This paper was originally written to defend a project at uOttawa. The ideas are still defensible, however the the university was too busy and stuffy and the project did not succeed. I should take some blame too, and ought to write a lessons-learned piece!
uOttawaglobe.ca - The People’s Internet at University of Ottawa
Abstract
“History bears witness,” writes a sociologist, “to the cataclysmic effect on society of inventions of new media for the transmission of information among persons. The development of writing, and later the development of printing, are examples.”
N. St. John, Book review, The American Journal of Sociology 73 (1967): 255.
Media innovations have been some of the most powerful technologies of social change. And if we accept that without access to knowledge – (be it scientific, theoretical, technical or otherwise) other technologies that lead to social change would be improbable, we can place centrally to human development the mediums by which knowledge and information are disseminated and accessed. In the early days of the internet, computer networking was created as a solution to isolated research, duplication and waste of resources. The need to network computers and the people who worked on computer technology led to the internet and the rise of the network society. The early situation is analogous to many institutional situations, where coordination, collaboration and networks are under-developed. The international community at University of Ottawa information-poor as regards to itself, even as we are information-wealthy in general. The university community can benefit from a technology that enhances visibility of local initiatives, local networks, and local collaboration and coordination, and enhanced the effectiveness of the international foci of all of these. This paper covers some of the issues and potentials of the new ‘user-generated’ internet, and discusses a participatory media initiative at the University of Ottawa (www.uottawaglobe.ca). The website may change the face of web communication in the community, making it more dynamic, inclusive, purposeful and relevant to members.
A Brief Treatise on Knowledge
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
– Thomas Jefferson.
To know is good and to share knowledge is better. Knowledge is so purely good, that even without tangible benefit it is satisfying and there is nothing more exquisitely human as the desire to know, to be curious and fascinated by the world and by ideas, and there is nothing more powerfully divine than to teach. To know, in and of itself, gives one inner power. Yet development, including the development of knowledge is also driven by the reactionary motivations of survival and necessity, by the relations of power, by threat, by command, by competition and rivalry. Knowledge development is also driven by proactive motivations; the will to power, the need for domination and control, by the will of patrons, the will to progress, the civilizing ambition and also for the betterment of the conditions of humanity, the establishment of justice, freedom, material comfort, security, It is pursued to please and entertain each other, for kinship and love and for the realization of human potential. Knowledge is sought to solve problems we face. Thus, the outer manifestation of its power is that which is inherent in the ability to use knowledge.
The development of knowledge is organic and systematic, relational and solitary and it is vitalized by a constant energy charged by challenge on the outside and desire on the inside. To know is personally powerful, to use knowledge is externally powerful. To lack access to knowledge that one needs to face challenges and that one desires as thinking human being is disempowering. It is disempowering to not know why your child suffered diarrhea and died. It is empowering to learn how to protect your child from a water-borne disease, empowering to know how to get clean water for your whole community, to teach others how to do this. It is disempowering to study science at a university with no access to current scientific literature, empowering to be able to access the knowledge you need to realize your own hopes, to stand as equal in knowledge as the best in your field and contribute to your country’s progress. It is disempowering to be a physician and not know how to recognize diseases that you see, without access to medical journals, empowering to be able to find the information you need to treat your patients. It is empowering to research and learn and be able to translate knowledge to others, disempowering to be always on the receiving end of ‘knowledge translation’. It is empowering to be able to create new dimensions of knowledge, to learn the basis of a discipline and to be able to challenge it based on your unique background and experience. It’s disempowering to encounter mainly false notions of your people in scholarship, and to be shut out from contributing to the accepted body of literature. It’s disempowering to only receive from those who know, and only at their will, to be cut off from accessing on your own the global body of knowledge and contributing to it. Those of us who work in the field of international development must understand that knowledge is the basis for development, and independence to access information and knowledge to develop one’s own knowledge is the key determinant of self-determination in development. ‘Today, we recognize that knowledge is not only a public good, but a global or international public good’ – Joseph Stiglitz (2006).
Knowledge and Us
We are living in the information age, on the fortunate side of the digital divide with few excuses for information poverty. As an educational institution, we are interested in imparting knowledge that can better humanity and interested in removing barriers to accessing knowledge for all persons. We are interested in generating knowledge and we are increasingly coming to understand the relational and interdisciplinary aspects of epistemology. In the digital age, knowledge can be developed globally, in being developed globally knowledge can rid itself of the centric biases that have plagued it, such as the false concept of that there is such a thing as Western science.
The synthesis and integration of knowledge both of praxis, theory and understanding across the great disciplines and ways of knowing may bring us nearer to that long sought after consilience, but through a wider and deeper well than that provided by the methodologies of science alone. We have hope to gain far more from a fair and inclusive approach to knowledge, not one relativistic towards what is true and real, but rigorously diverse in its approach to how we know what is true and real, and how knowledge may be expressed. As such the interaction of disciplinary and non-disciplinary ways of knowing is already providing rich and fertile ground for problem-solving the key issues facing humanity.
Knowledge in this millennium has the opportunity to be democratized, decentralized, synthesized, integrated and undergo its development in ever-widening spheres of contribution. The globalization of knowledge brings what is remote near, yet it encounters the difficulties of all globalizations and that is the tenuousness of local community. It is one thing to have a thousand points of distant light each illuminating the potential for betterment of humanity, another to have the closest star itself illuminate brightly the myriad collection of local scholars, workers, artists and artisans, students etc. Yet we are still called to be global citizens and to embrace our interdependence, to embrace the globe as a common community in which all members share fundamental valuing as human beings. What is needed are ways to illuminate the local community. In this case we focus on that community brought together by the University of Ottawa, and in shedding light on its own strength, to vitalize this venerable vibrantly and richly alive in discussion, debate, collaboration, communication, creativity and participation in Canada’s role in the world. The vision of the initiative described and defended in this paper, is that of a University taking centre stage in Canada’s internationalism, and in such a way that everyone who wishes to participates, from the grass-roots to the treetops, has a common platform for knowing of and relating with one another. The vision is of a myriad of topics, events, projects, fundraising, research, advocacy, policy proposing, arts, discussion, information and integrated action becoming visible and known, gathering momentum and empowering citizens in the face of the onslaught of tragic conditions that plague this first decade of the new millennium.
Information Poverty at University of Ottawa
An argument of this paper is that those who work in this area at University of Ottawa are poor in their knowledge of their own community and its resources. The university lacks a platform for networking its own community of people who would contribute to international development, human rights, global health and global citizenship. As such it ignores its own resources, to its own detriment and to those it would wish to serve. This is true at every level from student to administration and has been confirmed by everyone from directors to faculty to students and has been confirmed to the author through a formal environment scan, repeated conversations with student and faculty leaders, formal consultations with faculty and explicitly stated by administrators and those wishing to collaborate (Jinha, 2006, Health Services, 2003). Though the research is naturalistic, there have been no statements to the contrary. This is a type of knowledge that is the basis of social networks – a ‘knowing of’ type – awareness. ‘Knowing of’ persons, resources, places, processes, methods etc. is what leads to knowing in more substantive ways, it is the information that begets knowledge. ‘Knowing of’ potentiates relating with which potentiates sharing information with and acting with giving rise to social organization by network. Existing in limited ways comparative to the potential are opportunities to share knowledge with members of this community on the horizontal sphere, across disciplines, levels, organizations and between individuals. The quantity of people who are participating in debate, policy and decision-making and in interacting with the wider communities is fewer than the number of those who have something to contribute. This is an aspect of the democratic digital divide (Norris, 2001) whereby such privileges for public engagement on-line are blocked by institutional mechanisms and policy and lack of participatory technologies. The potentials are “extraordinary” according to Castells (2006), but “existing social systems stall the dynamics of creativity.” Knowledge that is visible can be disseminated, that which is invisible is only known to the knower. Every instance in which barriers to accessing and disseminating knowledge are deconstructed constitutes a positive step for people who don’t already have it.
