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<div class="moz-text-html" lang="x-western"> <font face="Gill
Sans">Sudo friends.<br>
<br>
I finally got a chance to read through the much anticipated
report from South Africa about the success and failure of the
Telecentres in South Africa. It surveys a longitudinal 10-year
study done trying to measure and evaluate the relative success
of libraries, cybercafes, and telecentres. It's often been my
impression that telecentres have many similar characteristics
to what we call hackerspaces, but am thrilled about the
willingness of Sudo Room to make our community deliberately. A
significant difference I see between the hackerspaces that I
know are that telecentres are generally in communities with an
overall lack of resources, rather than an abundance of
resources but a lack of public space.<br>
<br>
The link to the report is below, the abstract reprinted below,
and an excerpt about the conclusions regarding the fate of the
telecentres below that. Pages 5-10 would be most relevant for
people who want to read past the abstract, but not much
further than that.<br>
<br>
><br>
Public Access Computing in South Africa: Old Lessons and New
Challenges</font>
<div style="line-height: 15px; text-align: left; color: rgb(17,
17, 17); font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal;
font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2;
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widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255,
255, 255); "><font face="Gill Sans"><em>Ricardo Gomez, Shaun
Pather, Bryan Dosono<br>
<br>
</em></font></div>
<font face="Gill Sans"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/view/915">http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/view/915</a></font><br
style="color: rgb(17, 17, 17); font-family: Verdana, Arial,
Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal;
font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing:
normal; line-height: 15px; orphans: 2; text-align: left;
text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255,
255, 255); ">
<font face="Gill Sans">Abstract:</font><font face="Gill Sans"><br
style="color: rgb(17, 17, 17); font-family: Verdana, Arial,
Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal;
font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing:
normal; line-height: 15px; orphans: 2; text-align: left;
text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust:
auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color:
rgb(255, 255, 255); ">
</font>
<div style="line-height: 15px; text-align: left; color: rgb(17,
17, 17); font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal;
font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2;
text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255,
255, 255); "><font face="Gill Sans">The public access
computing (PAC) ecosystem in South Africa includes public
libraries, telecenters, and cybercafés. These PAC venues
offer marginalized and underserved populations opportunities
to use computers and the Internet to meet their information
needs. Based primarily on interviews with telecenters and
cybercafé staff, and on focus group workshops with
telecenter and cybercafé users, we assess the relative
strengths and weaknesses of telecenters and cybercafés and
their contribution to community development.
Government-sponsored telecenters continue to exhibit the
same problems reported a decade ago, and libraries are slow
in offering technological services. However, cybercafés set
up through entrepreneurial initiatives fulfill an
increasingly important niche and introduce a strategic
business model for entrepreneurs in disadvantaged
communities. Learning from the experience of cybercafés can
be an effective way to overcome the shortcomings of
telecenter experiences of the last decade in South Africa.
New business models in the PAC ecosystem, such as the
entrepreneur model, need to be rooted within a developmental
agenda in order to ensure that ICT facilitate meaningful
outcomes amongst needy communities and that a local context
for the social appropriation and effective use of ICTs
prevails.</font></div>
<font face="Gill Sans"><br>
Full text available in .pdf at <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/viewFile/915/418">http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/viewFile/915/418</a></font>
<font face="Gill Sans"><br>
<br>
excerpt, page 8</font> <font face="Gill Sans"><br>
</font>
<blockquote><font face="Gill Sans">The issue of telecenter
sustainability has been discussed at length in the ICTD
literature (for example, Best & Kumar, 2008; Mayanja,
2006; Proenza, 2001). But telecenters in South Africa seem
to be impermeable to the lessons drawn in the field during
the last decade. As long as telecenters do not function
properly, their impact will be small. By providing access to
functional phones, faxes, computers, and Internet, however,
telecenters provide users with the resources and skills
needed to access the knowledge and opportunities to compete
in today’s technology-driven market. The key to empowering
poor and marginalized South Africans is to provide them with
the means to lift themselves out of their poverty. The many
small telecenters are supposed to be providing just these
opportunities. The contributions that community volunteers
bring to the telecenters should not be overlooked. The most
successful of telecenter managers develop a strategic plan
for recruiting, training, retaining, and rewarding
volunteers that will save the telecenter operational costs
in maintaining ICT equipment in the long run (Roman, 2002).
The importance of the technical and administrative skill of
facilitators has also been cited as an important factor in
the success of telecenters. Per Arellano, however, not all
ICT interventions are equally successful. A number of
contingency factors need to be in place for continued
success: communications infrastructure, community buy-in and
support, a sustainable revenue model, and last but not
least, trained and committed staff (Arellano et al., 2009).
