Joe, Ben, List,
I agree with Joe that Ben should be at the ICCS workshop!
Finding your discussion of considerable interest and thinking that Aldo
de Moor might as well, I wrote the following: to him (I'd forwarded Aldo
most of that earlier exchange, not reproduced below).
Hi, Aldo,
FYI, Ben Udell replied to Ransdell's query. I've also attached to the
bottom of this post Joe's brief reply where he wonders whether we are
posing the "right questions" in the CfP, and that while "there is
something important happening in this" he expresses as well "a certain
feeling of distrust about it.as being, perhaps, a form of
technocracy."
Technocracy? What do you think?
Best,
Gary
Here is Aldo's email which he said I could forward to Peirce-l.
Dear Gary,
A valuable discussion on Peirce-l. Interestingly, we had a similar
discussion in the Community Informatics community recently. My being in
between the hardcore technological and "soft" philosophy/community
development research communities, it is difficult to explain the exact point
satisfactorily to everybody. I will give it a try, though.
What we are after is the _opposite_ of promoting technocracy. Technologies
both afford and constrain behavior. At the moment, "technocratic" developers
have little understanding of the often subtle requirements of (communities
of) users of their technologies, and how these technologies can satisfy or
hinder the realization of these needs. On the other hand, philosophy and
community researchers often insufficiently try to inform technology and
systems developers of their useful insights, even though this is essential
for technology to become more appropriate and legitimate.
Our mission is, simply put, to build bridges between the technologists and
the voices of the community. To make this concrete, I will list three
projects I am currently involved in.
- A workshop on Community Informatics at the "hardcore" OTM conference:
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/index.html?page=cominf2006cfp
Goal of this workshop is exactly to move away from a technocratic approach
to technology development, a goal reflected in the definition of Community
Informatics adopted by the Community Informatics Research Network
(http://www.ciresearch.net/) and used in the CfP:
"Community Informatics, also known as community networking, electronic
community networking, community-based technologies or community technology
refers to an emerging set of principles and practices concerned with the use
of Information and Communications Technologies for personal, social,
cultural or economic development within communities, for enabling the
achievement of collaboratively determined community goals, and for
invigorating and empowering communities in relation to their larger social,
economic, cultural and political environments."
- The development of an, "applied philosophical" if you will, methodology
for the diagnosis of socio-technical systems to better balance community
requirements with supporting ICTs. See for an explanation and case study:
A. de Moor and M. Aakhus (2006). Argumentation Support: From Technologies to
Tools. Communications of the ACM, 49(3):93-98.
http://www.starlab.vub.ac.be/staff/ademoor/papers/cacm06_demoor_aakhus.pdf
- The CS-TIW 2006 workshop being discussed on your list.
http://www.iccs-06.hum.aau.dk/tools.htm
I can imagine that for Peirce-l members not aware of the ICCS context of
this workshop the wording of the call may lead to some confusion. This
project indeed has more of a technological (though not technocratic!) focus.
The goal of CS-TIW is a very practical one: many Conceptual Structures
representation and reasoning tools have been developed over the years,
including a whole range of Conceptual Graphs and Formal Concept Analysis
tools. Even though these tools support very interesting _formal knowledge_
operations, they do not talk to each other, nor to information systems out
there in the real world that could benefit from their functionalities. The
goal of the workshop is "simply" to (1) better understand why these tools do
not interoperate and (2) what practical solutions could be developed to
address this problem. The rough, narrow definition of a knowledge system is
thus a combination of conceptual structures tools and the information
systems on which they operate, resulting in more effective and efficient
knowledge representation and analysis processes.
Getting our technological act together is a necessary, but not a sufficient
condition for developing more enlightened information and knowledge systems.
Of course, we shouldn't stop at just improving formal knowledge
representation and analysis. Once we have a better understanding of the
technical and organizational interoperability problems focused on in the
CS-TIW workshop, we can more systematically examine the relationships of
conceptual structures tools with society at large. The more important
questions therefore revolve around how knowledge systems affect individual
and communities of users and society. This is not the main focus of this
workshop (although certainly not ignored), but is addressed in much more
detail in the first two projects described above. It will also get more
attention in future editions of CS-TIW. This year, your invited talk on
"Philosophy Meets Design" should at least help us keep our "summum bonum" in
sight :-)
Best wishes,
Aldo
PS Feel free to forward my reply to your list.
Joseph Ransdell wrote:
Sounds to me like you should be at that meeting, Ben. Do you think they are
posing the right questions? I mean the ones in the CFP that Gary posted? I
am convinced that there is something important happening in this, but with
an uneasy feeling that they are not picking it up by the right handle. I
googled the term "knowledge management" and immediately found a very
informative website, very intelligently structured as an answer to the
question of what knowledge management is. Here is the URL:
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/knowledge+management
Very informative, particularly taken together with your testimony, which is
most helpful, Ben. Yet I can't shake a certain feeling of distrust about
it.as being, perhaps, a form of technocracy. .
Joe Ransdell
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