Exploring Community Networks’ Contribution to the Intersectionality of the Internet: Connectivity from a Decolonial Perspective

openMore than 37% of the world's population remains unconnected to the internet, and how the remaining population gets connected lies at the heart of many global dilemmas (International Telecommunication Union, 2021). Through increased EU and US regulations, big tech companies are looking to compensate for their impending loss of profit through restrictive measures on data mining of users' personal information. This leaves countries within the global south with no such regulations particularly vulnerable to connectivity schemes such as Facebook's Free Basics, which has been accused of violating net neutrality in several countries and removed from India (Goel & Issac, 2016). Africa has been a target for these big tech companies in utilizing their connectivity programs, with Free Basics operating in 65 countries among over 100 million people in 2020 (Nothias, 2020). This has taken attention away from more complex connectivity methods, such as community networks, which the UNHCR has suggested have potential benefits in satisfying key aims in their goals for development within displaced populations. Connecting users from rural communities in the global south becomes even more challenging when factoring in research which has found that Western epistemology present on the internet through popular websites such as Wikipedia, suppresses non-Western epistemology (Kumar, 2021; Sibani, 2018; Sousa Santos, 2007). This thesis attempts to find a pathway for new users connecting to the internet to enjoy increased development capabilities and encourage the preservation of their non-Western culture and knowledge. By comparing a blog post on a community network regarding the history of the ethnic population of the region to a Wikipedia article concerning the same subject, this thesis attempts to find if the notion of participation or ownership in a network changes how users critically interact with information on the internet.More than 37% of the world's population remains unconnected to the internet, and how the remaining population gets connected lies at the heart of many global dilemmas (International Telecommunication Union, 2021). Through increased EU and US regulations, big tech companies are looking to compensate for their impending loss of profit through restrictive measures on data mining of users' personal information. This leaves countries within the global south with no such regulations particularly vulnerable to connectivity schemes such as Facebook's Free Basics, which has been accused of violating net neutrality in several countries and removed from India (Goel & Issac, 2016). Africa has been a target for these big tech companies in utilizing their connectivity programs, with Free Basics operating in 65 countries among over 100 million people in 2020 (Nothias, 2020). This has taken attention away from more complex connectivity methods, such as community networks, which the UNHCR has suggested have potential benefits in satisfying key aims in their goals for development within displaced populations. Connecting users from rural communities in the global south becomes even more challenging when factoring in research which has found that Western epistemology present on the internet through popular websites such as Wikipedia, suppresses non-Western epistemology (Kumar, 2021; Sibani, 2018; Sousa Santos, 2007). This thesis attempts to find a pathway for new users connecting to the internet to enjoy increased development capabilities and encourage the preservation of their non-Western culture and knowledge. By comparing a blog post on a community network regarding the history of the ethnic population of the region to a Wikipedia article concerning the same subject, this thesis attempts to find if the notion of participation or ownership in a network changes how users critically interact with information on the internet

The Case of Wikipedia

In this paper we propose a theoretical framework to understand the governance of internet-mediated social production. Focusing on one of the most popular websites and reference tools, Wikipedia, we undertake an exploratory theoretical analysis to clarify the structure and mechanisms driving the endogenous change of a large-scale social production system. We argue that the popular transactions costs approach underpinning many of the analyses is an insufficient framework for unpacking the evolutionary character of governance. The evolution of Wikipedia and its shifting modes of governance can be better framed as a process of building a collective capability, namely the capability of editing and managing a new kind of encyclopedia. We understand Wikipedia evolution as a learning phenomenon that gives over time rise to governance mechanisms and structures as endogenous responses to the problems and conditions that the ongoing development of Wikipedia itself has produced over the years. Finally, we put forward five empirical hypotheses to test the theoretical framework

Wikipedia Conflict Representation in Articles of War: A critical discourse analysis of current, on-going, socio-political Wikipedia articles about war

With the help of a discourse-historical approach, a textual corpus composed of the talk pages of three controversial, socio-political Wikipedia articles about ongoing wars was analyzed in order to shed light on the way in which conflict is represented through the editing and discussion process. Additionally, a rational discourse was employed in order to unravel communication distortions within the editing process in an attempt to improve communication and consensus-seeking. Finally, semi-structured interviews of participating contributors within studied articles were used in order to better understand Wikipedian experience in a controversial collaboration scenario. Results unveiled a set of discursive practices in which Wikipedians participate, as well as the creation of a Wikipedian argumentation topoi framework useful for further Wikipedia-specific discourse analysis involving the content change-retain negotiation process

From printed to "wikified" encyclopedias: sociological aspects of an incipient cultural revolution

