CWNs as important developments for local civic engagment
alison’s thoughts on cwn’s as places for civic engagment. It’s a mini, 3 page paper that she came up with for the upcoming CRACIN workshop in Toronto that I’ll be attending with her. And I love it (the paper). And her for writing it.
Basically, the two things that I get from it:
1) CWN’s are new opportunities for highly technical young people (mostly males) to get involved in local civic engagement
and
2) These young males often don’t talk about their work in traditional terms of civic engagment because they are not familiar with that discourse or with associating their actions in terms of it. Instead they “swap in” hacker discourse.
Both of these are points that I’ve been trying to argue - here, at ISF, at CRACIN and in my recent grant applications. I also pushed this idea in the last point of the CWN WhyTo I wrote. This paper is wonderful because I can use it as support - and it’s just very encouraging because I know that Alison doesn’t follow other people’s leads, so this must conform to what she’s been seeing at ISF and in her interviews with volunteers.
“In Montreal, the community wireless network Île Sans Fil (ISF) demonstrates how building this infrastructure also acts as a way to engage groups of people who might otherwise not participate in the civic life of their community. It also provides an opportunity to rethink the parameters of democratic participation.”
ISF creates opportunities for youth to participate using skills that have not traditionally been considered useful in volunteer contexts. These skills include software programming, hardware installation and network management. While various governmental programs including Canada’s Netcorps program have encouraged youth with technical skills to use them in a volunteer context, ISF is a project founded by youth. Without having a specific mandate to serve youth or to attract them, it has a majority of young members, who devote volunteer time and energy to creating and maintaining a network of wireless internet hotspots. ISF’s volunteers are mostly male, with post-secondary educations, in their 20’s and 30’s. Most of them are employed, either full-time or as contract workers. This combination of factors makes ISF volunteers statistically anomalous, according to the National Survey of Giving (McLintock, 2004) which in 2000 reported a drop in the number of male volunteers, as well as those with university educations. The survey also notes that large cities have fewer volunteers than small towns. Has the valorization of the technical skills in the community technology setting created the possibility for new groups of people to become engaged?
and this idea is amazing. I think i suggested it to her and she fit it in and found beautiful support for it.
“At the same time, the hacker discourse may explain the inability of some ISF members to conceive of their activities as political. As Gabriella Coleman writes, “the political is not something that hackers do instead it is done by and through the very act of hacking. The politics, often of transgression, is embedded within the fibers of the practice of hacking. The political dimension remains obscure since it comes from the rationalised practice of programming and technological manipulation” (Coleman, 2004, p. 2)”
Alison acknowledge Steph and my input on the paper version she sent to CRACIN, but not in the version she posted her blog. Probably she didn’t think of it because CRACIN is the primary destination for the paper and this online version is less relevant for her. Hopefully she’ll credit me in the online one as well, because it’s just as relevant for me -if not more so- and I feel that a significant piece of this came from discussions we’ve had, a grant application I made for ISF, and even specific suggestions that I made to an earlier draft I saw. In any case, I’m psyched about this minipaper and hope that Alison continues this line of investigation. I’ll be asking her to touch on it in her presentation at CUWiN.