Hi,
This is a call for contributions and presentations - and of course
participation!
Incommunicado (http://www.incommunicado.info) is a network that focuses
on the spread, reappropriation, and reinvention of ICT across the
so-called 'Global South', exploring the shift toward south-south
alliances and a new global info-politics.
The first Incommunicado event will take place in Amsterdam on June (15)
16-17. There are several ways you can participate:
- you can attend the meeting
- present your work or case study (in a workshop or in the Open Session)
and/or
- contribute to one of the publications (see call below).
Please find information on the programme, participants, venue, etc. at
the conference website: http://www.incommunicado.info/conference
Greetings, Maja
P.S. Even if you can't attend, you can still contribute to the
publications!
Incommunicado 05:
Call for Contributions to Publications and Open Sessions
Date: June 15 (Public Event), June 16-17 (Working Conference)
Location: De Balie, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Organization: Institute of Network Cultures (INC), Waag Society, Sarai.
Concept: Geert Lovink & Soenke Zehle
For your submissions, or more information on program, participants, and
registration, contact the INC.
This is a call for contributions for TWO publications, a pre-conference
reader with short texts (ca. 2,000 words) to be published in June 2005
and a post-conference publication with longer texts (up to ca. 5,000
words) to be presented in cooperation with HIVOS at the WSIS PrepCom3
in September 2005.
Deliberately broad, the call intends to encourage contributions that
critically engage the overarching conference theme of accountability
and representation in an emerging global info-politics. For detailed
descriptions of specific issue areas, see below. On all topics listed,
we welcome case studies and original research as well as analysis and
commentary.
Please email complete submissions to (pre-conference essays by May 30
2005, post-conference essays by July 15). We also encourage
participants interested in presenting case studies etc. in one of the
open sessions to contact the INC to register specifically for such a
session (see online conference program for details).
Incommunicado 05: From Info-Development to Info-Politics
Incommunicado 05 is a two-day working conference that will attempt to
offer a critical survey of the current state of 'info-development',
most recently known by its catchy acronym 'ICT4D'. Not too long ago,
most computer networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and
info-development seemed to be a rather technical matter of knowledge
and technology transfer from North to South. While still popular, the
assumption of a 'digital divide' that follows this familiar cartography
of development has turned out to be too simple. Instead, a more complex
map of actors, networked in a global info-politics, is emerging.
Different actors continue to promote different - and competing -
visions of 'info-development'. States with emerging info-economies like
Brazil, China, and India form south-south alliances that challenge our
sense of what 'development' is all about. New grassroot efforts are
calling into question the entire regime of intellectual property rights
(IPR) and access restrictions on which commercial info-development is
based. Commons- or open-source-oriented organizations across the world
are more likely to receive support from southern than from northern
states, and these coalitions are already challenging northern states on
their self-serving commitment to IPR and their dominance of key
info-political organizations.
Actors no longer follow the simple schema of state, market, or civil
society, but engage in cross-sectoral alliances. Following the crisis
of older top-down approaches to development, corporations and aid
donors are increasingly bypassing states and international agencies to
work directly with smaller non-governmental actors. While national and
international development agencies now have to defend their activity
against their neoliberal critics, info-NGOs participating in
public-private partnerships and info-capitalist ventures suddenly find
themselves in the midst of a heated controversy over their new role as
junior partner of states and corporations.
Long considered a marginal policy field dominated by technology
experts, info-development is embroiled in a full-fledged info-politics,
negotiated in terms of corporate accountability, state transformation,
and the role of an international civil society in the creation of a new
world information order.
NGOs in Info-Development
We have become used to thinking of NGOs as 'natural' development
actors. But their presence is itself indicative of a fundamental
transformation of an originally state-centered development regime, and
their growing influence raises difficult issues regarding their
relationship to state and corporate actors, but also regarding their
self-perception as representatives of civic and grassroots interests.
Why should they sit at a table with governments and international
agencies, and who is marginalized by such a (multistakeholder) dynamic
of 'inclusion' dominated by NGOs?
After WSIS: Exploring Multistakeholderism
For some, the 2003-5 UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)
is just another moment in an ongoing series of inter-governmental
jamborees, glamorizing disciplinary visions of global ICT governance to
distract from other info-political struggles. For others, WSIS revives
'tricontinentalist' hopes for a New International Information and
Communication Order whose emphasis on 'civil society actors' may even
signal the transformation of a system of inter-governmental
organizations. Either way, WSIS continues to encourage the articulation
of agendas, positions, and stakes in a new politics of communication
and information. Following the effort to actively involve civil society
actors in WSIS activities, the idea of an emergent
'multistakeholderism' is already considered one of the key WSIS
outcomes, yet many are sobered by what appears to be the consensualist
minimalism of incorporating critical positions in ever more
encompassing final statements and action plans.
