From Tgc

Call for Participation. A workshop

Reflection on Technology in Urban Spaces

July 2-4, 2010; Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey

Over the last decade, Internet and connectivity have influenced governance and citizenship in a variety of ways. While scholars recognise globalisation as an important phenomenon, their theories of technology, governance and citizenship draw largely on data generated in / by the global North. How can we consider this phenomenon from the point of view of the rest of the world, which includes not only the legacies of underdevelopment and postcolonialism but also includes growing economies, strong democratic movements, and technologically proficient civil societies? This workshop calls on technology practitioners and analysts to forge a discussion that takes both technology and society seriously.

This workshop is inspired by the Communities, Technology and Participation project, and earlier workshops in Bangalore, India. How are communities formed around the use and development of software? Can open source software enhance the formation of communities? What kinds of democratic participation characterise different technology contexts?

Many of us work in computer science and related technological fields. These questions emerged from our interest in developing a more multi-dimensional understanding of the fundamentals of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). ICTs are not merely technological interventions. They become part of the social, political, economic, cultural and historical contexts in which they are used. In order to understand why and how implementation takes place the way it does and how the targeted beneficiaries adapt/adopt and appropriate these technologies there is a need to study, analyze and theorize ICTs in relation to the immediate societal context.

This is an invitation to come together especially as technology enablers and researchers to share experiences of our investigations in a variety of urban sectors. I.e., Technology, Governance and Citizenship, Community and Participation as experienced through architectures, markets, government services, schools and teachers, Internet communities and innovation infrastructures. Some of the themes that are taking shape as of now are:

Proposed format and some theme suggestions

Format will be a mix of presentations and panel discussions where panel formation for the day would be based on indicated interest during the workshop. Some of the theme suggestions until now have been Governance, City and Teaching in the context of digital technologies, and some possible questions for discussions and/or presentations:

• In e-governance projects, there is often the pressure to build an uniform solution that is applicable / replicable across a large (geographical) context. This often ends up becoming a top-down approach to implementation that cannot / does not respect local / contextual / cultural specific processes that are not necessarily uniform, especially in a diverse country like India. Do digital technology implementations especially reinforce and enable this top-down approach? Or, can they also make it easier to implement bottom-up implementations?

• Standardization, while it brings benefits, also homogenizes and reduces diversity. Since widespread use and benefits of digital technologies depend on standardization, what does the use of digital technologies in urban contexts (ex: mapping, credit cards, ...) do to richness and cultural diversity? Are they more or less disruptive than other kinds of technologies (ex: gasoline, electricity, cement) historically?

• We cannot have a workshop on digital technologies without mentioning Facebook, Twitter, social networking, mobiles, and iPads :-). But more seriously, they are "everywhere". What do they mean for governance, teaching, urban spaces, and digital accessibility?

• The Indian Government is considering issuing Unique IDs (UID) to all its citizens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Identification_Authority_of_India). Do UIDs streamline the implementation of government service delivery? If so, is it the UIDs that enable this or is the digital technologies used to implement and use them? Is so, how? If this is not really the case, what could be the reasons and perceptions that drive this? Some countries (UK and Australia, for example) have rejected National ID card schemes. Why and do those considerations apply to India? What is the Turkish experience with National ID cards?

Please add yourself to registration page or contact tgc@janastu.org to discuss interest and other related issues.