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<p>Hi,</p>
<p>Following the idea of talking about educational practices powered
by (a flavor of) Smalltalk. I would like to share two of them,
mainly by sharing some links and small phrases/paragraphs about
the.</p>
<ul>
<li>Grafoscopio [1] is what I call a "pocket infrastructure" for
data activism, digital citizenship and reproducible research and
publication. It tries to approach critically to the exclusionary
"fashionist" concept of "Big Data", by arguing that other
infrastructures and practices can bootstrap citizenship around
data without being constrain by the size of data or the
computational resources to process it. An example is the Panama
Papers as reproducible research[2] project, that shows how this
pocket infrastructures can be used, even in the case of the
biggest data leak in the history of journalism.</li>
<li>The Data Week [3](Spanish) is a recurrent Hackathon+Workshop
where people learn how to use, extend and modify Grafoscopio, so
they can tell Data Stories to amplify their voices and community
concerns. We choose problems where data and its visualizations
give visibility to grassroots communities and help to bridge the
gap between "user" and "maker", "coder" and "citizen", among
others. We try make and enactive critic of the (also)
"fashionist" hackathon, going beyond the "pitch", or the meeting
of "sleep deprived strangers" to create a "tech innovative
solution" in a weekend to complex social problems. Next Data
Week will overlap with the Open Data Day, and we are going to
address the political discourse on Twitter, as a way to improve
awareness on upcoming presidential elections in Colombia, but we
think that this (pocket infrastructures) approach could be used
as a way to use critical code+data digital literacy practices to
enable informed citizenship discourse and voting in the times of
social networks noise and post-truth.<br>
</li>
<li>Recently we have expanded our actions and infrastructures to
the publishing field by going beyond "open access" (as promoted
in practice by the Creative Commons movement) to "reproducible
publishing". One example of that is the "Data Driven Journalism
Handbook"[4] (Spanish). More are planed, using
"remix-traslation" to bootstrap a more fluent South -> North
dialog, because most of the ideas of Non-English and Non-Writing
cultures are kept outside of the public discourse. By
non-writing I mean cultures with strong and rich oral
traditions, but low writing/publishing practices, let alone
non-coding citizens in the Global South.</li>
</ul>
<p>Grafoscopio and the Data Week are developed as part of my PhD
research, where I ask about "how we can change the digital tools
that change us?" (or the reciprocal modification between digital
artifacts and communities of practice), in the context of a
Hackerspace in the Global South (Bogotá, Colombia). Such research
is informed by participatory action research, ethnography and
design research traditions, and is trying to approach "wicked
problems" to build a path in the present with possible and
desirable futures. I'm now finishing to write the dissertation, so
I'm tight on time, but I would be glad to keep this conversations
(or others) going.<br>
</p>
<p>Links:<br>
</p>
[1] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/index.en.html">http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/index.en.html</a><br>
[2] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/panama-papers-1">http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/panama-papers-1</a><br>
[3] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mutabit.com/dataweek/">http://mutabit.com/dataweek/</a><br>
[4] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/mapeda/">http://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/mapeda/</a><br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
<br>
Offray<br>
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