Project 3.0

Some days the writing comes down on you like you need to take an urgent loo break. Today is one of those days.

I’m about to email my potential posts-doc supervisor explaining why I went silent for a long time. Two pivots, that’s why.

Project title 1.0: Plurality and Playfulness, getting curious in the Metaverse
subtitle: The role of the digital in facilitating the transformation of expertise while maintaining accountability

Yup, it’s a mouthful, and difficult to wrap one’s head around.

When my eligibility to apply for the MSCF through Portugal fell through, I scrambled and asked around for a last minute connection. We realised the deadline was way too close, but a kind Danish researcher agreed to have a meeting anyway. While the meeting was amazing, and the researcher utterly lovely, he kept asking the wrong questions. I was wondering, why did he keep going down that road, effectively asking how we can collaborate better?

I am frustrated by this narrative of trying to do collaboration better, and trying to attract more collaborators, because in my experience it is a really fraught space. Volunteer projects are rife with ideology, and it’s obvious why – we need to have conviction about something to spend our precious free time on it, for no pay.

But that conviction also comes across as patronising. We want people to come and do stuff with us, for free, but we want them to do it our way. Clearly that is not going to work and it is not working in a big way: I don’t see space for me in the volunteer groups I am interested in.

So eventually it dawned on me, that I am not interested in the outer work of how we collaborate better, but the inner work of how we change ourselves to allow better collaboration.

Project title 2.0: Reflections on our world

Still about the transformation of expertise. Still about the need for new knowledge alliances. But now looking at how those knowledge alliances need some alignment of ideology, discoverability, as well as accountability.

I wanted to see if we can get people to see their own ideologies, to understand what underpins why they believe certain things, to see why other people may disagree on those. I wanted to see how data can help do that, while illuminating why data and how we structure it carries its own ideologies too – the whole blockchain thing as one example.

I thought to investigate this through three areas:

  • Facilitate knowledge linkages through linked data. Implement this through a simple, web-based prototype game; Pocket Ponies (in collaboration with theĀ Terceira Pony Association), set against a physical world backdrop of the Azorean islands, through LinkedGeoData, that would have the additional purpose of serving as a education tool about the benefits of linked data, and contribute to digital literacy particularly regarding data ownership and local data storage.
  • Facilitate reflection through a feminist ethic of care, to promote stronger inner work to be better collaborators, to be less vulnerable to misinformation, better communicators.
  • Facilitate curiosity through emergent game design approaches to knowledge, with outcomes including technical guidelines and packaging of physical world assets to be accessible to games, as well as social guidelines for how to design emergent games that incorporate physical world elements

So I sat with this title and this topic for a few days and felt really stuck.

This is psychology.

While I do believe that the whole internet and the whole global population needs therapy, I don’t want to do this. I have been through therapy, i have read up a lot about this, I have enough experience that if I wanted to do this research, I could. But I don’t want to research this inner working mediation stuff, I am not mentally resilient enough to do this. And frankly it doesn’t interest me enough.

Cue a period of, well, now I don’t know what to do in my career. Existential crisis again.

Then, one day while making a shopping list on a phone note, I came across a phrase again that I wrote while doing a shopping list probably about two years ago. I don’t know what it is about shopping that makes this shake out. And it clicked.

Project title 3.0: Interoperability of special interest groups

This is broad enough that it can handle a bit of the, doing collaboration better, and being a better collaborator, but out of virtue of its broadness, doesn’t need to dive too deep into those topics, while covering supporting tools that can help with the therapy-for-the-whole-internet and facilitating unpacking our ideologies.

I want to do two case studies:

case study 1: urban resource management from a participatory planning perspective – letting volunteers in
case study 2: the ongoing evolution of the metaverse seen from both the corporate, and the indie/grassroots perspectives

Why these two? Apart from my personal interest in both, I think urban resource management has not gained as much value as they should from volunteer groups, special interest groups, and digital tools, digitally facilitated participation.

Online digital special interest groups and forums like reddit are mature and have shown some of the pitfalls and challenges of the interoperability of special interest groups. The metaverse as an emerging concept is at risk of repeating mistakes, while also presenting an opportunity of innovating how groups interrelate, as interoperability is a widely acknowledged necessary concept.

metaverse == climate change
One challenge with the metaverse is that the term is so broad that it is interpreted in often contradicting ways. This is similar to the resource-related challenges of climate change, that is as a result vulnerable to capture by other interests, for example how carbon capture and carbon credits is possibly the worst way to address climate change, but dominates the conversations.

I think the metaverse evolution can learn from resource management to have a fairly consistent sense of meaning. Successful volunteer-driven projects like OpenStreetMap, Debian, Ubuntu, and Wikipedia have a clear sense of meaning and a well organised way of contributing.

So, well, that’s where I am so far.

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