Collaboration as Urban Culture
I’ve just joined a Banff New Media Institute workgroup on Collaboration as Cultural Expression.
As Karen Parker put it, the group aims to:
Set the parameters and case study analysis of the design and use of collaborative tools within specific cultural contexts such as game design, open source or hacker communities, mobile/nomadic communities.
The determining questions for this workgroup include how can creativity and cultural expression become part of tool development and collaborative processes, as well as whether practices and tools of these “urban” communities can be useful within an academic research context, especially a scientific one. Some of the methodologies explored by this group will include participatory design, action research and grounded theory. Issues that will also inform this group will include critical globalism and nonwestern approaches to collaboration as well as gendered voices.
Of course the system wouldn’t cooperate, so I’m putting my comment up here:
Interesting that you describe these as urban communities, Karen. My particular interest today (have to finish the paper!) is the distinction between the urban and the city. While a given city is a physical object, a cooperative agglomeration, the urban is its virtual image. This virtuality is intangible and could be understood as a “diagram” actualized differently in each given city.
Academic and artistic research collaborations have often ended up being known by the name of the cities they’re located in CoBrA (Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam), the “Prague School” and so on. Do such collaborations have more in common - some sort of urbanity you hint at?
Does this past pattern give us any hints re. the relation between collaborative tools and technologies and the peculiarly “urban” communities?