Inspired Frustration
My own involvement comes from years of dismay at the way people associated in limited networks, even when associations would benefit others or at the very least showed a great logical inference of the potential for mutual benefits of a more open network, and benefits to those outside the network. In 1997, I founded the Intercultural Club largely because cultural clubs were closed societies except for their external communication, both to each other and to individuals not identifying with any of them. In 2003, I founded the interprofessional international health course so that medicine and nursing networks would open to each other to the benefit of their own enrichment, their careers and those they would serve locally and internationally. In 2005, I took the position of coordinator of the International Health Program which had recently been created based on an environment scan. That environment scan placed inter-organizational coordination as a central problem of student groups, lack of a network resulting in duplication, in over-scheduling of events, and lack of opportunities to work on shared mandates (Health Services, 2003). In my work I had formed my own network and my own curiosity always led me to ask ‘Who’s doing What?’ As a result, I was always surprised at people at every level from student to directors who had little knowledge of the answer to this question. My surprise was not at all self-aggrandizing, in fact I’ve been in the position of knowing little myself, it was just that realization that we possessed a poor network, we possessed little interest in the question, we possessed little community and little time to try and build one. The vision of my program was stated as ‘building a vibrant and sustainable international health community’ (Health Services, 2003) but I also come from a mentorship of two great activists (Drs. Don and Liz Hillman, MD, PhD, FRCP and Officers of the Order of Canada), who taught me from their forty plus years of overseas work and advocacy, and whose vision was for the same but who taught me never to separate health from development. This year I held a set of formal consultations with faculty members of the Centre for International Health and Development (including the Hillmans’ who founded it) as part of our restructuring of its committee (Jinha, 2006). Their statements reinforced the enviro-scan and frequent informal conversations. I spoke with directors and their staff who said the same thing. In 2006, a student group emerged with the same conclusion and a bid to build a network of student clubs.
As fortune would have it, I had worked on a previous project with a designer from the Centre of E-learning who taught me about Civicspace, an open-source platform for participatory websites whose content was user-generated. E-learning was receptive to the idea of developing a participatory website to comprehensively represent international and civic life at the university. The site was developed and is located in cyberspace at www.uottawaglobe.ca , nicknamed the Hub in English and Le Noyau in French, representing both the spacious hub of communication, and the energetic core of activity.
ARPANET, a brief history of the internet
When the computer proved itself useful enough to become a military industry, the next step was to get the computer to recognize another computer and communicate with it. The predecessor of the internet, ARPANET, was developed in order to do just that. Its progenitor, Robert Taylor, saw the limitations of all the scientists using computers in isolation and the duplication of computer programming that was the result. Duplication and inability to access the research of others wasted resources and slowed progress of knowledge. Much of the duplication arose from incompatibility, and the need was for a common network (Hafner and Lyon, 1996). ARPANET gave birth to other versions such as telnet (recalling the early network out of Carleton University, the National Capital Freenet which became the only free provider of the dial-up era in Ottawa), and then Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and not only could computers communicate with one another anywhere, ordinary people could communicate with one another through their own computers.
We can apply the situation faced by Taylor and make an analogy to our own network-poor situation, that of the international and civic-minded community of the University of Ottawa. University of Ottawa is an interesting phenomenon. It is toted as ‘Canada’s University.’ Canada is the nation of Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, it is the humanitarian and multicultural nation, and the ‘just society’ determined to stake out a unique identity while being friends and neighbours with the nation of unilateralism and militarized democracy. This is the Canada of 2006 however, one who has ‘lost its place in the world’ according to Carleton University (Canada’s Capital University) writer Andrew Cohen. University of Ottawa is the closest university to Parliament Hill, in the home of a large percentage of the major Canadian NGO’s (many of them situated at 1 Nicholas literally two minutes walk away), in the very heart of the diplomatic community, a 10-minute drive from the Canadian International Development Agency in Gatineau. Yet the university is known as ‘Apathy U’ and student apathy continues to be of the most common concerns among the active student body. This is Canada’s University in 2006, where the great challenges are global – the staggering poverty, the plague of HIV/AIDS, the intractable conflict layered with the staggering increase in availability of information, information both remote and disparate from our experience and that overwhelms our limited civic ability to respond. The overload cancels the reactions of the apathetic and the non-apathetic to leaves us with pathos alone (or maybe pathetic alone) because we can’t respond. The global situation is what it is and University of Ottawa is a resourced institution with excellent people, solid Canada Research Chairs in key global issues, research centres and over 20 ‘civil society’ student groups, and a vast increase in international programs and courses. It is absolutely true that such advancements would not be possible without strongly developed provincial, national and international networks and those are also made possible through ICT’s. It may even be a consequence of ICT’s that we arrive at the paradox of rich international networks and poor local ones, even ones with similar international foci. This absurdity is best illustrated in two partnerships being pursued in the same town in the poorest part of its country, through two intimately related departments – partnerships with no communication with each other in the same building at the university. In retrospect, Taylor faced a challenge less inspiring and even more daunting than our own, national security in the U.S. during the Cold War. We have the duty to the human spirit that to be even more motivated by hope as we are by fear.
A fictional analogy
Let’s imagine we are in a time when maps have been the greatest new information and communication technology (ICT) and society progresses because it can more easily find new resources and people to trade with. Cartography becomes an important discipline. Much later we have a town with a cartography institute. It is the time before the internet and even the telephone, so all of the cartographers and their students go on expeditions to map territories. However, the cartographers don’t bother to map their own town. They can’t find their way to each other’s studios to share work. They expend large resources to map a certain territory, but have to come back and then are sent on a mission to another territory. They end up with bits and pieces of territory they can’t link up. They even go on expeditions to the same places, sometimes at the same time and come back with the same maps with different errors. They may even send by mail their maps to cartographers in their network in other countries for comparisons. They go on all sorts of international cartography conferences but never have their own meetings. They envy centers that are far ahead of them, but can’t understand it’s because those cartographers sought to map their own territory and coordinate their efforts. The mayor of the town is embarrassed because when they are called upon they can’t account for the resources they have.
Cyber-pragmatists
In the initiative we are working on, the Hub/Le Noyau, we are building a local community with an international focus by using the tool used to network internationally to network locally. It begs the question, obviously, if such people are situated locally, why is the World Wide Web needed to link them up? The answer is that the World Wide Web is where people locate information in the twenty-first century. People will consult the internet over the phone book to find a local store, and that is because it’s easier to find an internet connection than a phone book and you can do in between doing all of the vast numbers of others things people do on computers. Our camp is not with the cyber-optimists, their domain is science fiction. Worse are the pessimists. In Darin (2000) states that “when computer networks are to be involved in democracy at all, they are likely to be instruments of democracy at its worst.” As a general statement, it’s unverifiable. Writing even in the distant past of 2000, Darin is using the wrong verb tense. ICT is involved in democracy, has been since before 2000 and in a whole host of activities related to it. For instance, in 1997 my Intercultural Club hosted the uOttawa installation of the International Conference to Ban Landmines. I did not know it at the time, but the conference which created the first Ban Treaty with the largest number of states ratifying any treaty ever, was brought together by hundreds of NGO’s collaborating over the internet (Van Audenhove et.al, 2000). Currently, the World Urban Forum is an example of global civil society at its creative best, even in the way it bartered advertising. A blog friends and I started for students’ overseas work (dogooder.ca) bought the privilege of having our logo on the Forum site during a three-day multinational and multi-day live on-line discussion in return for promoting the Forum through our networks. Anheier (2001) cites the international campaigns for indigenous peoples through the internet, demonstrating its power to link up groups that are marginalized and minorities in their local contexts and have them gain power through networks. Today, Time announced the ‘Person of the Year’ as You, meaning Us, because of our participation on the web through blogs, participatory sites and other forms of user-generated content. What are difficult to understand as well are the arguments from equity. The current life expectancy of in Canada is now 77 for men and 82 for women owing to public health, health care and stability. This produces an inequity that begs the world to work for these conditions everywhere, not to reduce life expectancy in Canada. The idea is to make knowledge a global public good and to make access equitable, not to reduce that good because it is not yet accessible to all.
In any case, the landmines activists, dogooder.ca and the World Urban Forum fall into neither the optimist nor the pessimist camp, they are cyber-pragmatists. This is hard work. Because we are on-line, we need to occupy that space as participants and not passive consumers nor peripheral critics. It doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the weather outside, doesn’t mean we won’t go and meet friends anymore, that we’ll live in a virtual universe of fantasy. In fact if we make local connections on-line, it’s easier to meet in person the people we want to meet, easier than if we never knew about them. This is exactly what the research shows. The network society is hypersocial, those who use it also meet up in real space-time more frequently. When they increase their use, the real social time goes up too (Castells, 2006). This may be a correlation, but it serves to dismiss the idea that the internet generally isolates because the only possible causal link is going in the other direction. It is a common-sense causal (or casual) link. Whether someone is social or not, an on-line interaction is an opportunity for a real-time meeting. Kind of like the telephone. In looking at communities, emerging patterns in community informatic systems research reveal emerging patterns in collaboration, social network strategies and the building of social capital at the local level, communication and participation being of importance to the social fabric, and afforded by on-line networks. (Marshall, 2005).
The call for opportunities for bridging the communication and information gap has come from the international community at uOttawa. The internet is the map of the 21st century, it’s not a two or three dimensional map, the nature of it is that it’s further ahead as a map than what we are able to describe it as. The map can be most dynamic for the local community using it. The patterns follow this logic when it comes to participatory sites. One network analysis showed that transnational sites are less inclined to be participatory, and participatory sites are less likely to develop transnational networks (Burszt, Stark and Verdres, 2005). Language and culture are likely reasons, but perhaps there is also a certain advantage seen in the opportunity to readily translate virtual meetings to real ones. The ICT’s have created ‘spaces of flow’ – through virtual space – that create opportunities for ‘spaces of place’ – those real-time meetings from global conferences to local gatherings (Padovani, 2002).
The problem is getting the internet to form strong local networks, so that those local networks can be of better use to global networks. According to Joseph Stiglitz (2006), “a key part of successful development is combining global knowledge with local knowledge.” www.Oneworld.net is a global network. One of its channels is digitalopportunity.org. Oneworld is a vast network; its goal is to network global civil society. On digital opportunity there’s a description of a blog . The blog was created to develop a common platform for local communication and sharing of knowledge on ICT4D in India in the areas of health, education, poverty alleviation, agriculture, micro-finance, e-governance, trade and market-based information dissemination. It was developed to fill gaps such as lack of exposure to grass-roots initiatives, to new and promising innovations, lack of a common meeting point and to provide a common platform for networking and promotion, to debate issues and to drive debate and action towards needed policies. The weblog is used to draw together people working in similar local initiatives who previously didn’t have a platform for reaching each other. What is also interesting is that we learn about such an initiative with similar aims as ours, through a more global network, digitalopportunity.org. We need to use the new web technologies to build local strengths, access global knowledge and return our local strength to global knowledge and action. The new technologies suit this purpose through accessing the strengths of the grass-roots to the tree-tops by allowing users at each level to contribute and generate content. At University of Ottawa, we need a common platform to make visible grass-roots initiatives, to share innovations, to have a common platform for networking and promotion, to debate issues and to drive debate and action towards needed policies.
e-Participaction
In confronting their situation of information poverty, the African Internet Service Providers Association (AISPA) predicts that user-generated content on the internet will translate to relevant content by those sharing similar characteristics (AISPA, 2006). The dearth of African content on the internet provides a disincentive for use by African small businesses and community groups, working against the justification for investment in infrastructure in general. The strategy recommended by AISPA is to provide subscribers with free tools to easily publish content on the web. Doing such would encourage a culture of African publishing, thus providing content with more widespread relevance, increasing demand to provide dollars and justification for infrastructure for more widespread access.
At University of Ottawa, we endured a situation where knowledge of a student-led initiative to institute a policy on ethical purchasing a fair trade at the university would have been extremely relevant to our program in planning a fair trade event in November 2005. Three days before the event, I was researching for my introductory comments and stumbled upon the group. This was after weeks of researching and discovering plenty of fair trade initiatives at distant universities. With the randomness that internet searching begets, such networks were much closer at hand than the one that was useful and relevant in geographic proximity. If we had a platform for groups like this to publish information in the local network, the result would be more relevant information for the local community. This is similar to the African situation, where Africans accessing the WWW could locate all manner of distant information and have difficulty finding local and relevant information for the lack of an African-produced network. The University of Ottawa is a complex network of over 40,000 people occupying a geographic space of a few city blocks. If we do not deliberately encourage a local network through the internet, the internet will simply draw us from a place lower than our potential into non-local ones. At the university, we wish to establish a culture of exchange of information in a common network. This will take time. The internet is both producer and product of social change, but social behavioral change takes longer than the rapid technological change. For this to occur, ordinary citizens and not only cultural elites must recognize the value of their participation (Sousa, 2006). It is citizens’ application of their democratic rights, occurring through a network of fellow citizens, and not technology itself that fosters democracy and the internet is powerful tool in the hands of engaged citizens (Shin, 2006).
The uottaglobe.ca site is likely to become a platform for student activism. It is far easier to engage students in using such a site. One report on demographics of internet use in the U.S. delineates categories of internet content creators. “Power creators are the Internet users who are most enthusiastic about content creating activities. They are young – their average age is 25 – and they are more likely than other kinds of creators do things like use instant messaging, play games, and download music. And they are the most likely group to be blogging.” (Lenhart, Corrigan and Fallows, 2004).
On Nov. 22, 2006 we held a ‘Civil Society Forum’. The student organizations were represented, listed below:
? Engineers Without Borders
? Students With a Collective Conscience
? Student World Assembly
? Medical Students International Health Interest Group
? Be Aware of AIDS
? Students Against Global Aids
? People’s Republic of Delicious
? Oxfam uOttawa
? Amnesty International uOttawa
? Shared World Program
? Watercan uOttawa
? Ontario Public Interest Research Group
? Green Campus
? International Socialists
? Ottawa Student Health Initiative
? International Health Program
? International Development Studies Students Association
? Be AIDS Aware
? Kilimanjaro Students Association
? Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights
? Student University Network for Social and International Health
? Students Against Global Aids
? Journalists for Human Rights
? World University Services Canada Local Committee
Those invited but who couldn’t make it were also groups such as Lets Stop AIDS, Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights, Human Concern International, STAND (action for Darfur) and others. One of the hosts of the forum was the University of Ottawa chapter of the Student World Assembly, a student democracy movement connected with 700 universities worldwide. Their pilot project is to be the first chapter in the Assembly to build a local network of campus clubs (the club mentioned earlier). Their platform for this action will be the Hub and the site will serve to connect the local network to global networks such as SWA. In describing a similar participatory website out of Toronto to connect youth globally, the authors state that young people can feel powerless to overcome the immensity of issues, but technologies that allow them to connect with a global community empower them as integral spokes in a larger wheel (Lombardo, Zakus and Skinner, 2002). Jun (2006) argues the potential of the internet for rapid coalition-building globally on common causes such as human rights, the environment etc.
The previous web presence of the above organizations consisted largely of basic web-sites, ‘yahoo groups’-type sites, and blogs. The independent sites are not well networked to a uOttawa community, nor are the other types which are hosted on corporate networks such as blogger and yahoo. The independent ones are time-consuming and rely on renewal amongst groups of those with webmaster experience affecting sustainability. The other types have generic formats that share little identity with the community, closer on the multi-dimensional internet map to any number of non-local and unrelated groups. Lacking the platform for community networking, they tend to be isolated as the group relies on only its own resources to draw an audience to them. Our situation is similar that faced by global civil society, organizations now have internet access, but we are on the cusp of moving beyond basic web-sites and e-mail to appropriating the internet for social change (Reilly and Surman, 2003).
Solving our own Taylor dilemma
Solving this problem is akin to what Taylor was able to do; only our task is less technical though both situations call for persuasion and push to get people to use a new form of networking. Taylor had expensive machines that had to be bought under obligations to buy from different manufacturers whose potential was underutilized by the duplication and isolation resulting from lack of network. He had to get the computers to talk to one another, and before this to recognize one another. Our problem is to get our valuable human resources occupying the same local space to begin to recognize and connect with one another. The solution I am proposing is to turn the internet searchlight on the local community. The solution is to use the internet to make local connections of people that have international foci.
The Hub/Le Noyau is a participatory, bilingual, and dynamic website to allow those active in international health, development, human rights and global citizenship at the university. This site allows users to generate their own content at will, thus providing a dynamic map making visible the activity at the university – they can generate the type of content that informs in a static way about their organizations, and also dynamic and interactive content. The vision is to aim for comprehensive representation of activity of interest and open access to participation by all stakeholders. The model is that information flows uni-directionally for visitors in the same fashion as a regular website, and interactively for users who generate content. The continuum of static to dynamic content in the way the site is organized should provide useful information to visitors and members alike, providing the advantages of the traditional site and the blog-type site at the same time.
The Hub/Le Noyau
“Thirty spokes converge upon a wheel, it is the centre hub that makes the wheel useful.”
- Tao Te Ching
The goals of the site are:
1. To provide to users one place where they can find information related to international
health, development, human rights and global citizenship activities at University of Ottawa.
2. To increase the visibility of these activities on campus and in the wider community.
3. To increase internal knowledge of the activities of various groups, students and faculty at University of Ottawa.
4. To provide opportunities for collaboration between organizations, students and faculty and external organizations.
5. To increase awareness of international health, development, human rights and global citizenship to the general public.
6. To provide resources for teaching and learning, and a venue for people to post these resources.
7. To enhance communication on international health and development, build networks and increase opportunities for students and faculty to be involved.
The site has been created and is ready to move forward to meet its objectives. It is built on open-source platform Drupal – the Civicspace parent. The software is free and community-developed, with an overhead cost of less than $100 a year for the server. Content is user-generated. Organized groups from student clubs to departments, centres etc. can maintain content within their own section of the site – a mini-homepage, and a limited number of such accounts is given to each organization.
The reason that such accounts are limited is to protect representation and have accountability. These accounts are not representative of individuals, but organizations, as such they speak for those and the organizations are accountable for the content. The mini-site allows the organization to create a site architecture with parent and child menus, they can create links, post photographs and if they are html-savvy, they can disable the user-friendly text editor and insert html for such things a tables or other page designs. Organizations may also post events, which are submitted to the home page and the events calendar. The site is bilingual, and for every page a translation on the opposite language side of the site is easily created. If the organization is unable to translate, they can still post in their language on both sides so that there isn’t missing information. Individuals can join the site and both organizations and individuals can create discussion groups. The groups can be open or private. One group is using the mechanism to allow writers to collaborate on a play script for Black History Month! Individual users can also post on forums.
Philosophy of Free Speech and its Boundaries in User-Generated Content on The Hub/Le Noyau.
When we speak of removing barriers to knowledge, we are not speaking of those types of knowledge that are meant to be private in order to protect the security of persons. Privacy constitutes an equally important right and we are not talking about accessing private knowledge. We may say that where knowledge in question has both public and private interest, there exists a margin and a tension. The margin is established over the long-term by societies and individuals, civil society and institutions negotiate tensions that arise in the short term. Generally, however, we are talking about knowledge that is in the public sphere and is part of a global body of knowledge in which everyone has a right to be able to access for their development and for its inherent worth.
As Castells (2006) points out, knowledge and information have always been central in all historically known societies and this is not new. Castells argues that what is new is the technology and its capacity to transform the capabilities of an old form of social organization, networks. Technological change introduces new debates on issues such as access to information and freedom of speech. The term ‘access to knowledge’ has now become common in a world now committed to universal primary education and literacy of all people, and the acknowledgment of the ‘knowledge society’ even where societal development has always been knowledge-based. These issues are debated at the highest international fora often in the context of ICT’s within the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) as well as the World Summit on the Information Society and advocated by the Communication Rights in the Information Society campaign and the projects of the Open Society Initiative (Patel, 2006, Padovani, 2002). An access to knowledge treaty is proposed and supported by a broad coalition of southern governments and NGO’s (Patel, 2006). In a recent article in the Ottawa Citizen, Michael Geist (University of Ottawa Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law) recommends government legislation for open access, that all taxpayer funded research be made available to the public at no charge within six months of initial publication (Geist, 2006). He also recommends dealing with non-controversial copyright issues, making orphan works available and broadening fair use. All of the recommendations are aimed towards increasing the availability of quality works on the internet and in the public domain. Access to knowledge was and still is a primary issue concerning equity in education, but the internet presents access to knowledge as an issue of technology in a way far more centrally and directly than with previous technological changes which carried more implicit consequences by nature of the eras and of the technologies themselves. We must remember how recently access to knowledge was tacitly elitist, at least in the ‘civilized’ world. One of the ways to increase pluralistic contributions to knowledge is to make internet publishing more accessible, but making it more accessible raises questions around control over information and speech. The internet in general, and increasingly user-generated content, are introducing new dimensions to the debates around producing and receiving speech.
Three concerns need to be addressed in this initiative regarding user-generated content; a) the principle of non-malificence as it regards to legal and ethical speech boundaries, in harmful speech and with regards to rights of privacy b) the issue of representation, and contexts where speech may either represent the speaker alone, or may represent the voice of a group or institution as well, and may do so clearly or may do so ambiguously c) the issues of defining purposes and environments of particular spaces of limited speech and spaces of free speech and d) the issue of reliability and validity of information.
In matters pertaining to control, on the one hand we are dealing with control of information which relates to facts about the world, and on the other we are concerned with limits of interactive speech, of opinion, of discussion, of rhetorical and influencing kind of speech.
Information
The boundaries to the flow of information have been influenced from challenges arising from technologies that increase the ability to communicate information, and it should be added that technologies are also developed to secure information to varying degrees and within varying contexts and prevent the public from accessing it. Information may be commercialized and released only through payment. The control of information is often sought for the reasons that exposure to the information would be harmful (non-malificence). In Canada, a legal framework is in place to regulate the way the government is allowed to restrict information. This is because the government may abuse its power to restrict information, and that in a democracy people have a right to information about a government that represents them. When people have access to information, they need to share it in order to influence democracy. Seeking and imparting information in society is crucial to health democracy. Thus non-malificence exists in tension with beneficience, and control over information is meant to achieve a balance between privacy and the public interest in a healthy civic democracy with healthy institutions of jurisprudence. Those who hold intellectual property rights and exercise these in the marketplace argue that the proceeds are both related to property rights in general in the free market, and necessary to purchase the resources, human and material, to gather and present the information. Thus, a tension results here between the economic activity of the commercial publishers, and the resultant inequity in access to knowledge. In addition, what is made visible on the web by a corporation becomes part of its management of consumer behavior and this is true of the University of Ottawa. To quote from the first line of the first objective of the marketing and communications policy of the University - “the purpose of this policy is to ensure that the University's corporate image is projected in a positive, coherent and consistent manner, whether by traditional methods or by new media such as the Web” (University of Ottawa, 2006). University of Ottawa lecturer and internet guru Michael Strangelove cites the active, create and even subversive audience reduces the control of the commercial media and its ability to manage consumer behaviour (Strangelove, 1998.)
Healthy democracy requires freedom of speech in order to allow all people to discuss, analyze, opine and make decisions about the meaning of information and what to do with it. Freedom of speech is generally a freedom not tied to institutions, but a basic freedom. Though it may include misinformation, in a healthy democracy with access to information, such misinformation can be corrected organically with a sufficiently independent media and that which is claimed as fact but is in fact disputable may be challenged. The new web technologies also offer a media that can easily be independent of commercial interests, one that is participatory and more accessible, presenting an active challenge to complement the critical challenges over the years from McLuhan to Chomsky on the false objectivity of the mass media. The question of equity then becomes both mere access to the internet still out of reach to the majority of the world, and the relative quality of the different media leading to an inequity in whether one can access all sources, or just those that are free. The civic consumer has an increasing number of judgments to make regarding the types of media, the reliability and validity of information, the legitimacy of sources and their ability to pay. It becomes increasingly important to rely on multiple sources and multiple sources are easier to come by even in the ‘free market’ as it were.
The legal limits of speech are when misinformation and opinion serve to harm others, and criminal laws governing hate speech, libel and slander and harassment reflect the ethic non-malificence in speech. Apart from this, the issues of the abuse of media by those who have the most power over it, either by association with expertise, by strategy, by money, power and influence cannot be ignored as the internet contains those potentials especially where civic action is less established and effective in countering these. By exploding the proliferation of speech, the internet magnifies both the beneficient and malificient opportunities of speech. It also gives us more awareness, however, of the tensions surrounding speech, information and knowledge as applied to all spheres of public activity and thus represents a vast progression in our understanding of communication. The world of the internet is moving even faster.
Institutions and Information
Information may also be controlled in order to ensure its reliability and validity. In this case, institutions set standards for releasing information in order not to misinform, such as peer review and editorial boards. This is not meant to limit speech, but to establish credibility of knowledge and information imparted.
Institutions also govern the speech of employees and members. The standards of individual speech are freer than those of institutional speech. Violations of rules governing speech in professional roles carry professional consequences, and where professional standards are tied to legal licenses, they carry legal consequences above the legal limitations of individual speech. Roles and responsibilities therefore establish boundaries based on representations in profession and institution because of powers and responsibilities inherent in those. Institutions regulate representations for such reasons as corporate responsibility and image, legal accountability, personnel management etc. Institutions often disclaim representation of information where it places itself as more of a facilitator for the platform of communication rather than the product of information. Authors also disclaim their representations of institutions as Stiglitz does in the article his article cited in this paper, his first footnote standing right next to his title at the World Bank stating “the views presented here are solely those of the author and not those of any institution with which he is or has been affiliated.” Establishing the context of representation becomes very important in a user-generated on-line environment within an institutional community. The presence of the logo presents the benefits of association and the risks of censure at the same time. There is also the stark reality that web content is visible, or at least potentially so, to any viewer and as such the audience is virtually unlimited and the potential is obviously increased when it comes to risk of causing offense. It becomes essential to tease apart representations, to establish the risks upfront and place them in contrast to the benefits, and to present the model as one which is legitimate and where there has been previous success. To dissociate from the institution completely would present a loss both for the institution and participants. The middle way requires clear establishment of representations and associations, it requires courage, and it requires reactive mechanisms to deal with problems.
It should be pointed out that uottawaglobe.ca is something like a public bulletin board, but with a much wider audience and a much wider scope of information and speech. At University of Ottawa, even though clubs and association represent themselves in public areas such as posting on bulletin boards, the marketing and communications service sees a role in filtering such information proactively. Posters must be approved. By contrast, the uottawaglobe.ca site presents a model of reactive moderation for pragmatic and philosophic reasons; therefore representations become exceedingly important along with mechanisms for dealing with problems, along with justifications of the benefits of the model.
The levels of user functions create categories and levels of representation that are related to the spaces on the site. The two levels are group and individual. The categories run from student club to faculty to administration. Each is responsible for representation of themselves at the level of their representation. A student group carries the level of responsibility a student group should have in representing its body. A department would represent itself at that level, and an individual posting in a forum is just that. The distinctions for the audience between faculty group representation and student group representation are established through the menus, and student associations represent their bodies differently than clubs, so are also distinguished in the menu. The registration includes a contact directory survey whereby people indicate their background, status, affiliation with the university, interests and expertise. Though not compulsory, one who has stated their information related to their representation makes that known (such as Director of Centre of…) and just as any form of communication is responsible for their speech. The institution does not bear responsibility for the speech, but the speaker bears a responsibility in terms of their position, and towards the institutional community in a more ethical sense. Should the institution officially sanction the site, it can demonstrate its support for the model and its reactive mechanism while disclaiming responsibility for the content. The contact directory is also a networking mechanism for identifying people’s relational attributes, and they can also indicate whether they will speak on a topic or mentor students, their current projects and research etc. Finally, each group has only one or two accounts with the capability of posting information on that group. This ensures that the group speaks as a unitary voice, usually with a communications executive responsible for representing the group’s communication.
Apart from the responsibilities associated with representation, currently a team of law students is looking into legalities. Information regarding laws around speech will be posted and part of the agreement upon joining the site. The next level above law is rules. Rules governing the site will include content appropriate to the purpose of the site and respect the local community and a global audience. Beyond rules are self-governing standards. A group or individual with poor communication will not get far given the participatory nature of the site and opportunity for discussion and comment. The participatory nature of the site offers more checks and balances than are offered in the situation of a group operating its own site, which groups may do while also associating themselves with the institution without perhaps the disclaimer of representation. Forums shall have moderators, moderators encourage constructive discourse, enforce rules through warnings and can have the administrator suspend accounts, and immediately delete content felt to pose a risk of illegality. Moderation of organization-contributed content, found in different areas of the site than forums, is by committee which is open to representation by organizational members. Content is freely published and moderation is reactive by the community, administrators and the public who may object. The committee solves the issue by the level of offense, content that is illegal is deleted and accounts can be terminated, rule violations can result in temporary suspension of content and request of the offender to amend it or remove it voluntarily. If this doesn’t resolve the issue, the moderating committee may consider arguments from both sides and come to a decision by consensus, and failing this by majority vote. One of the principles of this site, however, is setting a tone and environment through the clear purposes of the site, building the site initially with known and trusted organizations, establishing rules and allowing for the community’s self moderation and members own enlightened self-interest in publishing responsibly. Within this framework, it is likely that the committee will place wide boundaries for freedom of speech while meetings to discuss offending content should be infrequent. Frequent deliberations of this kind would represent a deeper problem and the need to review the approach. The committee should be in place by fall 2007, when sufficient activity will justify it.
Similar to setting up a physical social space, depending on the tone of the establishment one can expect fewer or more problems, and one can deliberately set both the tone of the environment and the purpose of the space. The need of a ‘doorman’ or ‘security guard’ to watch over interactions is not necessary in an open space and detracts from the purpose and people’s sense of freedom and personal responsibility, but setting ground rules and establishing mechanisms for resolving conflict and ensuring legal activity helps keep the space open. Institutional sites control information through measures of security because content represents the institution as a whole and its corporate responsibility and image. The difference is between institutional management of information for the purposes of public relations with rigid organization; and free-flow of information with self-managing aspects and organic organization of information through planned routes. Both types of website have useful purposes, the latter’s advantages are vibrancy, participation, access, interaction, fluidity and one very important consideration which is low-costs of time and money in putting information on the internet. It is a true ‘civil society’ website of voluntary association, with the sum total of content nearly completely voluntarily produced.
The proliferation of all varieties of internet content, especially perhaps the user-generated variety should encourage educators to adapt to this new environment by teaching critical thinking in the new context. Civics, critical thinking, research all should be taught using both internet and non-internet sources, and students also ought to be encouraged to engage in their own user-generated content, and taught to think reflectively on their freedom, responsibility and inherent risks. It may be that the internet will contribute to our education in all areas relevant to healthy democratic and civil society as a consequence of both the beneficient and malificient realities of the digital age. It is a fundamental truth reflected in the literature, that the internet becomes useful only in the context of broader educational development. It does not represent a direct impact on development, but it can be argued that it is increasingly a determinant of health and development and that even when the extremely poor do not have access (and may not even be able to benefit from it) those who can benefit from it can be more effective partners. The benefits of their networks and access to knowledge can be transferred to communities themselves. It is also not at all adequate to address the digital divide by mere access. Access to the internet is not a goal in and of itself but a means towards achieving an inclusive society (Kostov, 2006). Knowledge inequity must begin with a preparation of those crossing the divide. Educators are already educated and more likely to already be on the fortunate side of the divide (or should be a key target for access if they aren’t), and the resources of the internet are at their disposal providing they too are aware of the risks and potentials.
It is well-advised for users of the site to consider the source of information and claims to knowledge. uOttawaglobe’s consumer of information has likely already witnessed, or has at their fingertips multiple sources to check the validity of information, or the balance of arguments around an issue represented. Information is taken as it is and the source for what it is, and all people when reading any type of information and attempting to gain knowledge from ought to consider the source and its motivations, the reliability and validity of its methods and presentation of facts, right up to the World Bank. The more people participating and viewing the site, the more checks and balances there are on information since both participants and visitors may comment or even complain and initiate the reactive mechanism. Still, much content is simply informational regarding activities and events, that which is controversial tends to occur in forums where both other posters and moderators balance the conversation.
Representations are key to understanding sources of information, and the advantage of this site is that people are representing themselves and are free to state their objectives, without obfuscating such behind a façade of objectivity or aligning with a an institutional communications plan. In essence, in this type of presentation, people are saying ‘this is what we do, what we believe and here are the reasons why – please consider these and take action with us if you agree.’ Institutions often say, ‘this is what we look like, what we represent and here is where you find our services’. Most commonly, positions in debate of actual issues are not the representational domain of the institutions. Institutions are platforms for diverse activity and represent themselves as such. They must represent a melting pot of general, positive and politically acceptable aspirations. This is good, because if the institution begins representing one or the other of the pluralistic views it will either be inconsistent or incomplete in its representation as a platform.
The institution can promote pluralism and the expression of individuals and groups representing themselves as part of the institutional community, and in keeping with the institution’s general values. In order to do so, it must provide spaces for the expression of collective and individual pluralism. Going further, if it wishes to encourage interdisciplinary and interfaculty collaboration, it must provide spaces in order for visibility to lead to communication to lead to networking to lead to collaboration. If it wishes vibrancy of community life, if it wishes people to feel involved and consulted, if it wishes the university society to progress in its productivity, contributions and happiness, it must provide space for inclusion. In the digital age, producing content on the web in a space shared by a common community is a piece of that inclusion that cannot be ignored.
The discussion of this website brings us to the key issues of the information age:
? access – both in imparting information, knowledge and speech and in receiving it,
? reliability and validity of information and knowledge,
? rights to knowledge
? knowledge as empowerment
? accessing and sharing information and knowledge in democracy
? the vibrancy of civil debate and structures supporting it
? the relationship of networks to pluralistic knowledge translation
? networks that bring vibrancy of civil society vs. isolation, duplication and limitation.
? that information and knowledge networking potentiate action for change, even when all actors are not on the same side of the divide.
One more issue that this discussion did not cover is the potential for protection of individual and collective rights that the internet and the ‘new participatory internet’ provide. The internet can be used to expose abuse, to warn of impending risks to persons etc. The author does not necessarily see this issue as likely to relate to this website, but does not rule it out.
Deliberative Beneficience
The success of international networks has relied on the limitless connectivity of the internet, a connectivity that has no spatial limitations. Having no spatial limitations means limitless distraction from local space. It is easier for me to get information from the internet on Ottawa than my hometown Carleton Place. It may be easier for me to get information on the situation of Sub-Saharan Africa than on northern communities in Canada. Yet, it is still easier for me to communicate with local people, to find information on our town than in the past, it is just that the way TCP/IP protocol works, it is just as easy to communicate with Nepal. Why forego one for the other? In this global age, it is truly wonderful that I can chat with my plumber or the local bookstore owner about all manner of global issues, and with the knowledge that ICT’s have aided in bringing greater global awareness.
Troublesome social impacts can be unintended consequences of technology. These may include fragmentation of local communities as a consequence of integration of global ones, they may include increasing the powers of political and commercial hegemony, they may include further inequities between those who can use them and those who can’t, and they may include an increase in the harm that communication can bring. There are those who wish to argue about the new technologies, whether they are good or bad for society. However, as is commonly the case with aspects of dark and light in our midst, the outcome is what we make of it for those who are fortunate to have access, and what we make of it ought to benefit the less fortunate. The best of any of our works are those that are based in the fundamental equality of people and substantive equity. Often the unintended consequences can be subject to deliberative action to counterbalance and correct them, and in the case of the internet the absolute weight of progress brought about by the technology gives us good reason to put pessimism to rest and attempt to deal deliberatively with the unintended consequences. In this case we can use the technology to enhance the environment by putting it to deliberative beneficient use while also dealing deliberatively with the unintended consequences.
In addition to advocating for physical space of interaction, the university ought to support virtual spaces of interaction. The institution ought to facilitate on-line space that allows for a local networking platform. In local networks, experts teach students, students share similar institutional concerns and moreover, in local networks experts are more of an asset to students and vice-versa than in international networks when it comes to direct communication. Local networks have more potential for leading to the real-time forms of communication and sharing knowledge, for communication across levels of status, expertise and discipline. International networks may be more amenable to people who are already on the same level, since it takes multiple mediums of interaction to create useful working relationships with multiple dimensions. An expert talking to a student in Ethiopia makes less sense that an expert talking to an expert in Ethiopia who can translate the knowledge throughout their institution reaching many other faculty and students. An expert working with students in a local network makes a great deal of sense because there is more relational time by which mutual benefits of students and teachers can be realized. This is not to say that distance learning is not useful. But distance learning is more self-learning where the program coordinators at a distance are a resource. It is not as relational. This is not to say that true relationships cannot be established internationally, but this usually requires a long period of correspondence or actual trips.
It is also not to say international networks cannot glean knowledge of persons and that these persons cannot translate knowledge across international networks. It is possible to create new and useful connections that are virtual alone given the prohibitive geographic distance for face-time. But it is often a question of ‘knowing of’ a person, rather than knowing a person. In local networks, we have the opportunity to move quickly from knowing of a person to knowing a person. It makes sense to exploit the geographic closeness of people to build strong local networks, networks of knowing of and of knowing people by which greater relational learning and action can take place. It makes paradoxical sense to use the tool that tends towards the ‘knowing of’ dimension over the ‘knowing dimension’ in so many aspects, because ‘knowing of’ can readily produce knowing relationships in local networks where it is more difficult to do so in international networks. In those areas of interest like international development that drawn on many disciplines, one makes limited work of developing knowledge without frequent face-to-face discussion, real-time seminars, meetings etc. and relying only on written sources, conferences, e-mails, conference calls etc. Further, the main purpose beyond the inherent value of networks for aboriginal peoples, for landmine activists, for environmentalists etc. is to bring more power and strength to their action for social justice in the local societies. The internet remains a means and not the end.
The internet makes much more of life, people, ideas, and phenomena visible across a wide audience, making it ‘known of’ and thereby creating the virtual reality. It is people and societies responsibility to transform ‘knowing of’ to ‘knowing’ through local processes of knowing and engaging with reality itself. Accessing information does not beget nor teach the skills of reflexivity and critical thinking as Hassan (2001) points out, but accessing information more readily increases the number of sources that form the material for thought. Increasing the number of freely available sources of quality information, such as scientific articles, books, analyses, and position papers increases the power of the knower to increase their knowledge. There lie vast resources of information, of inspiration, of creativity that can become visible through the internet, which can be digested and then used. There are vast resources in local networks, such as that of University of Ottawa that can be made visible, be it people, organizations, events, research, projects, opportunities, information that answers the question of ‘what is happening locally, and who is doing what, and what could we accomplish together that we can’t accomplish alone?’
All the groups invited were introduced to the Hub and will be given accounts and homepages. In the feedback survey, all groups felt the site had great potential at the university and beyond. In the current environment, although the numbers of ‘civil society’ oriented student groups, particularly international ones, the cycle of activism has been intermittent, owing to student turnover and the large investment of time and energy in mobilizing people around particular campaigns. Carroll (2006) cites democratic media activism (DMA) as playing a crucial role in forming a permanently mobilized global society to replace the intermittent cycles of protest. The student movement has always played an important role in social movements, and the Hub is a platform for activism by providing democratic media. The Hub is not specifically a site for ‘media activism’, but it is a medium for any manner of activism. It is democratic because it lacks the institutional barriers to participation of the uottawa.ca website, any student organization can participate in the main areas of the site and anyone else can use the forums and create groups. Venturelli writes in ‘A Civil Society Approach to the Policies of the Information Society’ “The civil society model of the Information Society leads to a social horizon of broad participation, self-determination, knowledge empowerment and the outward expansion of knowledge capital. I would lay the foundations for the creation and incubation of social institutions from the ground up, initiated by communities themselves, rather than from the top-down initiated by arbitrary state power…Most important, the civil society approach to the Information Society would accelerate social participation in the construction of knowledge systems and self-regulatory structures.”
We have been distracted in the first era of the internet, in my estimation, away from what can be accomplished globally through local networks. We would do well to remember the physicality of the labor movement. There is one great example recalled by the wonderful storyteller Utah Phillips, where labor organizers were jailed in a hastily constructed new facility. They passed a note from cell to cell and at the appointed time began to jump up and down in unison - physically breaking the walls of the poorly constructed jail “thus proving what a union is for, to get things done together that we can’t get done alone” (Phillips, 1999).
Why on earth do we keep hoping to effect the global situation with communication, networks, partnerships, collaborations when we are so poor in these areas at home? We are spending that which we don’t have. Globalization, that grand new term, represents the supposed increasing integration of the world. All over the world, we see that nations are becoming more integrated and interdependent with each other. We come to understand a kind of shared karma in our actions and policies, in the environment, in trade, in the consequences of shared history, in international financial management. We understand, whether we accept the term in a sense of governance, in a sense of our responsibility towards human beings everywhere, we are global citizens. With this integration however, in many, many places, the local situations and communities are becoming more fractured and fragmented and dependent on external actors. Far from integrated is equity itself, with the massive fracture between the rich minority and poor majority. Yet the happiest are not the wealthiest or most powerful, but those with positive relations with their local environment, its geography and nature, its people and its real activities and those who are able maintain self-determination in the new world.
