dear nettimers, here my sign of life from Academistan: my doctoral thesis, finally awarded after years of hard and joyous work, definitely unusual and as practice based as it can be, is out.
Please note this work is dedicated to the memory of my professor Antonio Caronia who guided me through all the phd updates. His book CYBORG was also recently translated in English and published at Leuphana with a preface by infatiguable TBazz's and is certainly a better read than my toiletpaper PDF. If you insist in reading my ramblings spanning from digital labour to code and comparisons between software patents and Via Campesina's protests against GMOs: you are welcome. The PDF is online and Creative Commons as Aaron Swartz rightly argued this stuff should all be. I'll appreciate any feedback, but will be slow in replying, so please take it easy.... http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/11101 Abstract: This thesis describes a practice based research journey across various projects dealing with the design of algorithms, to highlight the governance implications in design choices made on them. The research provides answers and documents methodologies to address the urgent need for more awareness of decisions made by algorithms about the social and economical context in which we live. Algorithms consitute a foundational basis across different fields of studies: policy making, governance, art and technology. The ability to understand what is inscribed in such algorithms, what are the consequences of their execution and what is the agency left for the living world is crucial. Yet there is a lack of interdisciplinary and practice based literature, while specialised treatises are too narrow to relate to the broader context in which algorithms are enacted. This thesis advances the awareness of algorithms and related aspects of sovereignty through a series of projects documented as participatory action research. One of the projects described, Devuan, leads to the realisation of a new, worldwide renown operating system. Another project, "sup", consists of a minimalist approach to mission critical software and literate programming to enhance security and reliability of applications. Another project, D-CENT, consisted in a 3 year long path of cutting edge research funded by the EU commission on the emerging dynamics of participatory democracy connected to the technologies adopted by citizen organizations. My original contribution to knowledge lies within the function that the research underpinning these projects has on the ability to gain a better understanding of sociopolitical aspects connected to the design and management of algorithms. It suggests that we can improve the design and regulation of future public, private and common spaces which are increasingly governed by algorithms by understanding not only economical and legal implications, but also the connections between design choices and the sociopolitical context for their development and execution. p.s.: to the question I get often asked after this "what now"? I'll give a preemptive answer: nothing fancy, we'll just continue rocking in Dyne.org where we'd love to be for software what Motown has been for music. Que Viva The Funk. Our current projects linked below, welcome to get involved (we are sustainable!) https://devuan.org https://decodeproject.eu https://pieproject.eu https://commonfare.eu and ciao... from EUuuhhwww -- Denis Roio a.k.a. Jaromil http://Dyne.org think &do tank Ph.D, CTO & co-founder software to empower communities Book keynotes, lectures, workshops: https://jaromil.dyne.org ⚷ crypto κρυπτο крипто गुप्त् 加密 האנוסים المشفره GnuPG: 6113D89C A825C5CE DD02C872 73B35DA5 4ACB7D10 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
