Local-Global: Reconciling Mismatched Ontologies in Development Information Systems

Abstract

‏This paper extends pre-existing digital divide conceptualizations to further investigate the important issue of mismatches between the ontologies of state-created information systems and local, community preferences. We argue that the reconciliation of these diverse logics and framings is critical for the effective engagement with communities as well as formulation and implementation of development policies around information systems. We suggest several paths toward overcoming mismatched ontologies that would enable communities to be directly involved and productively engaged in developing shared ontologies. These mechanisms would also help policymakers to avoid ‘information loss’ of ontology mismatches while preserving their ability to develop scalable, comparative perspectives to guide policies.

1. Introduction

“Waterlogging” is a perennial complaint in cities in Karnataka, India. A few hours of rain can turn a dry street to a rushing torrent, while a burst pipe or a blocked drain can turn a pedestrian crossing into a treacherous lake. Local newspapers are full of photos, bus stops and public places full of discussion. Yet city data on public grievances contains no record of “waterlogging” – instead there are recorded incidents of storm drains in need of desilting, storm drains in need of repair, leaking pipes, choked underground drains. These are the categories that citizens can choose from to report the puddles – which may very well look the same regardless of origin – via cities’ Public Grievance and Redressal Systems. [65]

Communities may in fact form and self-define around shared ontologies, constructed and re-constructed fluidly [50] through shared social and cultural activities and the ever-changing lived experiences of their members. Our use of ontology does not imply a reified nor exoticized model of ‘pastness’ or ‘locality’ that ignores flows of interaction that shape communities over time [2], but merely implies a distinction between groups’ mental maps of their surroundings.
The information loss between communities’ and states’ ontologies, on the other hand, is likely to be greater. The state ‘meta ontology’ sheds much of the local context in order to ensure tractable management for policy purposes including, especially, taxation, defense, provision of infrastructure and services, and economic management.[68,1,46]

Mismatched ontologies contribute to: (a) ineffective delivery of information services to communities; (b) insufficient participation and interaction with local communities; and importantly, and (c) ‘information loss’ that affects states’ abilities to effectively deliver goods, services, and development-supporting interventions.

2. The power of ontologies, the problem of information loss

The problem is especially pervasive for economic development policy, in which states’ goals are (at least normatively) defined in terms of individuals’ utility, or sense of wellbeing. Some of the most prominent formulations of “development” measure progress in terms of achievements that only make sense with reference to individuals’ or communities’ ontologies.

Censuses often group individuals as employed or unemployed, there is no reason that they could not also include categories for happily employed and unhappily employed as well. Governments often base the relations in their ontologies on those derived by the scientific method; there is no reason that they could not also incorporate folkloric relations that guide community perceptions.

The limitations on how much information can feasibly be aggregated through group decision making to determine social choices have been formally and extensively explored in social choice theory. [3, 5]

Every explicit effort to document a territory, such as a census, is based on particular claims of how a community is to be measured, how the boundaries of a community are to be determined, what counts as an activity, and how these collected data points are to be connected and compared. [61, 55] These claims may be motivated by politics [43, 31] or determined by administrative and technological feasibility of data collection, storage, and retrieval.

Researchers and citizens are less able to challenge the meta ontology when they cannot model and demonstrate the validity of local restrictions, practices, events, and entities according to community ontologies. States’ dominant position in the supply of data will likely change over time as the costs of collection, compilation, storage, and dissemination of community-produced data continue to decline. But even then, states’ authority may privilege conclusions drawn from “official” versus non-state produced data.

This discussion, therefore, leaves us with some important questions concerning the extent to which data models and sociotechnical systems optimize between local sustainability and cross-community scaleability? Or, is there a way in which community activities can be viewed and monitored from the birds-eye by the states while still preserving the local nuances?

3. Bridging local and global

We close this paper by reflecting on several ways in which information loss can be reduced. This section offers three possibilities, each the basis of ongoing research:

1) Developing collaborative and inclusive ontologies. Systems that engage communities to dynamically model their relationship to the information they are provided, around local categories, and fluid relationships between these, have been used sustainably and innovatively in cross-cultural local community contexts [e.g; 34, 45, 37]

2) Harnessing technology to ensure more effective dissemination of existing information in a form that enables communities to engage with and reorganize data in accordance with local ontologies.

3) Rethinking policymaking to decentralize more decision making to subnational and local governments that may operate on ‘less-meta’ ontologies that lose less information relative to community ontologies.