Info-Corporations at the United Nations
The controversial agreement between Microsoft and the UNDP, issued at a
time when open source software is emerging as serious non-proprietary
alternative within ICT4D, is just one in a series of public-private
partnerships (PPP) between corporations and the UN. As the UN reaches
out to Cisco, HP, or Microsoft, many argue that these cooperations are
simply an expansion of the PPP approach to international organizations,
and should be assessed on their respective terms. Others suggest,
however, that these developments are indicative of a much more
fundamental transformation of the UN and its member organizations, and
point to the sobering outcome of the almost-no-strings-attached Global
Compact, widely criticized as multilateral collusion in corporate
'bluewashing', the Cardoso Panel on UN-Civil Society Relations and its
controversial definition of civil society, or the ongoing controversy
over a new set of international standards for corporate accountability.
WIPO and the Friends of Development
As the international info-economy has come to revolve around
intellectual property rights, the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO) has asserted its status as a key player in matters
of info-development. Overseeing the implementation of international IPR
regulations, the little-known agency has been calling for an expansion
of the dominant IPR regime and generally supports euro-american
strategies of bypassing multilateral negotiations through an aggressive
'TRIPS-Plus' bilateralism. But recently, the agency has been targeted
by a global campaign, lead by a group of southern states, to change its
limited agenda.
Aid & Info-Development after 9-11
What is the status of aid in the promotion of ICT4D, and how have ICT4D
actors responded to the politicization and securitization of aid,
including the sale of security and surveillance technologies in the
name of info-development? To what extent does info-development overlap
with new info-infrastructures in the field of humanitarian aid
(ICT4Peace)? Are global trade justice campaigns a response to classic
development schemes?
ICT4D and the Critique of Development
The critique of development and its institutional arrangements - of its
conceptual apparatus as well as the economic and social policies
implemented in its name - has always been both a theoretical project
and the agenda of a multitude of 'subaltern' social movements. Yet much
work in ICT4D shows little awareness of or interest in the history of
such development critique.
Instead, techno-determinist perspectives have become hegemonic, and
even many activists believe that ICT will lead to progress and
eventually contribute to poverty reduction. Have development scepticism
and the multiplicity of alternative visions it created simply been
forgotten? Or have they been actively muted to disconnect current
struggles in the area of communication and information from this
history, adding legitimacy to new strategies of 'pre-emptive'
development that are based on an ever-closer alliance between the
politics of aid, development, and security?
Are analyses based on the assumption that the internet and its promise
of connectivity are 'inherently good' already transcending existing
power analyses of global media and communication structures? How can we
reflect on the booming ICT-for-Development industry beyond best
practice suggestions?
New Axes of Info-Capitalism
We are witnessing a shift from in the techno-cultural development of
the web, from an essentially post-industrialist euro-american affair to
a more complexly mapped post-third-worldist network, where new
south-south alliances are already upsetting our commonsensical
definitions of info-development. Examples include the surprising extent
to which a 'multilateral' version of internet governance has been able
to muster support, the 'tropicalization' (Gilberto Gil) of open source
approaches, and new alliances on the politics of ipr (WIPO Development
Agenda). Info-development, that is, has ceased to be a matter of
technology transfer and has become a major terrain for the
renegotiation of some of the faultlines of geopolitical conflict - with
a new set of actors. While the question remains whether such a
'tricontinentalist' shift really affects established dependencies on
'northern' donors, it's certainly time for a first assessment of the
agenda and impact of some of the new players and their alliances.
FLOSS in ICT4D
Pushed by a growing transnational coalition of NGOs and a few allies
inside the multilateral system, open source software has moved from
margin to center in ICT4D visions of peer-to-peer networks and open
knowledge initiatives. But while OSS and its apparent promise of an
alternative non-proprietary concept of collaborative creation continues
to have much counter-cultural cachet, its idiom can easily be used to
support the 'liberalization' of telco markets and cuts in educational
subsidies. What is the current status of OSS as idiom and
infrastructural alternative within ICT4D?
Accountability and the Critique of Representation
The decade-long controversy inside the 'NGO community' on issues of
accountabilty is also affecting actors in ICT4D. The singularity of
network environments and the particular brand of info-politics it has
facilitated suggest, however, that common approaches to
'accountability' cannot simply be transferred into the context of the
post-representative politics of network(ed) cultures. So beyond
embracing stakeholder consultation and participation, what is ICT4D's
original contribution to one of the core concepts in the renewal of
development as a project?
The New Info-Politics of Rights
After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bilateral order,
the discourse of human rights has become an important 'placeholder' for
agendas of social change and transformation that are no longer
articulated in 'third worldist' or 'tricontinentalist' terms. In the
field of communication and information, major NGOs and their network
'campaigns' have also decided to approach WSIS-related issues by
calling for 'new rights', paralleling other trends toward a
juridification of info-politics more generally.
Nuts and Bolts of Internet Governance
One of the few areas where WSIS is likely to produce concrete results
is internet governance (IG). The IG controversy revolves around the
limits of the current regime of root server control (ICANN/US) and
possible alternatives, but it is also significant because it signals
the repoliticization of a key domain of a technocratic internet culture
that long considered itself to be above the fray of ordinary
info-politics.
Media & Migration
Some of the organizations active in the WSIS process lost their
accreditation because participants used their visa to say goodby to
Africa. Widely reported, the anecdote suggests that media and migration
form a nexus that is nevertheless rarely explored in the context of
ICT4D.
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