[Reader-list] Software from below?

[Monica Narula]

This is a version of the presentation I made at the Tech_2 workshop 
in Bristol (17-24 August 2001), in the session "Open Content, Open 
Tools". Tech_2 was a very fun and interesting one week getting 
together of techies (from the novice to the high end) and some other 
new media practitioners, who are interested in working with the 
community. For more details visit: www.tech2.southspace.org, and for 
documentation from other sessions (such as on Squid, IPSEC, etc.) 
visit: http://tronic.southspace.net.

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What I would like to open for discussion today is the process by 
which innovations in technology happen and are addressed, and more 
specifically, the role within that process of marginal voices.

Before I elucidate our understanding of software, specifically social 
software and social mediations in terms of innovation, which has 
emerged quite concretely from our experience in the CyberMohalla 
Project, I would like to highlight two nodes which tend to animate 
any discussion on this issue, but which usually remain unarticulated 
in any systematic manner.

These two nodes can be framed as the tensions firstly between print 
and manuscript cultures, and secondly between the internalist and the 
externalist explanatory frames in the history of science.
Historically the hold of manuscript culture in society was broken by 
the arrival of print culture. Print culture has had an intense 
democratization and reachability to a larger public history as well 
as a rhetoric of it (which can hide the history of asymmetries within 
which it has grown and is located). But inspite of the incredible 
increase in access, the tradition of manuscript culture still 
continues. This is a culture that is constituted of closed knowledge 
communities (programmers, filmmakers, academics, architects, etc.) of 
which it is very exciting to be a part, but where entry into the 
group is severely marked. In this sense, there is always a tension 
between a knowledge-rich group and those who are outside it. For 
those who are on the outside, awe, suspicion, mis-recognitions and 
prejudice form the boundary between the two.

The second debate is seen most explicitly in the history of science 
where there is a contestation between the internalist and the 
externalist schools. In their uncovering of the events of science, 
the externalists prioritise systems of patronage, access to 
resources, institutional frameworks, territoriality, economic values 
(such as productivity, efficiency, and market co-ordinates such as 
expansion and intensification), structures of security, migration 
patterns, cultural mobility etc. The internalist school, on the other 
hand, would privilege the internal extensibility and growth of an 
idea, the intuitive, the serendipitous, and the genius, whether 
individual or civilizational. This is a very useful debate to make us 
aware of the relationship between practice, imagination and 
technology, as well as the leaching of technology into the social 
bedrock.

These are the hidden undertows on which debates on technology and its 
users develop. These debates can, at times, be very contentious and 
there may be those who rigidly withdraw from them, but these are also 
two nodes which can be engaged with very productively. An interesting 
example of this is a debate on free software that has happened on the 
Sarai Reader List. The debate began when some from the free software 
community espoused the use of Linux to set-up e-governance systems as 
an alternative to Microsoft, citing reasons of security and autonomy. 
They were challenged on the grounds that an unexamined partnership 
with the state would lead to the dissolution of the principles on 
which the free software model stands and can expand. (Those who are 
interested can check out the recent archives.)

To raise some questions specific to our discussion:
1. From where does technological modification arise? What motivates it?
2. Is technological modification (especially of software) an urge 
from the user or does it emerge primarily from the subjective creator 
and/or the Market?
3. How do we locate the new and the unexpected within the 
repeatability and standardization of technology?
4. The silent question: How does the marginal speak into 
technological improvisation and innovation? And by marginal one here 
means those who are outside the rubric of that technological 
framework, i.e. those who are outside or at the receiving end of that 
discourse.

I would like to share at this point our experiences from within the 
Cyber Mohalla project.  I think you will see that all the questions 
that I have just raised are echoed in these, and I will then 
hopefully be able to open out a discussion on these questions by 
providing you with an experientially informed perspective.

The premise of the CyberMohalla project is to work with a 
specifically urban, non-elite population and develop constructs, 
tools and processes which are able to facilitate for the participants 
three important things: creativity, expressivity and research into 
local history.

The 10 participants are from a basti (an urban slum) from the heart 
of the city, and are aged between 14 and 19. Some of them still go to 
school, albeit irregularly, and some are school dropouts. They are 
proficient in Hindi, Urdu and some Persian, and have a minimal 
knowledge of English, even though they are very comfortable with the 
roman script. When they joined the project, they had no knowledge of 
computers, and had never used them.

First there was an intensive workshop with the participants, which 
lasted 5 weeks and was held at Sarai. After these 5 weeks, Cyber 
Mohalla shifted to the basti and, in collaboration with an NGO that 
has been working in the area for 15 years, a small Media Lab - called 
Compughar, or Computer home - has been set up with three computers.