The Cape Access project in South Africa is a good example of
a telecenter program with a model founded on community
buy-in and participation. In a critique of this project and
other PAC interventions, Pather & Mitrovic argue that a
systemic and well governed approach to ICT4D projects cannot
be achieved without an effective involvement of local
governments (Pather & Mitrovic, 2008). They suggest
stronger local government involvement is needed based on
their specific role based on need-driven policies and
strategies operationalized through the multi stakeholder
platforms.<br>
</font></blockquote>
</div>
<font face="Gill Sans"><br>
<br>
On 6/29/12 5:37 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote:<br>
</font></div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAOJkv1qx-j0jhsua2Faoyriaikckk7KZFteSdxDienjpWJcfvw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<p><font face="Gill Sans">The characterizations of the
institutional spaces that hacker spaces are contrasted to here
are reminiscent of Ivan Illich's characterizations of same in
his essay Vernacular Values, and besides that, Vernacular
Values is good background for this and by taking a longer view
on what's substantially the same question it provides some of
the history this ends by asking for:<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.oikos.org/ecology/illichvernacular.htm">http://www.oikos.org/ecology/illichvernacular.htm</a></font>
</p>
<div class="gmail_quote"><font face="Gill Sans">On Jun 29, 2012
4:20 PM, "jenny ryan" <<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:tunabananas@gmail.com">tunabananas@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br type="attribution">
</font>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div><font face="Gill Sans">via <span
style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:16px">Johannes
Grenzfurthner/Frank Apunkt Schneider (<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.monochrom.at/english/" style=""
target="_blank">monochrom</a>):</span></font>
<div><font face="Gill Sans"><span><br>
</span></font>
<div><font face="Gill Sans"><span
style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:16px">HACKING
THE SPACES</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Gill Sans"><span
style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:16px">A
critical acclaim of what was, is and could be a
hackerspace (or hacklab, for that matter)</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Gill Sans"><span
style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:16px"><br>
</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Gill Sans"><span>
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cellspacing="2" width="600px">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style=""><span
style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(255,255,255)">//
Hackerspaces 1 <br>
// History</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">The
history of the so-called hackerspaces expands back
to when the counter culture movement was about to
make a serious statement. In the decade after the
hippies attempted to establish new ways of social,
political, economical and ecological
relationships, a lot of experiments were carried
out concerning the construction of new spaces to
live and to work in. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
These were considered as niches to relieve and
rescue people from the monotonous way bourgeois
society directed civic spaces from kindergartens
to cemeteries to be exactly the same and to
reproduce its patriarchal and economical order. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
The politics of establishing open spaces were
meant as explicit statements confronting a
capitalist (and in the East: an authoritarian
communist) society whose very structure, purpose
and operating mode were broadly considered to
"alienate humans", to take control of and to
modify their basic human needs and relationships.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Thus, the failed revolt of the sixties survived
and flourished in the shadows of a ubiquitous
bourgeois lifestyle. And the idea of change was
conjured up from nebulous lysergic dreams and
pathetic speeches to get one's dreams and/or feet
back on solid ground - to be dis-obamaized, if you
like. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
This conversion gained its popularity because
macro-political hippie dreaming ("I had too much
to dream last night" as the title of a classical
psych pop tune by 'The Electric Prunes' put it)
had completely deteriorated. The hippies learnt
that social and political change demanded more
than just joining the mantra of posters, pop songs
and drug fantasies that were promoting it. The
real world was way too tough to be impressed by a
bunch of filthy bourgeois drop-outs mantra-ing
about change. The capitalist imperative of the
real world was way too effective to really be
changed.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
And yet, when it all was over in 1972, some of the
people involved were not ready to give in and give
themselves over to the system and to fade into
integration - hence the launching of
micro-political tactics. Instead of trying to
transfer the old world into a new one people
started to build up tiny new worlds within the old
world. They made up open spaces were people could
come together and try out different forms of
living, working, maybe loving and whatever people
do when they want to do something. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
It is necessary to have a look at the historical
development of political movements and their
relationship to spaces and geography: the
students' revolt of 1969 was driven by the idea of
taking back places and establishing a different
psychogeography within the maze of the city
through détournement. Likewise, the autonomia
movement of the late 1970s that came to life in
Italy and later influenced people in
German-speaking countries and the Netherlands was
about appropriation of spaces, be it for
autonomous youth centres or appropriation of the
airwaves for pirate radio.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Thus, the first hackerspaces fit best into a
countercultural topography consisting of squat
houses, alternative cafes, farming cooperatives,
collectively run businesses, communes,
non-authoritarian childcare centres, and so on. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
All of these established a tight network for an
alternative lifestyle within the heart of
bourgeois darkness.</p>
<table bgcolor="#000000" border="0" cellpadding="2"
cellspacing="2" width="600px">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style=""><span
style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(255,255,255)">//
Hackerspaces 2<br>
// Present</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Hackerspaces
provided room where people could go and work in
laid-back, cool and non-repressive environments
(well, as far as any kind of space or environment
embedded into a capitalist society can be called
laid-back, cool and non-repressive). </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Sociological termed "third spaces" are spaces that
break through the dualistic scheme of bourgeois
spatial structure with places to live and places
to work (plus places for spare time activities).
