[wos] Re: cultural projects to be included in wos4

[Gregers Petersen]

cornelia sollfrank wrote:

The prior mail I send was 'kind-of-a-waving-my-hand-in-the-air-signal' just 
stating that I had read the words and now was thinking about a response - being 
polity and telling that someone out "there" actually found it interesting (maybe 
not being able to add anything to the concept, apart from offering two hands) 
.... :-)

But, here are a few comments from me:

> 
> - terminology
> what are we talking about when we use the term 'open cultures'? we 
> should come up with a term which is more precise.
> (culture from/for the commons, non-commodified culture)
> 

I'm quite blank (which I'm not) --> though personally I prefere 'Public Domain' 
which is neither more or less a question about politics/ideology.
The concept of 'commons' makes crunchy noises when I hear it ... its somehow 
just to easy/fast to make me really relax ?


> _FRAGMENTS:
> 
> 1. **the mode of production
> authorship/ _subjectivism/ anti-subjectivism/ open cultures

> - what are the ideologies and promises behind the different modelsof 
> authorship?
> 

To me this contain a question about ownership - who owns the property which is 
being produced/authored, and how is it valued (in what terms)?
let me place a fairly long quote authored by James Leach:

... Value in the Lockean tradition, passes from the labor power of the producer 
into the thing itself. It is the transmission that makes an appparently natural 
connection between the producer and the object they produce. This is, in turn, 
based on a notion of the individual as possessor of her- or himself, and 
thereby, by extension, the products of her or his own labor. But by locating 
value in productive relationsships (that they call kastom), and not in things, 
people in Madang have a different interest. The contrast is between the 
valuation of culture as tradition and heritage, embodied by objects or sites, 
and notions of culture that appeal to the inherent and ongoing creativity of 
human engagement (Kirsch 2001). It is our focus on the thing itself as the locus 
of value that confuses us here. It means we assume that granting cultural 
property is the granting of property rights over objects ….. the ground for the 
success of open source software lies as much in the way a community and ethos 
has developed as it does in the brilliance of its prime movers (individual 
authors). In other words, there are conditions for creativity here in which 
value is generated without that value being realized by individuals as private 
property .....

The quote referes to ethnographic fieldwork amongst people living in Madang, 
Papua New Guinea, which is being compared to the modes of production within the 
OSS "world".

And refrasing the question into: What is the different promises and ideologies 
behind the different models of ownership?


> 
> 2. ***free access
> copyright & licenses, economy
> 
> to be continued
> *
> 
> 3. ***open adaptability
> art & appropriation
> *_
> _*to be continued*_
> 
> 
> _
> Basically, I find the approach to look at the FOSS movement and try to 
> adapt it for cultural production limited. maybe this is the reason that 
> the debate is going in circles for a few years now.
> why not starting from culture and thinking about what utopian modells we 
> want there, independenly from FOSS?
> 

To me the problem arises because the actions taken focus on replicating the 
complete structure of the FOSS mode of production --> instead of appropriating 
(being inspired by) the idea (here pointing upwards to my prior comment about 
ownership), and then on a pure experimental basis explore the potentials. 
Un-reflected replications just exposes the inherent limitations, when you try to 
re-plant a cultural form which is based within a (sometimes) quite limited 
structure - focussed on the production of software (which is a creative 
expression, but an expression geared towards a very defined product)??



>
> definitely there is a lot of OPEN questions out there. we should collect 
> the most important ones and work on them - together.
>

I would like to add the question about 'ownership' to the this?



(+ I will continue to think, about this) ....


Which lead me to the question about:
..... mainly by 'amateurs'. what do these examples stand for? and in what 
respect might they be of relevance for a 'professional' cultural producer?

I'm not quite sure if it is relevant to make a clean cut between 'amateurs' and 
'profesionals' --> one of the primary values in the FOSS world is that your 
being judged by your peers on basis of what you do and not what your official 
qualifications are, or how your identified/put-into-a-box by dominant 
cultural/political structures --> To me the FOSS idea is an creative empowerment 
, which makes no distinctions ??

chz

-- 

Gregers Petersen
Anthropologist, Ph.d fellow
Department of Organization & Industrial Sociology
Copenhagen Business School
Kilen, Kilevej 14A, 4.
DK - 2000 Frederiksberg
gp.ioa at cbs.dk
(+45) 3815 2811
www.icco.dk

Free Software & Ownership