Hi,

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.

• 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.
• 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.
  
• 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.

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.

Links:

[1] http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/index.en.html
[2] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/panama-papers-1
[3] http://mutabit.com/dataweek/
[4] http://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/mapeda/

Cheers,

Offray

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