Category: Uncategorized

Carol Gilligan wrote an article in 2014 “Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the Conversation about Differences” and it has stayed with me. An ethic of care is a core tenet to my next project, and I would hope the next stage of my academic career. So I was more than pleased to see this book published in 2023, updating her thoughts.

My project explores the potential of emergent games to foster curiosity-driven learning and facilitate new knowledge alliances in interdisciplinary fields. By combining emergent game design, open process practices, and a feminist ethic of care, my collaborators and I aim to create a platform that promotes curiosity and accountability while exploring politically charged scientific questions.

In one such collaboration, the Industry of Integrations (IOI) project (Nevelsteen 2021) will be applied to scientific databases, known collectively as Open Data Infrastructures (ODIs). We intend to use these ODIs at high levels, and integrate them with Collaborative Data Platforms at more local levels (for example through Citizen Scientists) to create a citizen-driven ecosystem. In this system people can build integrations, bridging scientific ODIs between different disciplines, and integrate with their own citizen contributed data – the scientific equivalent of user generated content (UGC). In addition, we hope to bridge scientific ODIs and game platforms, to allow the incorporation of physical world elements into casual games. In this way, by bridging science and creativity, we can dissolve the boundaries between laypeople and experts, and build new knowledge alliances. And also build super cool games.

I was doing a web search for hits that contain both pluralism and feminism and found this article by Esther Turnhout, which is adapted from her inaugural lecture as Chair of Science, Technology and Society (STS) at University of Twente: A better knowledge is possible: Transforming environmental science for justice and pluralism. Articles are written in such terrible ways, so I read the lecture instead. It explains a lot of the concerns I have, and I mostly enjoyed reading it. Here’s some bits I highlighted, and then some thoughts about how this relates to my work going forward.

I’m attending a Debian Day in Lisbon, at the MILL – a makerspace in Lisbon. Organised by Diogo, a good friend, quality person and probably a decent reason why we settled on Portugal in the first place. Anyway, we stumbled upon future dreams and he mentioned he is planning to get a screen for his projector, and then he has everything to go on a roadshow to give talks and courses about software freedom and all things open source.

I am moving to the Azores soon. I have recently moved to Portugal, I need new friends, and to be frank, the number of friends even in my previous home country has become critically low. I want to build new initiatives, possibly to also financially sustain me, but the main objective I have is to make new friends. (Post is still work-in-progress)

* I don’t know what to call this. Focus group, thematic bridging group, guild, subject matter expert group. For now, whatever. This is a place to collect the things, initiatives, groups, foundations, of this sortof grouping that could help the metaverse become a good thing. And I don’t know what to call this particular subcategory either. Ultimately, I hope that these groupings are useful enough to live on a wikipedia page or something, and if it exists already, hopefully I find out about it 🙂

The current list of groupings are:

1. Accessibility
2. Entertainment
3. Education/Training
4. Communications
5. Commerce
6. Health and Wellness
7. Natural Resources, Geospatial
8. Transport
9. Digital unions / Democracy / Citizenship / Activism (this post)