1. Introductory remarks; 2. The new "asymmetric competition" between open source networks and conventional bureaucratic organizations; 3. The Wikipedia as an encyclopedic project; 4. “Wikis” as tools for focused and cumulative intellectual productions; 5. Six Dimensions of WP growth and evolution; 5.1 Worldwide multilingual diffusion; 5.2 Staff expansion; 5.3 Diversification; 5.4 Elaboration; 5.5. Increases in internal cohesion; 5.6. External Embedment; 6. On the potentials and limits of wiki-based open source encyclopedias: some preliminary conclusions after six years of experience; 6.1 Free self-recruitment of collaborators; 6.2 Extensive and efficient exploitation of intrinsic motivations; 6.3 Low needs for capital and organization; 6.4 Multicultural segmentation; 6.5 Flexible polymorphic organization; 6.6 Community embedment; 6.7 Keeping pace with current events and discoveries; 6.8 Changing usage patterns and user roles; 6.9 Public visibility of production processes and resilient adaptation; 5.10 Unguided incrementalism and unplanned “memetic evolution”; 6.11 "WP-Notability" as a new digital divide; 7. Conclusive remarks; Reference

The Trouble with Knowing: Wikipedian consensus and the political design of encyclopedic media

Encyclopedias are interfaces between knowing and the unknown. They are devices that negotiate the middle ground between incompatible knowledge systems while also performing as dream machines that explore the political outlines of an enlightened society. Building upon the insights from critical feminist theory, media archaeology, and science and technology studies, the dissertation investigates how utopian and impossible desires of encyclopedic media have left a wake of unresolvable epistemological crises. In a 2011 survey of editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, it was reported that 87 per cent of Wikipedians identified as men. This statistic flew in the face of Wikipedias utopian promise that it was an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Despite the early optimism and efforts to reduce this disparity, Wikipedias parent organization acknowledged its inability to significantly make Wikipedia more equitable. This matter of concern raised two questions: What kinds of knowing subjects is Wikipedia designed to cultivate and what does this conflict over who is included and excluded within Wikipedia tell us about the utopian dreams that are woven into encyclopedic media? This dissertation argues that answering these troubling questions requires an examination of the details of the present, but also the impossible desires that Wikipedia inherited from its predecessors. The analysis of these issues begins with a genealogy of encyclopedias, encyclopedists, encyclopedic aesthetics, and encyclopedisms. It is followed by an archeology of the twentieth century deployment of consensus as an encyclopedic and political program. The third part examines how Wikipedia translated the imaginary ideal of consensus into a cultural technique. Finally, the dissertation mobilizes these analyses to contextualize how consensus was used to limit the dissenting activities of Wikipedia's Gender Gap Task Force. The dissertation demonstrates that the desire and design of encircling knowledge through consensus cultivated Wikipedias gender gap. In this context, if encyclopedic knowledge is to remain politically and culturally significant in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to tell a new story about encyclopedic media. It must be one where an attention to utopian imaginaries, practices, and techniques not only addresses how knowledge is communicated but also enables a sensitivity to the question of who can know

The experience as a document: designing for the future of collaborative remembering in digital archives

How does it feel when we remember together on-line? Who gets to say what it is worth to be remembered? To understand how the user experience of participation is affecting the formation of collective memories in the context of online environments, first it is important to take into consideration how the notion of memory has been transformed under the influence of the digital revolution. I aim to contribute to the field of User Experience (UX) research theorizing on the felt experience of users from a memory perspective, taking into consideration aspects linked to both personal and collective memories in the context of connected environments.Harassment and hate speech in connected conversational environments are specially targeted to women and underprivileged communities, which has become a problem for digital archives of vernacular creativity (Burgess, J. E. 2007) such as YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and Wikipedia. An evaluation of the user experience of underprivileged communities in creative archives such as Wikipedia indicates the urgency for building a feminist space where women and queer folks can focus on knowledge production and learning without being harassed. The theoretical models and designs that I propose are a result of a series of prototype testing and case studies focused on cognitive tools for a mediated human memory operating inside transactive memory systems. With them, aims to imagine the means by which feminist protocols for UX design and research can assist in the building and maintenance of the archive as a safe/brave space.Working with perspectives from media theory, memory theory and gender studies and centering the user experience of participation for women, queer folks, people of colour (POC) and other vulnerable and underrepresented communities as the main focus of inquiring, my research takes an interdisciplinary approach to interrogate how online misogyny and other forms of abuse are perceived by communities placed outside the center of the hegemonic normativity, and how the user experience of online abuse is affecting the formation of collective memories in the context of online environments

Encounters with Authority: Tactics and negotiations at the periphery of participatory platforms

