wikipedia. Instead, the idea was to look at Wikipedia as a symptomatic site by which we build new frameworks and concepts to understand the ways in which connected and collaborative digital media are rapidly restructuring the older forms of knowledge production, consumption, distribution and dissemination. The Reader has emerged as the first of its kind critical inquiry into various debates and discussions ranging from geo-politics to governance, and education to protocols of knowledge production online. While the Reader maps out the field and introduces the wide range of concerns around these areas, the editorial and organizing team, along with many of the participants had felt a growing need for specialised inquiries into some of the areas that the Reader opens up. I am writing this email, on behalf of the organizing teams to give a brief update of how we are planning to take some of the ideas further, building upon the conversations that started at the workshops but did not always translate into contributions into the Reader. I am also writing to elicit responses from other interlocutors, about their own future plans and also the possible directions that our collective research can take. The idea is to start a momentum around ideas that we are invested in and see if new and novel collaborations can happen between different institutions and locations towards more specialised research that invokes Wikipedia in its unravelling of practices on the net. A small and modest project that we, at the Centre for Internet and Society have initiated, with the University of California, Humanities Research Institute is titled 'The digital classroom in the time of Wikipedia'. The project invites various scholars and practitioners to produce academic essays, practice based case-studies, and regional snapshots of the growing intersections of technology, pedagogy and learning in spaces of formal learning within academic institutions. We are hoping to bring together people from different disciplines and build upon some of the ideas around education and digital natives, that we have been working through CPOV and other related topics. If any of you are interested in looking at the detailed concept note, and think that you would like to contribute to a special issue for an MIT Press journal, aimed at March 2013, please do write to me and I will be glad to share it with you. Meanwhile, we are also interested, drawing from some of the other work that has happened at the INC, as well as with CIS' growing relationships with the Wikipedia community in India, in one area which found a lot of excitement at the CPOV workshopsand definitely needs more scholarship and academic attention : This is the question of Governance, Wikipedia and the changing face of web as we witness it in our contemporary times. As with the earlier Reader, the intention is to look at Wikipedia as a concrete site of inquiry, but producing knowledge which has to do with the much larger form and scope of the Internet. Especially in these 'exciting' times, when we are moving into becoming information societies, the governance of Wikipedia and other User Generated Content spaces has become critical because it has direct implications on freedom of speech and expression, censorship, access to knowledge, open and collaborative forms of knowledge production, and the larger ideologies of neo-liberal nexuses which are shaping the internets today. An inquiry into modes, forms, practice, scale, scope and actors of governance within the complex and integrated world of Wikipedia, might lead us to not only unravelling the often mystified back-end of knowledge production on Wikipedia, but also, perhaps, suggest new manifestos and ideologies through which we need to revise our older concepts and ideas. We hope that this area will resonate with many of your current projects and investment, and it would be great if we could find collaborators who would want to think through this process with us, form a core editorial and production team that will help out with fleshing of these ideas, devising methods for harnessing this knowledge and looking at forms of production and publication. It might also be fruitful for a handful of us to come together and form a larger concept note which might serve as grounds for discussions on this list, leading to knowledge sharing from different locations. As was the case with CPOV, we hope that our focus can be global, inviting different and critical perspectives from different locations in order to question the rhetoric of Universality that systems like Wikipedia (or Facebook) often produce. We hope that this longish email shall jog us into conversations and we are very excited to see how you might shape these discussions.We are looking forward to finding new collaborators who will help us initiate a dialogue around these questions and move the project further. Warm Regards Nishant Shah With Geert Lovink & Sunil Abraham -- *Nishant Shah* Director - Research Centre for Internet and Society #194, 2nd C Cross, Domlur 2nd Cross, Bangalore - 560071, India. *Phone*: +91-9740074884 www.cis-india.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From geert at xs4all.nl Sat May 12 11:52:22 2012 From: geert at xs4all.nl (Geert Lovink) Date: Sat, 12 May 2012 11:52:22 +0200 Subject: Elsevier Versus Wikipedia: Academics Revolt Against Giant Publisher Message-ID: <6C5E0B21-3AFF-4B32-8BB4-0FCF45D1FD70@xs4all.nl> Subject: [corp-watchers] DailyBlog: Academics Revolt Against Giant Publisher Date: 2012-05-11 22:02 From: To: corp-watchers at lists.corpwatch.org WHAT'S NEW ON CORPWATCH: Holding Corporations Accountable Holding Corporations Accountable http://www.corpwatch.org Elsevier Versus Wikipedia: Academics Revolt Against Giant Publisher Pratap Chatterjee May 11th, 2012 Over 11,000 academics have pledged to boycott Elsevier, the Dutch publishing giant, for profiting off their work and making it unavailable to the general public. Now Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, plans to turn the world of corporate academic publishing on its head. See http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15725 Please feel free to write to me directly with story ideas, comments or just to say hello. My address is "pratap at corpwatch.org" Thanks for holding corporations accountable for their actions! Pratap Chatterjee Managing Editor Follow CorpWatch on Twitter at http://twitter.com/corpwatch and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/CorpWatch/23166336951 DONATE TO CORPWATCH! https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=1002183 Support CorpWatch's work to hold corporations accountable on human rights,labor rights and environmental justice issues through education and activism.Help us bring the critical information and resources that tens of thousands access every month by making a contribution to CorpWatch. From dqamir at bezeqint.net Sat May 19 20:10:41 2012 From: dqamir at bezeqint.net (Dror Kamir) Date: Sat, 19 May 2012 21:10:41 +0300 Subject: An experiment in creating believable myths on the Net (including Wikipedia) Message-ID: <4FB7E221.3050804@bezeqint.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: