Northern Voice, open knowledge and the most famous “Robert”

So I went to Northern Voice last weekend.

I giggle to think that I’m blogging about a blogging conference one week (exactly) after it happened. I’m so lame.

But no, I”m not (said with all humilty). Like all but the professionally unemployed or the geekily employed, I find there’s not a lot of time left to blog after paid work, school work, house work and kids – not in that order, of course.

But I’m blogging about it now, and all should be forgiven. For me, it’s not part of membership in a club. Indeed, it was in the name of fieldwork that I attended. I have this blog for my research, not for the integrity of blogging (if such a thing may be said). That said, I’m uncomfortable in my role as “researcher” because my “subjects” (again, a problematic term) are human – living, sentient beings, not in fact objects to be studied, extracted from life and later “coded” for my empirical results. I get an icky feeling about it all – in grade school, they would have called me a “user”.

So I don’t approach conferences like this with half the amount of professionalism I “should.” I go, check out the panels that even vaguely corelate to my work, and then go for a beer. What else is there?

And it was over a beer that I met the most famous Robert on Google. I innocently asked the man across form me at the bar (apres conference) – so, what’s your blog? He said, I’m the number one Robert on Google. And he is. Two above Robert DiNero (he’s occupies spots number one AND two) and four above Canadian children’s author, Robert Munsch.

You don’t say!

I learned later that night that his fortune rose as the “Microsoft blogger” and the rest (as “they” say), as far as his place in the blogosphere goes, is history. I have two things to say about the guy: 1. He looks like Philip Seymour Hoffman (perhaps a tad handsomer?) and 2. He was very nice. I’ll leave you to pronounce on his geekiness.

But back to Northern Voice. It was full of the usual suspects – that is, the “who’s who” of the Van tech scene, plus many more my ignorance prevents me from immortalizing. I missed the opening addres by Anil Dash (I could only think of Damon Dash – what does that say about me?) but I made it in time for coffee (which was very important, given my haul on the B-Line and hike halfway across UBC campus – a vast and alien territory for me). There was one panel that was, in fact, a perfect match. It was called “Building Rich Communities with Wikis” and the discussants were Stewart Mader and John Willinsky. Now Mader was interesting – he spoke of his experience publishing a book about wikis on a wiki. You can check it out here.

But it was Willinsky, a UBC english prof, who really caught my attention. He was an engaging and fascinating speaker, but it was the substance of his talk that really fired me up. Willinsky is in deep in the Public Knowledge Project, a federally funded research initiative at UBC and Simon Fraser University that “seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments. PKP has developed free, open source software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals and conferences. Open Journal Systems and Open Conference Systems increase access to knowledge, improve management, and reduce publishing costs.”

Willinsky described how he used wikis in the post-secondary classroom setting. I’m fairly familiar with this through CMNS 253, which I’ve TA’d for two semesters. Nonetheless, I was inspired. I asked about my pet interest – open knowledge. I take this to be similar to the products of wiki collaboration (Wikipedia, for one) but within the academy. Can scholars collaboratively produce “authenticated” knowledge, given the restrictions of copyright, and the requirement to innovate new ideas to ensure career advancement (e.g. single authorship, the “coining” of terms, notions, concepts or methods, “it’s MY idea” etc.) Essentially, the question is: Can we “wikify” academic knowledge?

Willinsky mistook my question, and corrected me: “Open access.” And proceeded to explain his involvement in this movement. Which is entirely worthy, and certainly adjacent to my concerns. But if we want to democratize society further – if we believe in the liberatory and progressive elements of knowlege; if we want to challenge the limits of capitalist democracy (My Friend says I have to stop using the “C” word if I want to make any headway…) we need to take on the Academy (and here I use it with a capital “A” for emphasis) head on. I mean, in a no-holds barred, street brawl kinda way. If the academy is the last bastion of free thought, the preserve of rational (and hence progressive) thinking, then why is access to its knowledge restricted (see the Public Knowledge Project); why must academics “publish or perish” with all the sacrifice to education (and quality of knowledge production) that entails; why the stinginess, the slyness and the lack of openness when it comes to presenting one’s ideas to the public (e.g. publishing)?

These are some (!) of my burning questions. I’m going to ask Willinsky, see what he has to say. I support his project. One of my collegues has been quite involved in the Open Journal Systems that supports the Canadian Journal of Communication’s online presence. There’s no question it’s innovative, important. But I maintain it goes beyond access to knowledge – right to the heart of the matter, to knowledge production itself. Open knowledge. How will it play out?

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