The hub’s great hope is to provide a platform for the local interest in civics and international affairs to vitalize life at the university, to build communities and not simply random groups under super-ordinate ethical goals. These are goals such as ‘health for all’, eradicating poverty, human rights, ending violent conflict, defending the status of women, of aboriginal peoples, protecting human rights. They derive from the ethic of binding our own liberation to that of all peoples. The Hub asks the people who make up the university to respond to the question of how a university can respond to the global situation. The global situation can be ignored, it can by thrown to apathy in deterministic cynicism, it can even be denied but lessons of life teach the wise to accept reality as it is. The paradox is that the more we know, the more we find that is unacceptable. Acceptance of the unacceptable is a call to action and as such acceptance to deal with reality calls one to get involved, to participate, to engage. To engage requires others, to find others requires knowledge of who they are. To engage fully is to recognize the interdependence of development issues while focusing action. To do so requires representations of pluralistic action. To be able to say that a university itself has an active society is to encourage activity and make it known. To do so in a way that makes sense in the digital age is to do so with web technologies that require virtually no expenditure and place few barriers to participation. In doing so, one is able to map one’s own territory, and to know oneself. In knowing oneself, one can deal more intelligently and effectively with the world.
Knowing the world without knowing oneself is simply to be worldly, as such one’s way of working in the world is limited and superficial. Without knowing oneself, one brings weaknesses rather than strengths to partnership. One’s engagement with others tends to be voyeuristic , defensive, patronizing and biased. It is voyeuristic because when our capabilities to act are well beneath our capacity, all we can do is watch. It is defensive because we are coming from weakness where we are expected to have strength. It is patronizing because if we haven’t learnt to value those in our own environment as people, how can we practice humanistic values on those we feel deserve our charity? In other words, how can we practice community-building or participatory development if we don’t do it our selves? It is biased by the nature of people’s inherent centrism, yet biases can be reduced by engaging and involving the local diverse communities. Often, we cannot even answer the difficult questions such as what the privileged community we are coming from is doing beyond the immediate project.
As an example, take a town in Africa that is among the poorest, and so becomes a target for development work. Civil society groups from the north get involved including universities and expectations are raised. The north delivers hundreds of limited projects that bear no relation to one another. As soon as one group disappears another appears. Vast numbers of needs that could be met go unmet because projects rely on one set of expertise while missing the others. People become projects. Students from various universities waif through this town, observe the degradation and if they do will they do get their hands dirty, makes some deep bonds and their lives are changed. They at best provide small help, at worst get in the way. Poverty is a project. If they are wise enough to build relationships and learn experientially, they discover that those they serve have several dimensions of wealth amidst their poverty. One that stands out is community. The local people have greater sense of community, foreigners who get to know them sometimes discover that though they suffer more, they have more happiness than those who have come to help. The visiting worker discovers that he can do so little. At the same time, transnational corporations extract wealth from the countries with impressive effectiveness of networked and organized effort.
If we quote from “When the Wizards Stay Up Late”(Hafner and Lyon, 1996) about the history of computer networking, and interchange the relevant words and the 1965 date and we would have the perfect fit with the scenario here. The only words altered are those in italics “(As Jinha argued in his paper) in 2006, International development at had reached an unfortunate state of affairs, overseas projects were proliferating but there was ‘no common ground for exchange of programs, personnel, experience or ideas.’ His impression of the international development community was “of a number of essentially similar projects, each going off in its own direction with complete disregard for the others.’ Why waste resources?”
It may just be that we feel that the fact we are devoting this time and energy to good works is good enough. It may be that careers take precedence and projects are part of careers, careers of learning and doing things in international development. It may be that international development is thought of as overseas projects and research, is not thought of as part of the institutional fabric of our home nation and institution. It may be that international development comes from a personal inspiration and our personal interests so what we do is go after the best research or go on the best project for us. It may be that we are satisfied with the current relations of development, whose state of inequity affords us opportunities to do interesting and good work, and to document the problems with an impressive array of words and figures and admonitions. It may be that for some reason, “many large universities seemingly have bigger fish to fry and appear to be relatively uninterested in the community in which they happen to be physically located” (Schuler, 1996). It may be that there is not presently a better platform for coordinated university action.
My question for the university, and for academic institutions, is whether we need to know ourselves. Whether we shall continue with one-off projects, or whether we should to organize long-term, multi-faculty partnerships to contribute our research resources, our actionable resources and our networks. Shall we bother to have the discussion across faculties of the policies of the north and the policies of our university that may stand in the way of human rights, health and development? Shall we continue to gather pieces of the puzzle, duplicating our efforts, establishing all sorts of international networks only the department or group that has them knows about? Shall we continue to resist each other, and pursue the grandest of ideals while ignoring the simplest, most direct and most realizable ideal of a community? This is the one ideal that we are poor of in relation to the rest of the world. The world we attempt to help because they are poor in more tangible ways. The rest of the world we cannot effectively help because we are poor in this way.
Recommendations
I therefore recommend the following:
1. The university officially sanction and promote participatory websites such as the Hub.
2. The university include promotion of such sites in its annual Marketing and Communications plan.
3. The university encourage its faculty and members to use such sites.
4. The university create new policy releasing Marketing and Communications of its responsibility to control information on participatory sites, releasing these to reactive mechanisms by site community representatives, but that the new policy require such sites to establish legal boundaries, rules encouraging respect for the community and environments for discourse reflective of the level of a university environment.
5. Faculties, departments and services related to international health, development, human rights and global citizenship be at least minimally represented on the site, and use the site to develop networks.
6. The university create strategies for multi-faculty student, grad student and research involved long-term development, and among these strategies building the platform for communication amongst the network.
In addition, I would add to Michael Geist’s recommendation to the federal government, that it pursue public-private partnerships with publishers and dedicate foreign aid to allow or even require that Canadian universities to provide access to our library database and subscriptions with all partnerships with developing country universities. This would make available to their students, the world’s highest quality scientific and academic journals for free, without which one might easily pay over a month’s worth of the country’s average daily income for a single article. In two partnerships I’ve been involved in already, this has been a key request of the partner institution. For those universities without adequate access, university partnerships should pursue development projects such as building VSAT dishes for broadband access, and advocate to CIDA for funding such projects in combination with the library database exchange (which is the proposed model for one of the partnerships). Finally, if universities have a platform such as the Hub, such partnerships can include sections of the site dedicated towards development of collaborative knowledge between the institutions by allowing both sides to create and edit documents written together. If students from the new Globalization and International Development program are doing overseas fieldwork, for instance, they should be encouraged to jointly contribute content with local authors.
The university can also develop policy around intellectual property rights in general. As a public institution, research should be based on the philosophy of knowledge as a public good and one of contributing to the global knowledge commons. Meanwhile the university can investigate new forms of licensing such as the Creative Commons, which allows the proprietor of knowledge to retain some aspects of the license for commercial use and others for the public domain.
These are just some of the issues that can be discussed, written about, proposed and developed collaboratively into policies, projects and research through communication across faculties by students and faculty alike. Doing so on the web also contributes to public engagement on international development, transparency and engagement. It’s my hope that all feel welcome to post and share information on the Hub.
Arif Jinha
Administrator and founder
uottawaglobe.ca – the Hub/Le Noya
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