This is indeed a very good point. Scholars very rarely take into account the power dynamics that are implicit in the cohexistence of people with different class “habitus”, educational background, gender and ethnic characteristics within a movement, network or other form of public space. I published an article on the subject in “Sociology Compass” last Novermber but would like to hear the perspectives of other colleagues on how these dynamics take place and what effects do they have on the functioning of public spaces.

+ The change of the research position in participative research. The researcher become more a facilitator of a collective process than the “director” and owner of the research.

+ Dilemmas of the digital threads strategy:

In the Internet sphere all actions are translated in to digital information, known as digital threads, and these digital threads always are traced on databases. This automatic documentation opens a new frontier up in research: the possibility of storing and elaborating information produced independently from direct research aims. All this growing information generated daily online can be connected and interpreted by programs, in order to extract knowledge. Also, it bypasses many costs and difficulties normally met in ad hoc and empirical data collection.
The treatment, accessibility, privacy, security, and legality of digital threads is at the centre of many debates. Some enterprises can access this information by simply buying it or by clearly ignoring legal restrictions. The digital threads are already exploited for police control and commercial aims. Two examples of the commercial type are the supermarket cards and Google Gmail.1 In these commercial examples the companies buy the possibility to store and elaborate these digital threads by paying “something” to the users (such as a gift after a certain amount of shopping or free services). In this way, they use the “natural” behavior of the users to elaborate marketing profiles. This kind of “indirect” strategy to obtain and elaborate information and knowledge has already been used in the empirical research of some online creation communities, especially applying data visualization techniques, such as in the research of Wikipedia.
The ways in which the digital threads are stored afaa fect their possible usefulness for research aim. In this sense, the interest in the potential of this information will probably produce a close link between the development of the databases and protocols that organize the flow of digital threads and the aim of obtaining more and more information that is potentially transformable into useful knowledge. This tendency suggests that one of the tasks of a researcher could be the conceptual design of protocols for storing relevant data and of the programs to develop them.

Following Mayo’s suggestion, I want to open discussion around the first topic for the English-language “Dictionary of the new politics”. Rather than a single word, this is the contested / overlapping set of meanings around action research, knowledge for action, co-research, engaged research, participatory knowledge and so on: themes which are close to the heart of the Networked Politics project itself.

The purpose of the dictionary, as we are provisionally seeing it, is to be itself a form of knowledge for action: both in terms of individual development (for people who are themselves moving deeper into some aspect of the new politics and are looking for a tool that can help them do this) and in terms of movement development (enabling communication between people from different intellectual and political traditions, operating in different national and movement situations, and using different cultural and linguistic ways of framing their ideas and action).

In practical terms, we are calling for people to contribute the following:

- The words or phrases that you feel, from your own experience, belong in this dictionary entry. We are looking for words or phrases that movement actors, and engaged researchers, actually use as opposed to those that we might argue they should use!

- Details of who uses which words, and in which languages (please give the original as well as an English translation). Don’t be afraid to be specific: if in your experience a particular usage marks somebody out as (e.g.) a Marxist or working in adult education, say so - this is exactly the kind of information that other people need.

- Your understanding both of what the words or phrases you come up with mean, and of the most important differences and distinctions between different words or phrases. If you know something about the history behind a particular concept, please include this (for relevant books, please give the author and exact original title).

I’m going to set an arbitrary deadline of February 6th, two months away, for contributions on this, after which I will compile the results into a single entry and we can consider where we want to go from here, perhaps convening a session on the project at a future Networked Politics event.

We’re discussing this online in the dictionary working group, which you can join at http://lists.euromovements.info/mailman/listinfo/dictionary; you can also contribute via http://www.networked-politics.info/research-projects/dictionary or email me directly at laurence.cox@nuim.ie.

If you know other people who you feel should be involved in this project, please feel free to forward this email to them and invite them to join.

Apologies to all for the delay in getting this off the ground (as anyone familiar with the history of dictionaries knows, we are remaining true to a hallowed tradition in this….)

Laurence

We had some exchanges before the summer, with Marco outlining the development of the Italian dictionary (which has now been published)
and me developing some of the ideas I presented in Berlin. Dave Lowes has now offered some ideas from his own experience of publishing the Anti-Capitalist Dictionary.

My sense is that right now we have a number of interesting possible ideas but no very strong consensus on the purpose such a dictionary should serve (and a rather small list, albeit with a very high-quality membership!) I’m hoping that over the next month or so we might either come to a consensus on what seems to be a worthwhile direction, or let the project go.

