[Reader-list] Thesis on Amsterdam's Digital City: "Rise and Fall of DDS"

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 15:35:01 +0100
From: ReindeR Rustema <subscriptions at reinder.rustema.nl>
To: nettime-l at bbs.thing.net

Geert asked me to post an announcement here that I wrote a thesis on
DDS. You can download it in 5 different formats at
http://reinder.rustema.nl/dds/ ranging in size from 1MB for RTF to
96Kb as doc for your Palm handheld.

The thesis is an historical study in combination with an evaluation.

The history of DDS is cut in four periods: the experimental 10 weeks
in 1994, the transformation into an institution in 1995, the
competition with the internet in 1996-2000 and finally the
commercialisation. You should know that DDS became an ordinary
discount ISP a few months ago and completely dropped any commitment
to the public domain.

The 4 periods are evaluated in relation to four themes: social
cohesion, third place, freedom of information and democratisation.
That is 'third place' indeed, and not public place or public sphere a
la Habermas. A minor but hopefully interesting difference.

What I have learned from writing this whole thing is that it is
incredibly difficult to institutionalise whatever collaborative
'space' in cyberspace if you want to do justice to the beautiful
internet culture. You know, the old fashioned one, with a
gift-economy etcetera. If you want to do this you can at best make
sure that the protocols and software licenses you use are open, free
and compatible and decisions are made on the internet itself in
discussions. The problems really start when you come up with
interfaces nobody but some central authority can alter. Like in the
case of DDS and their WWW interface. An on-line community also should
not grow to big. At best it should have a few hundred members, but
once you want to become as big as possible (why should you? to
attract advertisers?) the whole community falls apart.

Anyway, that's what I learned from this study but if you read it
yourself you probably will get lots of other and/or interesting ideas.

I tried to avoid difficult words as much as possible (English is not
even my first language, so that helps as a crap filter) and there are
some entertaining parts. I hope.

It's 77 pages to print from the PDF, but if you leave out appendix 5
and 6 (which are in Dutch) you need only 60 pages. I don't know how
the difference translates into dead trees.

About me: I am somebody. In the beginning of 2001 I launched the idea
to buy DDS as inhabitants in order to resue it. This resulted in an
association with the name Open Domein (Open Domain) which is now
trying to live up to the old DDS ideals. One day something
interesting might grow out of it I think.
--
ReindeR