Session Title: Contextualising OSH: lessons from the global south
Date: 24/3/2017
Attendees (who was there?):
Overview of topic (3-6 sentences):
We discussed issues around the way technology, particularly open technology, gets to the global south. The ideas of OSH as a “common”, cognitive justice, science shops, cultural appropriation of technology, and how we can make technology easy to appropriate.
Notes:
Thank you @rbowman for your resuming, I just want to add the small paper I prepared for this skillshare. In the first part, I present the GOSH manifesto and commons as statements. In the second part, I presented lessons borrowed from: India (cognitive justice), africanization of sciences shops and finally cultural appropriation of technology coming from latin america, known as: baroquization, creolization and cannibalism. It is based on these lessons, that we have contextualized OSH.
1. Statements
1.1. GOSH Manifesto
1.2. OSH as a Common
a common exists only if these three values are present: resources, communities and management by co-property.
• A resource which can be tangible or intangible. Tangible resources are palpable or material resources, whereas we cannot touch intangible resources. INFORMATIONS, SKILLS, TOOLS
• Community using, protecting and taking care of available resources. A community is not just human actors; non-humans are also comprised in. GOSHERS
• Management and the bundle of rights. The idea of a community around a resource implies a set of rules that define its use. Rules set by all members of the community and not an individual: OUR MANIFESTO
2. Lessons
2.1. Cognitive justice (India)
for Grassroots engagement - (Everybody should really participate to collective matter)
Early proposed by Shiv Visvanathan (2009), the cognitive justice can be defined as an epistemological, ethical and political ideal aimed at the emergence of socially relevant knowledge.
The quest of cognitive justice is devoted to two missions: valorize the knowledge of global south, whether they are scientific or not; and align science/scientists with the concerns of local populations and their vision of sustainable local development. The achievement of these missions is possible through:
• The refusal of marginalization and disregard to local knowledge, relegated to being mere beliefs, superstition or “culture”;
• The promotion of local languages instead of colonial languages, because this unjust detour does not allow us to express fully the basis of our original thought;
• The avoiding of sealed boundaries between science and society, by promoting citizens sciences and allowing experts and non-experts to work together in order to solve problems of their city;
2.2. Africanization of sciences shops
Captation of local social needs and Generate endogenous/local knowledge
2.3. Baroquisation, creolization, cannibalism (Latin America).
Cultural appropriation of technology
Bar et al. (2016)
Baroquization is the filling-in of technological spaces that providers intentionally leave blank for users to personalize devices and applications;
creolization is bricolage, the recombination of the technology’s components to create something new;
cannibalism is creative destruction, an innovative act that requires breaking down the existing to invent something new.