Digital participatory platforms like Wikipedia are often celebrated as projects that allow anyone to contribute. Any user can sign up and start contributing immediately. Similarly, projects that engage volunteers in the production of scientific knowledge create easy points of entry to make contributions. These low barriers to entry are a hallmark feature in digital participatory labor, limiting the number of hoops a new volunteer has to jump through before they can feel like they are making a difference. Such low barriers to participation at the periphery, or edges of participatory platforms, have presented a problem for organizational scholars as they wonder how such projects can achieve consistent results when opportunities to train and socialize newcomers are constrained by a need for low barriers. As a result, scholarship has focused on answering the question of newcomer learning and socialization by examining how newcomers make sense of their new digital workspaces rather than focus on how institutional constraints are imposed. In this research, I draw on a growing body of scholarship that pushes against the perception of openness and low barriers on digital participatory platforms to unpack the constraints on participation that newcomers confront and, in particular, to show how such constraints resemble characteristics of institutionalized newcomer onboarding tactics. To approach this question, I conducted 18 months of participant observation and conducted 36 interviews with experts, newcomers, and project leaders from the crowdsourced citizen science platform Planet Hunters and the peer produced encyclopedia, Wikipedia. I analyzed my data using a grounded theory research design that is sensitized using the theoretical technology of Estrid Sørensen’s Forms of Presence as a way to pay attention to the sociomaterial configurations of newcomer practice, attending to the actors (both human and nonhuman) that play a part in the constraints and affordances of newcomer participation. By drawing on Sørensen’s Forms of Presence, the analytical focus on the newcomer experience shifts from looking at either top-down institutional tactics of organizations or bottom-up individual tactics of newcomers to thinking about the characteristics of relationships newcomers have with other members and platform features and the effects of these relationships as they relate to different opportunities for learning and participation. Focusing on the different ways that learning and participation are made available affords the exploration of how the authority of existing practices in particular settings are imposed on learners despite the presence of low barriers to participation. By paying attention to the sociomaterial configuration of newcomer participation, my findings unpack the tactics that newcomers encounter at the periphery, or edges of participatory platforms, as well as how they find their work being included or excluded from the platform. I use the findings to develop a taxonomy of encounters that describes how newcomers can participate in a self-guided experience as the existing literature describes, but also experience moments of guided and targeted encounters. What this taxonomy of encounters suggests is that the periphery of participatory platforms can be at once an open space for exploration and experimentation but also a well-managed space where, despite low barriers to initial participation, a newcomer must negotiate what I describe as the guardrails of participation that define the constraints and affordances that shape their experience

Beyond the Gender Gap: Understanding Women\u27s Participation in Wikipedia

In 2010, UNU-MERIT researchers surveyed editors of Wikipedia, “the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (Glott, Ghosh, & Schmidt, 2010). When the report revealed that almost 90% of the editors were male, however, it suggested that perhaps not everyone “can edit” Wikipedia—especially women. As the resulting media and academic explanations of the Wikipedia “gender gap” have largely attributed the gap to ‘female lack’—lack of initiative, confidence, or technical skills—very little research has explored the treatment of women within Wikipedia culture. Thus, this paper first draws upon feminist technology scholars to problematize current explanations of the gender gap that frame it as a ‘woman problem’. Then, through in-depth interviews with 26 English Wikipedia women editors, it explores sociocultural norms within Wikipedia that influence women’s lived experiences and participation. The findings frame these norms as gendered organizational tensions, describing how women’s experiences of these tensions lead to their perceived outcomes of isolation, emotional exhaustion and distress, and attrition. Despite these effects, many women editors persist due to their deeply rooted sense of purpose in their work on Wikipedia. The findings also draw upon feminist standpoint theory to discuss the tensions in women’s sense-making of the gender gap, specifically its causes, appropriate editor responses, and solutions. While the standpoints of the participants are complex and fluid, two primary approaches emerged. These approaches can be conceptualized as two ends of a continuum, as women who espouse an essentialist view of gender and an individualistic approach to addressing the gender gap are on one side, and women who hold to gender constructionism and call for cultural and structural change to address the gap are on the other. Thus, this study suggests that gendered sociocultural factors do bear upon women’s participation within Wikipedia, and their sense-making of these gendered tensions—their causes, outcomes, and solutions—are textured by their own social locations and experiences, demonstrating the complexity of women’s participation within Wikipedia. Due to these findings, put simply, the gender gap is not just a ‘woman problem’

The alignment of screens

This thesis makes a distinction between screen and surface. It proposes that an inquiry into screens includes, but is not limited to, the study of surfaces. Screens and screening practices are about doing both divisions and vision. The habit of reducing screens to the display neglects their capacity to emplace separations (think of folding screens). In this thesis an investigation of screens becomes a matter of asking how surfaces and the gaps in between them articulate alignments of people and things with displays that, in practice, always leave something out of sight. Rather than losing touch with screens by reducing them to surfaces, in other words, I am interested in alternative screen configurations. For this task I sketch an approach that touches on screens through the figures of lines, surfaces, textures, folds, knots and cuts. Lines help me to make the case for thinking about screens as alignments. I then ask what kinds of observers emerge from reducing screens to single or digital surfaces. I trace that concern with Google Glass, a pair of “smartglasses” with a transparent display. To distinguish between screen and surface I suggest, through a study of biodetection and assistance dogs, how to qualify or texture screens within webs of relations. I further outline, with snapshots of my workplace and two screens named Vig and Ben, two modes of touching or un/en/folding their locations. Finally, with knots and cuts, I underline the unfolding of self checkouts in supermarkets, and the enfolding of automated tellers outside banks. All of these reconfigurations experiment with screens by moving sideways in order to approach their displays laterally, and make visible their (ab)use by those in power. This method is a way of grasping the embodiment and the materiality of screens, while responding to the practices, agencies, and affects aligned around, through, and away from their displays