I am a casting producer over at the Sci Fi Channel and I am came across your name while doing research on Cyborgs for a show I am putting together. I was wondering if you could offer some advice and direction. I am looking to speak to individuals who are transforming themselves into cyborgs or who function as cyborgs. Please forgive me if I sound ignorant ... From: "Michael Gurstein" <mgurst@vcn.bc.ca> Subject: RE: [Air-l] the history of social infomatics
Thanks to Kevin and Maja,
I only met Rob Kling once (at the AoIR meeting in Maastricht). We were introduced by some mutual acquaintances. We immediately entered into an intense conversation on Community Informatics vs. Social Informatics... I was struck by the fact that he had read (and deeply assimilated) all of what I thought were the relevant materials. ... His strongly but respectfully presented challenge was two-fold, first "what was new or different (from say, Social Informatics), about Community Informatics" and second if there was something new about CI, what were appropriate methodologies for analysing/researching in the ... As Kevin noted, he very generously made an invitation to prepare a "Position Paper" on Community Informatics for an upcoming issue of Information Society. As these things happen, the article took rather longer than I would have liked when I received the shocking news of his untimely death.
You might find our upcoming workshop on what we might more aptly call Community/Social Wisdomatics (Workshop on Inverse Surveillance) to be of interest. It's less about informatics and maybe more about social interactions and not so much information and knowledge creation but more about the wisdomain knowledge of knowing what areas of research to study. In any case it's all about Cyborglogs (or 'glogs as they've become known), so it should certainly be of interest to you or anyone else who'd like to submit a short 1 page extended abstract or a 4 page paper. Here's the Call for Participation: International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance: Cameraphones, Cyborglogs, and Computational seeing aids; exploring and defining a research agenda Date: 2004 April 12th. Time: 12:00noon to 4pm (a working lunch will be served) Location: Colony Hotel (1-866-824-9330), 89 Chestnut Street, Toronto Website: http://eyetap.org/iwis/ TOPICS: * Camera phones and pocket organizers with sensors; * Weblogs ('blogs), Moblogs, Cyborglogs ('glogs); * Wearable camera phones and personal imaging systems; * Electric eyeglasses and other computational seeing and memory aids; * Recording experiences in which you are a participant; * Portable personal imaging and multimedia; * Wearable technologies and systems; * Ethical, legal, and policy issues; * Privacy and related technosocial issues; * Safety and security; * Democracy and emergent democracy (protesters organizing with SMS camphones); * Technologies to prevent totalitarianism, state-terrorism, and genocide; * Technologies of lifelong video capture; * Personal safety devices and wearable "black box" recorders; * Research issues in "people looking at people"; * Person-to-person sharing of personal experiences; * End of gender-specific space (e.g. blind man guided by wife: which restroom?); * Subjectright: ownership of photograph by subject rather than photographer; * Reverse copyright: protect information recipient, not just the transmitient; * Interoperability and open standards; * Algebraic Projective Geometry from a first-person perspective; * Object Detection and Recognition from a first-person perspective; * Computer Vision, egomotion and way-finding technologies; * Lifelong Image Capture: data organization; new cinematographic genres; * New Devices and Technologies for ultra miniature portable cameras; * Social Issues: fashion, design, acceptability and human factors; * Electronic News-gathering and Journalism; * Psychogeography, location-based wearable computing; * Augmented/Mediated/Diminished Reality; * Empowering children with inverse surveillance: Constructionist learning, creation of own family album, and prevention of both bullying by peers and abuse by teachers or other officials. TO PARTICIPATE: IWIS 2004 will be a small intimate discussion group, limited to 25 participants. Email your name, the name of your organization, and what you might add to the meeting, as part of a one page extended abstract, outlining your position on, and proposed contribution to the theme of inverse surveillance. Submissions should be sent by email to hilab [at] eyetap.org. Alternatively, authors may email up to four pages, in IEEE two column camera-ready format that address the theme of inverse surveillance. Prospective participants wishing to submit a full paper may also contact the workshop facilitators prior to submission. All participants (accepted papers or extended abstracts) will have the opportunity to contribute to the published proceedings. There is no workshop registration fee. There is no submission deadline; reviews will continue until there are sufficient numbers of high quality theme-relevant contributors. PROGRAM COMMITTEE: * Dr. Jim Gemmell, MyLifeBits (lifetime data storage) project with Gordon Bell; author of various publications on lifelong personal experience capture, Microsoft research. * Joi Ito, Japan's leading thinker on technology; ranked among the "50 Stars" by Business Week; commended by Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications; chosen by World Economic Forum as one of the 100 "Global Leaders of Tomorrow"; Board member of Creative Commons; http://joi.ito.com/moblog2/ * Anastasios Venetsanopoulos, Dean, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto; author on hundreds of publications on image processing. * John M. Kennedy, Chair, Department of Life Sciences, UTSC; author of Drawing and the Blind: Pictures to Touch. * Dr. Stefanos Pantagis, Physician, Hackensack University Medical Center; Geriatrician, doing research on wearable computers to assist the blind, and clinical work on brainwave EyeTap interfaces for Parkinson's patients. * Steve Mann, author of CYBORG: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer; 30 years experience inventing, designing, building, and wearing devices and systems for personal imaging. * Douglas Schuler, former chair, Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR); founding member SCN. * Stephanie Perrin, Former Chief Privacy Officer of Zero-Knowledge Systems; Former Director of Privacy Policy for Industry Canada's Electronic Commerce Task Force; responsible for developing domestic privacy policies, new technologies, legislation, standards and public education; recipient of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award. * Dr. Jason Nolan, Senior Fellow, Mcluhan Program in Culture and Technology * Dr. Nina Levent, art historian, New York Academy of Art; works with visually impaired; collaboration on using EyeTaps and wearcamphones in museum education. * Elizabeth Axel, founder, Art Education for the Blind, Inc. (AEB); collaboration on using EyeTaps and wearcamphones in museum education. _________________________________________________________________ ORGANIZERS: S. Mann; S. Martin (smartin@ecf.utoronto.ca); and J. Nolan. IWIS 2004 arises from planning over, the past 2 years, at Deconference 2002/2003. ADMINISTRATION: PDC, 416-978-3481 or toll free 1-888-233-8638 PUBLICITY LIAISON: Daniel Chen (dan [at] eyetap.org), and Jacqueline MacNeil (jacq [at] ecf.toronto.edu). _________________________________________________________________ This April 2004 Workshop, IWIS, will also serve as a planning forum for next year's Symposium: ISIS. Here's a summary of surveillance versus inverse surveillance, to lay the groundwork for the technologies and issues we hope to discuss: Surveillance Sousveillance ------------ ------------- God's eye view from above. Human's eye view. (Authority watching from on-high.) ("Down-to-earth.") Cameras usually mounted on high Cameras down-to-earth (at poles, up on ceiling, etc.. (ground level), e.g. at human eye-level. Sur-veiller is French for "to Sous-veiller is French for "to watch from above". watch from below". Architecture-centered Human-centered (e.g. cameras usually mounted on (e.g. cameras carried or worn or in structures). by, or on, people). Recordings made by authorities, Recordings of an activity remote security staff, etc.. made by a participant in the activity. Note that in most states it's In most states it's legal to illegal to record a phone record a phone conversation of conversation of which you are which you are a party. Perhaps not a party. Perhaps the same the same would apply to an would apply to an audiovisual audiovisual recording of your own recording of somebody else's conversations, i.e. conversations conversation. in which you are a party. Recordings are usually kept in Recordings are often made public secret. e.g., on the World Wide Web. Process usually shrouded in Process, technology, etc., are secrecy. usually public, open source, etc.. Panoptic origins, as described Community-based origins, e.g. by Foucault, originally in the a personal electronic diary, context of a prison in which made public on the World Wide Web. prisoners were isolated from Sousveillance tends to bring each other but visible at all together individuals, e.g. it times by guards. Surveillance tends to make a large city tends to isolate individuals function more like a small town, from one another while setting with the pitfalls of gossip, but forth a one-way visibility to also the benefits of a sense of authority figures. community participation. Privacy violation may go Privacy violation is usually un-noticed, or un-checked. immediately evident. Tends Tends to not be self-correcting. to be self-correcting. It's hard to have a heart-to-heart At least there's a chance you can conversation with a lamp post, talk to the person behind the on top of which is mounted a sousveillance camera. surveillance camera. When combined with computers, we When combined with computers, we get ubiquitous computing get wearable computing. ("ubiqcomp") or pervasive ("wearcomp"). Wearcomp usually computing ("pervcomp"). doesn't require the cooperation Ubiq./perv. comp. tend to rely on of any infrastructure in the cooperation of the infrastructure environments around us. in the environments around us. With surveillant-computing, the With sousveillant-computing, it locus of control tends to be with is possible for the locus of the authorities. control to be more distributed. See also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance