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, p. 8) 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)

“Art production of the 20th century might have been a rarified field, but in the 21st century, cultural production has become a necessary component of organizing social action. In other words, if the world is a stage, then the players must learn the skills of theater.” (Thompson)
Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from the Last 20 Years

This event has already passed, but there is a great collection of lectures online, and now the release of a new book, Living as Form

You can find Nato Thompson’s lecture in the previous post, but if you go to the vimeo page for these videos you’ll find a bunch of other great talks.

A few things that I enjoyed from this talk

1. In section 1 of his lecture Thompson illustrates the overwhelming scope of social practice history with a slide that depicts Paulo Freire and many-many other non-art influences. I think the urge to create an oversimplified historical narrative is simultaneously necessary and problematic.

2. Shannon Jackson’s Social Works, and her critique of the disciplinary differences between the “arts” coupled with the historical and geographical specificity of how and where many of these arts practices emerged and developed further complicates the way we make sense of these things. Social Works by Shannon Jackson and Suzanne Lacy’s Leaving Art are great books.

3. Nato’s comments on resistance as a form of meaning production, dialogue that operates under a different logic, the production of meaning is both product of language and spatial.

I apologize for these notes being so out of context. I imagine most of you won’t have time to watch the lecture, but if you have time it is well worth it.

The following quote from Bakunin is taken from Chomsky’s introduction in Daniel Guerin’s book Anarchism.

If one were to seek a single dominant idea within the anarchist tradition, that might be defined as “libertarian socialist,” it should, I believe, be that expressed by Bakunin when in writing on the Paris Commune, he identified himself as follows:

I am a fanatic lover if liberty, considering it as the unique conditions under which intelligence, dignity, and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out, and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the school of J-J. Rousseau and the other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each—an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worth the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual, and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since there laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual, and moral being—they do not limit us but  are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.

After a brief visit to one of the occupy location here in London I was left with the desire to clarify some fuzzy points I’ve had about Anarchism, to pick up some reading material I stopped by our local Hackney Library and grabbed Anarchism by Daniel Guerin along with London Stories by Hilda Kean (which I’ll post about later). I’ve always found Anarchism’s positioning between libertarian and socialist ideals to be simultaneously inspiring and problematic.

Yesterday I came across this nice article – The new anarchists by David Graeber. In the article Graeber argues for the practice of direct action and non-violent civil disobedience, he articulates the Anarchist perpective on the occupy movement, and its unifying antagonism of neo-liberalism or “market fundamentalism” that holds that “there is only one possible direction for human historical development.” Graeber highlights a whole network of international coalitions and the creative strategies they’ve developed over many years. He goes on to note what he sees as the occupy’s critical distinction from previous movements.

There is one striking contrast between this and earlier internationalisms, however. The former usually ended up exporting Western organizational models to the rest of the world; in this, the flow has if anything been the other way around. Many, perhaps most, of the movement’s signature techniques—including mass nonviolent civil disobedience itself—were first developed in the global South. In the long run, this may well prove the single most radical thing about it.

Graeber concluded by making an interesting point about creativity, alienation, and nonviolent direction action.

Finally, I’d like to tease out some of the questions the direct-action networks raise about alienation, and its broader implications for political practice. For example: why is it that, even when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary politics in a capitalist society, the one group most likely to be sympathetic to its project consists of artists, musicians, writers, and others involved in some form of non-alienated production? Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives—particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity? One might even suggest that revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on a kind of alliance between a society’s least alienated and its most oppressed; actual revolutions, one could then say, have tended to happen when these two categories most broadly overlap.

During a visit to one of the London occupy camps yesterday, I met a gentleman that was building a small wood house. He was friendly enough, he showed me around and when he realized I was just there for a short visit he referred to me a tourist, which I unquestionably was. We discussed the cultural differences between the various occupy camps in London. He described each camp as having its own unique personality and sense of class, for instance the occupied bank building down the road was for middle class revolutionaries, and St Pauls was for the outspoken characters, at any rate there was a sense mutual respect and co-operation in the way he described the differences and similarities between the various tribes.

After listening to him describe his design goals for the wood house I left the camp to return to my flat. Our flat, where my wife and I live, is part of a larger social housing estate. The flat itself is privately owned making our rent 3 or 4 times as much as it would be if it was still owned by the local council. Many of the social housing flats went into private ownership following Margaret Thatcher’s campaign to privatize social housing as way of encouraging tenants to become home owners. From a personal perspective I am left with the growing sense that concepts such as a neoliberalism, an idea that I once understood as an abstract economic concept, are increasingly becoming understood as a tangible lived experience. Maybe the man building his wood house in the middle of London knowns the idea of struggle resistance as a lived experience.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,200 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 53 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

http://occupyduniya.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/mike-davis/

Lost Scrunchie Hair Tie!

A black scrunchie hair tie was last seen two weeks ago at the corner of Coleman Fields and Prebend Street, near the Duchess of Kent watering hole. Helena thinks scrunchies are appalling, but that is no matter to the person that lost theirs.