For anyone who’s interested in contributing to this discussion, you can join the list ahttp://lists.euromovements.info/mailman/listinfo/dictionary
or drop me an email and I can subscribe you.

Laurence Cox: laurence.cox(at)nuim.ie

I hope that you are all fine. Answering Laurence e-mail call for suggestion here I send you my reflections:

1) I would develop a first experiment focusing into one specific keyword; instead of addressing the Dictionary project as a whole. Focusing into creating the methodology for collectively defining of a specific keyword could then be a way in order to have some experience and evaluate later on how actually could be done a dictionary on new politics.

2) I would propose to address the specific keyword of action research, co-research. Participative research, whatever we consider to be called or using all the words at the same time, but the cross point between political action and research. I think this keyword is transversal to most of the participants at NP project, and so we could more easily generate a collective thinking as it is one of the elements that link most of us in my view. And inviting other people to contribute to its definition it would be a way to agglutinate more people into the NP connexions. (By definition I-m not referring to a close definition, but a mapping of the issues (pros and contras), several traditions, present challenges, etc that is related to it)

3) Concerning the methodology. In general terms, I deeply enjoyed Laurence reflections concerning developing a collective thinking, instead of the model of only one author definition (as it was the case of the Italian dictionary experience). But in my view, in order to do so and considering that our contact is mainly online, I think it is important that someone has the active role of facililator, in the sense of providing a first draft-plan from where to start our contributions, doing the time – keeper, stimulating others interventions and extracting a synthesis of the inputs, and so on. And I think Laurence has great qualities to develop this role. And even more if we decide to collectively define the action research keynote, because he is a node and a specialist on the action research issues (personally I inspired very much by him).

4) I think it would also be good that we support the keyword collective definition by experimenting on the use of the tools of collaborative writing. In concrete, I-m referring that in very few time we will have the new NP tool, so we could use it to support the collective definition and contributions to the keyword. In this sense, I could commit my self on helping on providing the technical help to adapt the tool to our needs.

Kisses! Mayo

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I don’t seem to be able to access the documents relating to the Bologna Seminar via the links included in Marco’s post. So, as I’m not completely conversant with the issues with which a Networked Politics Dictionary might be concerned, my comments focus on suggestions made about the purpose of the project.

I’m particularly interested in the ‘goal of making the proposed dictionary a tool for action’ and ‘a sort of hand guide to the networked action for activists.’ Would this equate to something like The Global Activist’s Manual edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002) wherein issues are defined, discussed and activities are suggested? At the very least, it seems to offer an example of how concepts, organization, rules and terminology can be defined and limits and opportunites explored through the recounting of experience in a dictionary style format.

In my experience, however, the traditional paper dictionary is effectively out of date as soon as it’s written and, particularly so, by the time it’s published. I therefore think that an accompanying ‘evolving’ resource is essential if it is to remain relevant and useful, but don’t know how this would be viewed by potential publishers.

Similarly, some level of interaction seems to be a prerequiste if a handing down of canonized knowledge is to be avoided and on-going debates are to be reflected and encouraged. With this in mind, the idea of a wiki-style format – as I understand it – could be too restrictive; limiting the exchange of ideas through the aim to articulate a definitive explanation. While it might be necessary to limit editorial rights for the amendment of definitions through ‘a closed wiki, accessible to people who have agreed to constitute themselves as part of an editing collective’, perhaps this could be accompanied by additional tool that seeks to adapt the principle of open publishing.

In addition to a ‘definition’ reached through collaboration and available for amendment – albeit via some form of editorial control - could a parallel mechanism be devised to allow the sharing of ideas through an exchange of information and research and therefore encourage debate? To this end, an automated E-mail list might be used to alert interested parties to latest contributions and invite people to respond. Maybe a separate, but linked, section could also be included to allow discussion of tactics, provide updates on activity and initiatives and be used to distribute action alerts, campaign updates, newsletters and press coverage.

On the question of the dictionary and bearing in mind that I’m not familiar with the surrounding initiatives, I’d be interested to know how it is expected to fit with ‘The Guide for Social transformation in Europe’ described by Fuster i Morell Mayo http://www.euromovements.info/e- library/autorsview.php?id_autore=313 . Is this a separate initiative or part of the same project and, likewise, how does ‘The Guide’ relate to the Transform Italia dictionary? Looking in from the outside there seems to be great potential for collaboration and the creation of a huge interlinked/ networked resource, but there is also an equivalent possibility of duplication.