They represent an integrative way that refuses to
accept a lifestyle which is formed through such a
structure. This means they can come to cooperative
and non-repressive ways of working on e.g.
technical problems that may result in new and
innovative solutions. And that's exactly where
Adorno's "Wrong Life" could slip in too. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
The Capitalist system is a highly adaptable
entity. And so it isn't surprising that
alternative spaces and forms of living provided
interesting ideas that could be milked and
marketed. So certain structural features of these
"indie" movement outputs were suddenly highly
acclaimed, applied and copy-pasted into capitalist
developing laboratories. These qualities fit best
into the tendency in which -- by the end of the
seventies -- bourgeois society started to update
and re-launch using the experiences gained through
countercultural projects. Mainstream harvested the
knowledge that was won in these projects and used
it. Normalizing dissent. Uh yeah.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Thus, the sixties revolt and all the
micro-revolutions that followed turned out to be a
kind of periodical refreshment. As a system,
capitalism is always interested in getting rid of
some of its old-fashioned oppressive traits that
might block its overall evolution and perfection.
As an example: eco-capitalism became trendy, and
it was quite effective generating capitalist "good
wealth" and capitalist "good feelings".</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Hackerspaces today function differently than they
initially did. When the first hackerspaces were
formed there were always clear distinctions (an
"antagonism") between "us" (the people resisting)
and "them" (the people controlling). Certain
people did not want to live and toil within the
classical bourgeois working scheme and refused to
be part of its ideological and political project
for some pretty good reasons.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
The otherness of the spaces back then was
determined by the consistency of a bourgeois
mainstream culture on the basis of a dualistic
cold war world order. Here again they proved to be
third spaces of a different kind: neither state
nor free trade capitalism. And being structural
and ideological different from that had been an
important political statement and stance. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
In a society easily distinguished into mainstream
and underground categories, each activity carried
out within the open space of such an underground
was a step from the wrong direction. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">The
very practice of making personal use of
alternative structures came with assurance of
being on the good side. But post-cold war society
established a different order that deeply affected
the position of the hackerspaces.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
While on the one hand it got harder and more
repressive, the system (a clever one!) learned to
tolerate things that are different (in the
pipeline of integrating or assimilating them) and
to understand that it always has been the edges of
normality where the new substance grows. Milking
covert culture.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Before that, the open intolerance and often brutal
oppression carried out against countercultural
spaces only made them stronger and their necessity
more evident (at least where society didn't
succeed in crushing them). </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Thus, alternative life forms were applied ideally
as a rejuvenation of what was old, boring,
conservative and impotent to progress and adapt in
an ever changing bourgeois present. New ways to
solve technical (and aesthetical) problems were
cooked up in the underground and bourgeois talent
scouts watched closely to occasionally pick this
or that, just as it happened in the field of pop
music with the so-called alternative rock of the
nineties. Alternative mainstream, ahoi!</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
On the other hand, the nineties marked the triumph
of liberal democracy, as Slavoj Žižek writes: "The
fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 marked
the beginning of the 'happy 1990s'. According to
Francis Fukuyama, liberal democracy had, in
principle, won. The era is generally seen as
having come to an end on 9/11. However, it seems
that the utopia had to die twice: the collapse of
the liberal-democratic political utopia on 9/11
did not affect the economic utopia of global
market capitalism, which has now come to an end."
It's thus highly ironic that geeks and nerds,
while watching the death of liberal democracy in
its political form (civil liberties granted to
keep the social peace) as well as its economic
form (crisis) turn to become liberal-democratic
defenders of an ideology that has already failed.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Without the political demarcation lines of a cold
war society, hackerspaces changed sometimes
without even noticing it. The political agenda was
mushroomed by individual problems that techno
nerds tried to solve in nice fearless atmospheres,
non-aggressive states where the aggressiveness of
the market was suspended; where one could discuss
technical and creative problems and challenges
politely with likeminded people. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
As such, the political approach faded away on <em>en
route</em> into tiny geeky workshop paradises.