3.1. Collaborative and inclusive ontologies

Fluid ontologies, in their most localized form, involve content creators and multiple stakeholders in the direct crafting of categories and data representations so as to ensure that the information they interact so as to ensure that information is presented, retrieved, preserved, and shared around relevant categorical and relational attributes that are sensible to the community in particular [50].

We believe that these creative and local uses of tagging, rating, and other types of Web 2.0 technologies present powerful opportunities to adapt and edit a meta ontology and reconcile it with local practices.

3.2. Improved and interactive dissemination

Technology is also important for ensuring that information dissemination is as flexible as possible, so that communities can interact with the data stored in meta-ontologies in the manner that they see fit.

3.3. Institutional design

Policy decentralization can mitigate information loss by empowering decisionmakers with ‘less meta’ ontologies to respond to community needs.

….dark side, however, in that it can allow locally powerful groups to unduly influence policies in their favor rather than the community interest. [Grindle])

3. Conclusions

We have argued that information loss due to mismatch between community ontologies and the meta ontologies that states act upon has serious consequences for the efficacy of state policies, especially those aimed at accelerating development.

We are not the first to point out the defects of centralized planning and the hubris of states.

The paper does offer a new perspective on this long-recognized problem, however, by re- conceptualizing information loss as a kind of communication failure that can be increasingly mitigated through technology as well as addressed through institutional redesign.

Normative considerations, aside, progress in reducing information loss ultimately comes down to understanding the positive political economy of states’ efforts to form, maintain, and rely on data organized in meta ontologies as the basis for action. What are states’ incentives to adopt recommendations such as those mentioned above, and can they find a point of reconciliation with community-driven, local ontologies? This remains the key question.

Following Benedict Anderson’s (1983) description of the imagined community underpinned by myths, foundational narratives, and historical performances, archives and the histories that are made from them play an important role in the forming and supporting of collective memory and community identification. Hall (2000) and others (Flinn, 2008; Gilroy, 2004) look forward to post-identity, post-national societies, stressing notions of identification that are multiple, fluid, and ever-changing (always becoming) in relation to both the past and the present and that leave behind more fixed and reified identity formations. However, there is also a recognition of the requirement to confront the present absences in national histories and the importance of the “imaginative rediscovery” of hidden histories and essentialized identity histories which, while necessarily mythic in the sense of “being,” also have great power as a pragmatic tool for challenging these partial narratives, unifying social groups, and mobilizing social movements to bring about desired political and social transformations.

In the context of the role that history can play in supporting these struggles and movements, the writings of another new left historian, Raphael Samuel, are also very instructive. Samuel (1994 p8) sought to promote non-professional, community, and collaborative history-making, making the famous observation that history was a social form of knowledge, the work not of one individual but of a thousand hands. Following both Hall and Samuel, it seems clear that independent community-led archives may have significant roles to play in the production of these democratized and more inclusive histories. The very existence of these independent archives, operating outside the framework of mainstream, publicly funded, professionally staffed institutions is both a reproach and a challenge to that mainstream. As Hall (2001) wrote when marking the establishment of the African and Asian Visual Artists Archive, that in the context of those archives and histories that have been consistently ignored or underrepresented within mainstream collections then the “activity of ‘archiving’ is thus always a critical one, always a historically located one, always a contestatory one”

Ultimately, in this context, although we are not disinterested in whether such histories might be said to be wholly “accurate” or not, we are really more interested in how such histories are put to use (for good or for ill), what impact they have on those who engage with them, and how they intersect and revise individual and collective community memory. (page 4-5)

However, the real distinction lies not with whether the project is locally focused or otherwise, but whether it is primarily motivated by the desire to celebrate and recover every voice or whether the project, in a critical sense, wishes to go further by exploring areas of difficulty and complexity in the group’s or community’s history, histories that might challenge the community as well as reinforce any preconceptions about identity. Celebratory histories of achievement and recovery are important, even valuable when such stories have been previously ignored or misrepresented, but ultimately they are rather limited, taking independent archives and radical history-making only so far. Those archives and history-making activities which go beyond this and build upon the acts of recovery, offer something more compelling, discursive, and ultimately more impactful, perhaps representing the shift identified by Hall from the expressive relations of representation to more formative and subjective politics of representation (Hall, 2003). (page 11)

When informed by a clear political agenda and perspective, the capturing of oral histories and community memories can be used to empower the community in challenging the narratives that are falsely representing them and may be used against them. In the case of both the Isle of Dogs Island History Trust in London and the Cardiff Butetown Community History and Arts project, the histories of two threatened and misrepresented dockland communities were captured and utilized by academic activists (or activists with an academic background) steeped in radical politics and history practice as part of an effort to challenge the threats to those communities. (page 12)

