What should it mean to be "open"?
- 1. What should it mean to be ‘Open’? jude yew
- 5. But what exactly does it mean to be ‘Open’?
- 7. Etymology of “open”: i. "not closed down, raised up" (of doors, gates, etc.) ii. "uncovered, bare; plain, evident,"
- 8. Open tech: Open information: - open standards - Build trust through: - open source software -- value -- transparency -- control
- 9. How do we design for users to be “open” ? attribution: kirstie shanley
- 10. Designing Systems with “open” values Architecture and design of web applications makes “socially transparent” (Chi et al., 2008) the activity of the users on the website = Holoptism (Bauwens, 2005)
- 11. Openness is a “socio-technical” phenomenon • “Open” behavior is determined by the functionality and affordances of the social software; • “Open” behavior is determined by the alignment of individual contributions to group norms; • The act of openly sharing and reusing content is an expression of self-identity;
- 13. • Does Rosenberg’s definition of openness work for open.michigan? • Is there anything that Jonathan Rosenberg overlooked in his treatise on openness? • How might we embed the values of openness in the things that we design?
- 14. Extra Slides
- 15. Criteria for open systems: “So as you are building your product or adding new features, stop and ask yourself: Would open sourcing this code promote the open Internet? Would it spur greater user, advertiser, and partner choice? Would it lead to greater competition and innovation?”
- 17. ccMixter
Editor's Notes
- #2: Hi everyone, my name is Jude Yew and I am a doctoral candidate at the School of Information, University of Michigan. Today I am going to lead a discussion on the question ... I am going to quickly introduce the topic with a short presentation and then open the floor up for discussion. But please feel free to stop me and ask questions anytime during the presentation.
- #3: I am going to start of by saying that my research is concerned with the broad phenomenon of open-sharing and reuse that we see on the Internet today. I agreed to lead this discussion primarily because my research was coming up against this term - open. I was seeing it everywhere ... in the lit and in my data. However, I couldn’t find a suitable definition of openness to use in my dissertation.
- #4: Individuals are willing to share not only content, but also personal information/data, openly and freely. Even to the extent of letting others reuse and modifying that content, and we see this in a variety of fields/domains ...
- #5: The values of openness are now being embraced broadly beyond just digital and the technical ... what started out as a way to reduce the restrictions of copyright for software development has now spread to fields as diverse as civic participation in government to open-source beer ... relate experience participating in the free culture research workshop? ...
- #6: Given the diversity of applications that the values of openness have been applied to ... the question I would like to ask is ...
- #7: While there is much related work done defining - I feel that their focus has been mainly on licensing and legal infrastructure has enabled much of this open sharing behavior to occur.
- #8: If we consider the etymology of the word “open” - these existing work only address the first part of the meaning of the work “open” - it was concerned with “opening” up the restrictions surrounding intellectual property to enable the creation of additional works, which build upon previous work and add to greater social benefit. HOWEVER, I think that there is a second part to the meaning of the work “open” that tends to be overlooked ...
- #9: ... and that is what I think that Rosenberg was trying to address in his blogpost. That being open meant not only focusing on the technical infrastructure to enable sharing and reuse to take place. He also addressed the content that the users contributions and the digital traces that they leave behind should also be a part of any consideration of openness ...
- #10: What Rosenberg is perhaps hinting at is the less examined role that the various technical applications/platforms play in uncovering and surfacing the open behavior of the users. That if we want our user base to behave openly, then we need to embed the values of openness into the design and functionality of our systems ...
- #11: In particular, I would like to pay attention to one characteristic of online open sharing - they take place on systems that are designed to be “haloptic” and “socially transparent”. Just like in this illustration, from the ed chi’s wikidashboard project, OCS makes the activities of the users on wikipedia transparent. Systems/apps that engender such social transparency has a “haloptic” effect on behavior.
- #12: Thus my primary framing for this dissertation is performative in nature. It draws from the literature of dramaturgical sociology, in particular Kenneth Burke. And these are some of the assumptions that my “social performance lens” makes ...
- #13: However, we are experiencing a phase shift in societal and cultural acceptability of towards being open online ... here is a project by artist Jonathan Harris and Stanford Computer Scientist Sep Kamvar ... {DEMO}
- #14: So ... with that I’d like to throw open the discussion of “What should it mean to be “open”?” I thought that I would have some questions here to help us out - but feel free to take this into any direction that you see fit. Also, I believe that Rosenberg has agreed to respond to some of the questions that come out of this discussion ... that’s something we can do on the blog?
- #16: For Rosenberg, being open had to fulfill these broader criterions ... the goal here was that embracing openness would raise the “sea level”
- #17: There’s a flip-side towards these kinds of openness ... scientists are able to deduce sensitive personal data through traces of information left online ... admittedly through the use of sophisticated statistical techniques ... but it does present a sobering limit to how open should we be?
- #18: I apply the “social performance” lens on one particular online community/OCS - ccMixter. The main activity in this OCS revolves around sharing and remixing/re-use of music. Why this site in particular - ccMixter’s affords “social transparency” through the following features ... {NEXT SLIDE}