The micro-politics failed on the same scale and to
the same extent as older macro-political projects
got pulverized through the irreversibility of
capitalism. The idea of having a revolution (of
whatever kind) was domesticated into good clean
reformism, and the only revolutions that lay ahead
were the technological semi-revolutions of the
internet and its social web sprouts. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Without former political agendas hackerspaces
turned into small places that did not really make
fundamental differences. Comparable to the fall of
squat houses becoming legal in status and turning
into new bourgeois housing projects where the cool
urban bohemians live their lives commuting
steadily between art world, underground,
IT-business and advertisement agencies. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
This may not be the case for all the hackerspaces
out there today, but it should be noted that most
have travelled along the same paths.<br>
And while for a long time the macro-political
scheme had worked quite well to provide the
inherent difference that had been attached to all
of the activities carried out in hackerspaces
(even to things as trivial as soldering, pottery
lessons or juggling trainings), it is missing now.
And due to this deficiency hackerspaces can no
longer be shaped and politicized on a broader
scale. And that clearly means that whatever we
might do: our hackerspace communities remain
constricted; nothing more than nutrient fluid for
breeding human resources. (Soylent Google is made
of people!)</p>
<table bgcolor="#000000" border="0" cellpadding="2"
cellspacing="2" width="600px">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style=""><span
style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(255,255,255)">//
Hackerspaces 3 <br>
// Future</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">So
what can be done about this? Actually, it is not
very hard to find something to protest against.
Surveillance, whatever. It's no problem to use the
prefix "anti". Use rule 76 - as long as you can
think about it, you can be against it. But that's
just too simple. Never before in the history of
bourgeois society has everything been as fucked up
as it is right now. But what is lacking amongst
all the practising going on in hackerspaces is a
concise theory of what bourgeois society is like
and what should be attacked by us building and
running open spaces within that society. </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
The lovely alternative approach we share should be
grounded in such a theory, which is to be read: a
political agenda that lends some revolutionary
glam to what we are doing on a daily basis making
technical gadgets, networking through the world,
or utilizing our technological and programming
skills. <br>
To get there we really need a more explicit sense
and understanding of the history of what we are
doing, of the political approaches and demands
that went into it long ago and that still are
there, hidden in what we do right now.<br>
So to start off we would like to organize some
workshops in the hackerspaces where we can learn
about the philosophical, historical and other
items that we need to get back in our lives.
Theory is a toolkit to analyze and deconstruct the
world.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Plus, we need to reflect and understand that the
hackerspaces of today are under the "benevolent"
control of a certain group of mostly white and
male techno handicraft working nerds. And that
they shape a practise of their own which destines
most of the hackerspaces of today. (It is hard to
understand that there are hackerspaces in certain
parts of the US that don't have a single
African-American or Latino member. <br>
But we'd like to keep our European smugness to
ourselves. We have to look at our
oh-so-multicultural hacker scene in Europe and ask
ourselves if hackers with a migrant background
from Turkey or North-African states are
represented in numbers one would expect from their
percentage of the population. Or simply count your
women representation and see if they make 50% of
your members.)</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
As such, we find today's hackerspaces excluding a
lot of ethnical and social groups that don't seem
to fit in or maybe feel so and are scared by the
white male nerd dominance, their (maybe) sexist or
exclusionist jokes or whatever might be
contributed to them. Or perhaps they don't have
the proper skills to communicate and/or cooperate
with the packs of geeky guys (or at least they
might think so). </p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
What is needed is the non-repressive inclusion of
all the groups marginalized by a bourgeois society
just as it had been the intention of the first
hackerspaces in countercultural history. If we
accept the Marxian idea that the very nature of
politics is always in the interest of those
acting, hackerspace politics are for now in the
interest of white middle-class males. This needs
to change.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Well, that's all for the moment. Let's start to
work on this and see what would happen if we
change the somehow boring hackerspaces of the
present into some glamorous factories of an
unpredictable freedom for all of us even those who
do not fit in the classical nerd scheme.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
Change the nerds. Make them a better space. For
you and for me and the entire human race.</p>
<div>------</div>
<div>/jnny</div>
</span></font></div>
</div>
</div>
<font face="Gill Sans"><br>
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<pre wrap=""><font face="Gill Sans">_______________________________________________
sudoroom mailing list
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:sudoroom@lists.hackerspaces.org">sudoroom@lists.hackerspaces.org</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/sudoroom">http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/sudoroom</a>
</font></pre>
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