Jan 23, 2009
UC Irvine


The Workshop on Networking Knowledge is a conjoint initiative by UCHRI, the MacArthur Research Hub on Digital Media and Learning, and the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. The Workshop hosts ongoing meetings to address common themes in the impact of digital technology, new media, and networking practices on knowledge formation, circulation, transformation, and their implications across various domains. Workshops serve as a site for discussions of significant current and emerging work across these areas of interest. David Theo Goldberg, Mimi Ito, and Bill Maurer invite to the series of workshops.

January 23, 2009

UCHRI, Aldrich Hall Room 338

François Bar is Associate Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He is a steering committee member of the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication. His research and teaching focus on the social and economic impacts of information technologies, with a specific concentration on telecommunication policy, user-driven innovation and technology appropriation. His most recent work examines the impact of information technology for development, in places ranging from East Africa to Latin America.

Investigating the Social and Economic Impact of Public Access to Information and Communication Technology (IPAI) is a five-year, CAD $7.2-million research project sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and managed by telecentre.org in partnership with the Center for Information & Society (CIS) at the University of Washington Information School. Through telecentres, libraries, and other emerging models of public access to information and communication technology (ICT), this project will examine the impact of ICT access in a number of areas including employment and income, education, civic engagement, democracy and governmental transparency, cultural and language preservation, and health, among others. Using longitudinal and comparative research approaches, the project will seek answers regarding the magnitude of these impacts and how to measure them, as well as the relationship between the costs of providing public access to ICT and its benefits. http://globalimpactstudy.org

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

UCHRI, Aldrich Hall, Room 338

GEERT LOVINK, Institute of Network Cultures

Wednesday, April 8, 2009
UCHRI, Aldrich Hall Room 338

DONALD PATTERSON, Informatics, UCI
“Status Quo: Micro-presence in an always online world”

Wednesday, May 6, 2009
UCHRI, Aldrich Hall Room 338

KAVITA PHILIP, Women’s Studies, UCI and Colleagues
“DesigNation: Conversations on the design of Design Research”

Design has long been designated as the task of architects, planners,
and other artist/technicians/practitoners. Increasingly, however,
humanities research has designs on design research. What knowledge
formations are understood, predicted, produced, or re-mixed by these
existing and new designations? What is the status of nation, identity,
and transnationality in the design stories commonly told in each of
these formations?

Presenters:
Kavita Philip, Women’s Studies & Critical Theory Institute, UCI
Marisa Cohn, Information and Computer Science, UCI
Susan Sim, Information and Computer Science, UCI
Lilly Irani, Information and Computer Science, UCI (represented by Silvia Lindtner, ICS)
Paul Dourish, Information and Computer Science, UCI
Ackbar Abbas, Comparative Literature & Critical Theory Institute, UCI; discussant

Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Social Science Plaza A, Room 2112

SHARON TRAWEEK, History, UCLA
Discussing current work on data bases

The series of workshops will continue during the 2009-10 academic year on the theme of “Information and Infrastructures.”

Friday, December 11, 2009
Humanities Instructional Building (HIB) 135

Paul Kockelman (Columbia University), Julia Elyachar (UCI), and Paul Dourish (UCI)
INFORMATION AND INFRASTRUCTURES

We inhabit, so the cliché goes, the Age of Information. Information and its arrangements fuel and inform economic, political, and social arrangements. Information forms us. Information animates the institutions and infrastructures that in turn shape the order of thinking for which information stands.

Digital environments and ecologies are altering our engagement with information of all kinds. They multiply the range and reach, the volume and shape of information. The seeming ubiquity of information has tended to render largely invisible the infrastructure on which delivery, circulation, stability, and reproducibility of information. And yet, the information revolution depends on various infrastructures, even as it transforms, challenges or undermines others.

At the same time, profound shifts in funding, capacity, and regulation have served to foreground the previously less visible, taken-for-granted but dependable infrastructures undergirding everything from waste disposal to libraries: Information and its infrastructures become newly visible when, due to funding cuts, the trash doesn’t get collected and the library is closed. There is an urgency to attending to infrastructures when they start to fall apart, get defunded, reappropriated or repurposed, stolen or hacked. Individuals, organized electricity, cable or wireless poachers and corporate interests all seek value in these ways from privatizing infrastructures. There is urgency, too, to understanding how infrastructures are being left to decay, completely abandoned, rebuilt, or repurposed. For these developments in turn are both driven by and drive information architectures.

So information depends on a series of infrastructures. And alternative infrastructures are emerging in the interstices of formal ventures as the relationship between government and private interest in infrastructure changes. Attending to new conjunctures of information and infrastructures accordingly becomes an important analytical task.

This workshop series begins a conversation about information and infrastructures at the intersection of the digital, legal, financial, spatial, experiential, technical, and indeed architectural. We want to get at how things are plumbed and wired, how people do things when the systems underneath things can no longer be taken for granted.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

A conversation between
Scott Mainwaring, Intel Labs and
Michael Likosky, Senior Fellow, New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge

Sponsored by the Networking Knowledge Workshop, UCHRI and the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion

Background readings available at: https://eee.uci.edu/10s/72480

We inhabit, so the cliché goes, the Age of Information. Information and its arrangements fuel and inform economic, political, and social arrangements. Information forms us. Information animates the institutions and infrastructures that in turn shape the order of thinking for which information stands.