Similarly, at Eastside Community History Geoff Bell, a historian of British and Irish labor history, brought a similar set of skills and priorities to recording the stories of East London’s working classes. In all three cases, these endeavors were working with communities threatened by change and dislocation, and all saw their work not just as preserving the memories of communities that were being broken up by redevelopment but also as part of collective and collaborative strategies that might help a community resist or mitigate some of those changes. In this context, such acts of historical recovery are not just an academic or even a leisure activity; they are also informed by a political understanding of how this material and doing this type of activity might help people and communities in their contemporary lives and struggles. (page 13)

Recognizing independent archives and heritage activities as a resource for education, employing a “usable past” as a tool in contemporary struggles or in challenging some of the harmful effects of the absence of (for instance) black history in the school curriculum and national heritage narratives locates these independent and community-led archives as sites of resistance against injustices in society. (page 13)

Some of these archives producing oppositional histories and acting as sites or spaces of resistance seek to create what might be referred to as “useful” history. That is, not history produced by and for disinterested academic research but rather archives and history that are explicitly intended to be used to support the achievement of political objectives and mobilization, as a means of inspiring action and cementing solidarity. As Howard Zinn wrote in the introduction to Voices of a People’s History of the United States “to omit or to minimize these voices of resistance is to create the idea that power only rests with those who have guns, who possess the wealth, who own the newspapers and the television stations” and conversely radical, popular, politically-engaged histories demonstrate that “people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women—once they organize and protest and create movements—have a voice no government can suppress” (Zinn & Arnove, 2004, p. 28). (page 14)

History-making and archiving are therefore never neutral or disinterested activities, but in the case of long-established projects and archives, such as the Working-Class Movement Library in Salford, the Black Cultural Archives in London, the Butetown History and Arts Centre in Cardiff, or the Lesbian Herstory Archive in New York, it is the continuity, not ruptures or a shift away from political activism, that best explains the energy and physical resources pledged over a sustained period by successive groups of activists. In reflecting on her commitment to archival work in terms of the continuities with her anti-racist and anti-imperialist activism, one of the founding members of Future Histories (interviews, 2009) described the political power embedded in the archival act:
I realized that actually to decide to gather information, organize information, and preserve information to disseminate it, was a political act. And so, Future Histories for me was my political intervention in the social and cultural arena of the arts in the UK. (page 15)

However, possible areas of collaboration and sharing might include, from the professional side, expertise and guidance with regard to preservation (digital and analogue), storage, cataloguing, sharing space, and skills around exhibitions and public engagement activities and, from the independent archivists, subject-based knowledge, access to new collections and materials for exhibitions, and the possibility of new audiences. Crucially, these relationships should be seen not as short-term one-off exercises but as sustained ones in which trust and mutual respect are fostered not just between individuals (who will eventually move on) but also between institutions. (page 17)

Rather than re-asserting narrow professional values, archivists and other heritage workers should seek to open up their services to a more participatory approach where different methods of custody and management, and different views of archival practice, and of collection and value are considered and embraced. In order to retain and enhance their status as trusted sites of information and memory, archives must justify their existence by working with others and offering their expertise in support of independent activity, helping to sustain different archival initiatives in the home or in communities. If archives and other memory sites are to offer important spaces for engaging with potentially positive and empowering conversations about personal and collective identifications and promote notions of belonging, then these conversations need to be inclusive rather than exclusive and sometimes uncomfortable and disrupting rather than safe and superficial. (page 17-18)

Without enough jars to keep all our spices safe and organized, we put a note up near the main door of our building asking neighbors for unwanted jars. Within a couple days of putting the note up we had more jars then we knew what to do with. All different shapes and sizes, the jars are slowly filling in with the color of their spices.

On several occasions we borrowed (and returned) chairs from our neighbors to sit people at a large dinner party, both the jar collection and the chair borrowing has led me to meet quite a few of our neighbors in the Marshall House building. I’ve also joined to TMO Board, Tenant Management Organization, and am about to start new project that is for and about the estate.

copied from the learn more page:

What exactly is Wikipedia doing?

Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours, beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. Readers who come to English Wikipedia during the blackout will not be able to read the encyclopedia: instead, they will see messages intended to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA, and encouraging them to share their views with their elected representatives, and via social media.

What are SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” and PIPA is an acronym for the “Protect IP Act.” (“IP” stands for “intellectual property.”) In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found here and here. You can also follow them through the legislative process here andhere. The EFF has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.

“Let us try to define this question more clearly. We will consider the following simplified scheme: on the one hand, a social practice, and on the other, the materiality in which this social practice is inscribed.
Social practice, a Brownian motion, constantly changing, subject to fluctuations, cycle, fashion, perpetual modifications, from the most common actions of everyday life to the most abstract philosophical reflections: this social practice develops inscribes itself, and exists in a materiality that also varies, although generally less rapidly. Materiality is discontinuous, it is composed of objects, of things; objects as material beings have an existence, a life span. They are born at the moment of their manufacture, they live, are worn down in yielding a service, allow themselves to be used, then expire when they become useless. We may speak of the life of an object and call it obsolescence. The obsolescence of an automobile today is 4 to 5 years, the obsolescence of a paper dress is only a few hours.
The object that interest us here are those that constitute urban space, in particular constructed space in the strict sense of the word.”

page 76-77 Explanation: becoming outdated
Utopie: Texts and Projects, 1967-1978
Edited by Craig Buckley and Jean-Louis Violeau

“The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk—-an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of the urban “text” they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representation, it remains daily and indefinitely other.”

The Practice of Everyday Life, by Michel de Certeau
Part 3 Spatial Practices, Chapter 7 Walking in the City

text – The Practice of Everyday Life

“The archive is protected both physically and ideologically by all sorts of rules, protocols, procedures, and technologies that govern access to the material. The purpose of all this protection is to create a space in which research can occur. It allows one to look closely at documents that probably would have been lost had they not been taken out of circulation and placed in the archive. Thus in a sense, the archive is against time. In fact, the archive is the enemy of time; it is against entropy.” (page 11)

“Archives exist outside of time, available for future generations of scholars to examine. More precisely, archives are available for generations of people who will become scholars by virtue of the new ways they will look at these documents. Archives await new eyes, demand new eyes.” (page 11)

“The dominant thrust of experimental design is to leave the archive behind. The archive is understood as the opposite of experimental design. Whatever has been archived is what the architect will have to move beyond.” (page 11)

“The highest ambition of the classical architect is to reach backward and catch that moment in time in which a built structure acted as a perfect bridge between the physical world and the cosmos, the moment in time in which architecture became a conduit to the timeless.” (page 11)

“Such an intimate bond between an archiving gesture and a transformative gesture leads to the claim that historical research is fundamental not just to design, but to the most radically experimental design. Work can only be experimental by both actively positioning itself relative to existing archives and through new archiving moves. We should also go so far as to suggest that every architect designs an archive in designing a building. If this is the case, then experimental design requires an experimental relationship to the archive. To explore the exact nature of this relationship, we have to understand the ways in which the architect has always been an archivist.” (page 12)

“It is not even possible to imagine the act of design without thinking of the archiving gesture. Buildings themselves can be understood as archives, that is, mechanisms for storing, classifying, and making historical research available. Couldn’t we argue that almost every design is, in a certain way, the design of an archiving machine? And wouldn’t that be very closely related to the standard claim that architecture can act as a witness and storehouse of the memory of a culture? If that’s the case, architects are surely in the business of making archives—archival experts even.

This notion raises the huge problem of how to archive a building since it is by definition too large to fit inside a standard archive. One could argue that the field of historic preservation reconfigures the architectural archive by turning the entire city into a big filing cabinet. Such vast archives without walls take the relationship between archiving and designing to a new level. Inasmuch as design involves gathering together diverse and evolving materials and giving them a singular fixed shape, his- toric preservation’s archiving gesture is always an act of design. To save something is to redesign it.

This leads to the parallel claim from the side of archives, that an unused archive is not an archive.” (page 12-13)

“This leads to the suggestion that there might be such thing as an activist archivist, one who designs an archive whose pur- pose is to polemically rearrange the standard perception of the world outside. To change the shape of an archive—the way it is catalogued, who gets in, what the access is, what is being collected, and so on—is to change the direction of thinking. Given that line of reasoning, perhaps it is the case that all archives are activist in as much as such choices have always been made. There is no such thing as a completely innocent and neutral archive.” (page 13-14)

“We want to test the proposition that the most experimental design work depends on a deep intimacy with the archive—that the archive might be what is front of us, that towards which we move, rather than that we leave behind.” (page 14)

text - unleashing the Archive

Hello there, this is a rebirthing for happyhappysadhappy.org… I’ve been previously posting at upthehillandthroughthewoods.wordpress.com Most of the posts on up the hill are from when I was in graduate school working on my masters in the digital arts and new media program at UCSC.