Digital environments and ecologies are altering our engagement with information of all kinds. They multiply the range and reach, the volume and shape of information. The seeming ubiquity of information has tended to render largely invisible the infrastructure on which delivery, circulation, stability, and reproducibility of information. And yet, the information revolution depends on various infrastructures, even as it transforms, challenges or undermines others.

At the same time, profound shifts in funding, capacity, and regulation have served to foreground the previously less visible, taken-for-granted but dependable infrastructures undergirding everything from waste disposal to libraries: Information and its infrastructures become newly visible when, due to funding cuts, the trash doesn’t get collected and the library is closed. There is an urgency to attending to infrastructures when they start to fall apart, get defunded, reappropriated or repurposed, stolen or hacked. Individuals, organized electricity, cable or wireless poachers and corporate interests all seek value in these ways from privatizing infrastructures. There is urgency, too, to understanding how infrastructures are being left to decay, completely abandoned, rebuilt, or repurposed. For these developments in turn are both driven by and drive information architectures.

So information depends on a series of infrastructures. And alternative infrastructures are emerging in the interstices of formal ventures as the relationship between government and private interest in infrastructure changes. Attending to new conjunctures of information and infrastructures accordingly becomes an important analytical task.

This workshop continues our conversation about information and infrastructures at the intersection of the digital, legal, financial, spatial, experiential, technical, and indeed architectural. We want to get at how things are plumbed and wired, how people do things when the systems underneath things can no longer be taken for granted.

Michael Likosky holds a JD and a PhD in Law (Oxford), and is the recipient of the Jonathan Weiss Award for Public Interest Advocacy. He has taught in leading law and business schools within the United States and the United Kingdom. Likosky is formerly a tenured law professor at the University of London, and is now Senior Fellow at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. He has been Markle Foundation Fellow at Oxford University, Global Crystal Eastman Research Fellow at New York University School of Law, and Squadron Fellow at the Center for Media Education in Washington, DC.

Likosky is Expert to the United Nations on public-private partnerships, a Member of the OECD Working Group on Infrastructure and Extractives in Africa, a Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers Task Force on Sustainable Infrastructures, Fellow at the Center for State Innovation, and Expert to Tree of Life Civil Engineers for Iraq. Likosky has held visiting professorships at Fordham University School of Law and University of Wisconsin Law School and has also been a Fellow at the University of Bonn’s Center for Development Studies. Likosky has advised governments, intergovernmental organizations, financial institutions, multinational corporations, public interest organizations, and labor unions.

He has written extensively on public-private partnerships in the areas of finance and law. His work has focused on financial crisis and recovery, high tech industrial growth strategies, social and labor rights, and political risk. He has written five books in this area: Obama’s Bank: Financing a Durable New Deal (Cambridge University Press 2010); Law, Infrastructure and Human Rights (Cambridge University Press 2006); The Silicon Empire: Law, Culture and Commerce (Ashgate 2005); Privatizing Development: Transnational Law, Infrastructure and Human Rights(Martinus Nijhoff 2005); and Transnational Legal Processes: Globalization and Power Disparities (Cambridge University Press 2002). He has written opinion pieces for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Center for American Progress’s Middle East Progress, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Engineering News-Record, and the Huffington Post. Likosky is a regular contributor to the United Nations World Investment Report. His research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Ford Foundation, Institute for a New Reflection on Governance, the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation, and the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy.

Scott Mainwaring works in the People and Practice Research (PaPR) group within Intel Labs, based in Beaverton, Oregon. He research bridges approaches from psychology (self-awareness, embodiment, mental models of abstract domains), anthropology (cultural/political construction of infrastructure, norms, and meaning), and HCI (ubiquitous computing, usable privacy and security, critical design). For example, he has conducted collaborative research on experiences of everyday mobility and transactions; people and communities living “off the grid” by exclusion or by choice; and, most recently, technology-based alternative currencies like Q Coins in China and EDY cards in Japan.

He is currently working as part of a large collaborative project within PaPR, titled “Consumerization,” which seeks to understand the processes by which abstract conceptions of “the global consumer of technological goods and services” (often represented as middle-class, enlightened, and deserving of empowerment or protection) come in practice to structure and motivate the aspirations, perceptions, and behaviors of people, governments, development NGOs, and businesses around the world. I am particularly interested in how notions of green or sustainable consumption are reacting to and also influencing these larger processes.

Mainwaring was trained in cognitive psychology (Ph.D., Stanford, 1994) and computer science (A.B., Harvard, 1985). He began his career as a Unix software engineer (1981-1987), switched into basic research in cognitive science (1987-1994), which evolved into the more applied, design-oriented, cultural/ethnographic research he learned as a postdoc and staff researcher at Interval Research Corporation (1994-2000) and continues to develop as a senior researcher within PaPR (2000-present).

Selected Publications

Wang, Y. & Mainwaring, S.D. (2008). “Human-Currency Interaction”: Learning from Virtual Currency Use in China . In Proceedings of CHI 2008 (Florence, Italy, 5-10 April, 2008), pp. 25-28. ACM Press.

Mainwaring, S.D., March, W., & Maurer, B. (2008). From meiwaku to tokushita! Lessons for digital money design from Japan. In Proceedings of CHI 2008 (Florence, Italy, 5-10 April, 2008), pp. 21-24. ACM Press.

Mainwaring, S.D. & George, C. (2008). Navigating Future Moneyscapes (video). Presented at the Intel Technology and Research Pavilion, Technology Showcase, Intel Developers Forum (San Francisco, 19-21 August, 2008).