A text to understand the development's process
of a technopolitical tool
and some proposals for further developments."Dear, it is quite late in "de peper" and i am preparing the food for tomorrow. This evening i was babysitting for a friend while she did her dance performance for our youth project. It gave me the chance to reflect on two things, time and life. Having such a small and precious child in my arms said more to me than a thousand words. Chronos is the master of us all until we realize the immortality that is life itself. It has no name nor a place to rest its head, it just moves on, dancing to the illusion of time. History is a fine teacher yet without it the human spirit was, i believe, much richer in the days of ours ancestors. Thinking of the now deserted mining villages where my mother grew up, i remember many a lost moment of our family's history. Barcelona will always be associated in my mind with the Spanish civil war and George Orwell's book "Homage to Catalonia". He is one of the English writers i most admire. Human nature is a paradox. We know so little yet we assume so much. At a time in history when so much of life on Earth hangs in the balance as an environnemental crisis of massive proportions unfolds i ask myself what kind of a world Daphne's small baby daughter will inherit. We all share a responsibility to make sure it will be a good one. A database that records the alternative history of our times and empowers those who have the courage to still believe in creating a better future is, i believe, a very fine idea..." J.D, Amsterdam, 06-2005
Summary white book:> The genesis: what we really want to do? > Doc: Calendar
> Choosing a language/vocabulary for the research and for the programation:
> Free software and Copyleft/ Creative commons
> Remarks about the several steps to decide a language and a technical system to program the online database
> Activist research vocabulary > Doc: CASA, workshop reflections
> Programation vocabulary> Developing the skeleton of the database: entrances, categories and search engine
>Categories and entrances > Doc: Categories Definitions + final structure
>Input form, login/users, compulsories fields, search engine and design: some comments > Doc: compulsories fields + database structure
> First Feed backs >Doc: email exchanges> Projections
--> Technopolitical general changes
--> Input form
--> Logins/users
--> Database Information Visualization
--> Search engine
--> Maps and Visualizations
--> Transforming towards a CMS?
> Origins of the project:
Euromovements was born as a network oriented towards the creation of a confluent space in Europe for the activist research and the action research for and from contemporary social movements. The original idea was to develop an european guide for social transformation that would be based on a networked development of several kind of contents:- Networking tools basically shaped as directories developped around several subjects such as, the "organizations and collectives" that have participated to the several European Social Forums, a guide about local social forums, listing of groups that are developping activist research and also a directory about several european networks related to grass roots social movements and civil society.
- Developping activist research around several thematics such as: webographies on european processes of confluence of the social movements, conceptual dictionary about the actual vocabulary used in the several social movements around Europe, a chronology about the european social and political mobilizations.
There is several more contents developed or to be developed inside the euromovements network action research space, you can get a clear idea about it visiting our website.The chronos project was originally planned to be an activist research for the development of a chronology of events related to social and political mobilizations. In its way towards concretion it has become a technopolitical tool. Maybe because euromovements network philosophy tries to make activist reserch as a process that not only produce knowledge but also tools to help in the systematization of the knowledge.
By another way, we did also count on the crucial help of the Di Vitorrio foundation that did offer themselves to finance the project with 5.000 euros and that did agree on a six months time to make it. With this amount of time and this financial support it was possible to also include the programmation of a free software database that would be online and that would let any collective or person logged inside the database to enter information about social and/or political mobilizations.Before going further on we would like to define what do we understand and mean by "technopolitical" tool. We can range a large variety of experiences, technical and human interfaces, behind this definition: the Echellon world's surveillance system (based on a cooperation between USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand) is a frightening exemple of pancapitalist technopolitic tool; the indymedia network is another exemple based on descentralized media centers composed by groups of persons working on a voluntary basis for self publication and maintenance of alternative, autonomous and free news through free medias and software.
Those are two exemples of "technopolitical tools", behind their territorial scales differences, and their ideological and political gap, they do share some common points: the development of a set of technical tools that do allow communicational flux oriented and committed to improve some political desires and necessities merging from a group, collective, organization, or even a set of countries.To talk about "technopolitical tool" means that any technical development nowadays is ideologically and politically oriented and that any political process that aims to improve the systematization of the living memory, of the autonomisation and decentralisation of the political and ethic expression of the persons, can be improve through the development (better if collectively, better if swarming) of technics and technologies that are based on open systems that can proceed and/or organize huge amounts of data and informations. One of the desired consequences is to help human communities and their political aims to transform those data in knowledge.
To resume, we are talking about technopolitical tools when we address or define a complex system (dispositive, clusters, interphase exchanges) that is based in a human/machine interaction embedded inside an ideological system and oriented to improve politicals aims determined from a group or a community. Adopting the point of view of social transformation, those aims are generally focused on a better circulation and systematization of processes to free, multiplicate and improve the circulation of data and information between interindividual relations from person to person, collective to collective, social movements and society.
Contemporanous struggles and resistances looks to develop themselves in complex ways, because they are embedded inside a "mille feuilles" of social, political, cultural and technical scapes based in waves of fragmentarious exchanges and merging from a multiplicity of actors. In that sense, this process of research tries to take in account the experiencing of new forms of confluence, that are building subjectivity and organization, of cooperation and shared production of information-knowledge. The infrastructure of the social cycles of communication, merging from actors and groups actively involved in social transformation, can be understood as the whole set of tools, communicational flux and various ways that do use people to communicate their actions and reflections. The content of those cycles of social communication is the whole set of messages, discourses, values, essays, desires, codes, data and information, they do intent to communicate. The content, and the infrastructure closely interact inside a technopolitical tool. The multilplicty of experiences, representations, informations around policical and social mobilizations do merge from a multiplicity of actors and groups, inscribed in trans-local contexts. The tecnopolitical tool tries to make available ways of organizing, searching and retrieving information. It is a way to help in the development of "insurgent architecture".
In the concrete aspect of the chronos project the general aim was to understand how chronologies of social and political events where linked to the various stages of memory: Historical memory, Living memory and Collective memory;
How are drawn/produced those memories?, by whom?, which effects could they have in the improvement of knowledge merging from social movements?;
how groups, persons and collectives from social movements where communicating their fights and resistances through time?
Moreover chronos is a tentative to build and experiment with a system of information-communication at a European level. It do take in account the national, regional, autonomist, independantist, comunitarians, territorial aspects of memories. Perhaps, traditionnaly the memory produced by state-institutions has been framed inside a "historical-winner-power" perspective, and the communities in struggle, or social movements, have been developping memories based on other perceptions of what was really revelant for them. Anyway, a wide work on the european dimension of social and political mobilizations is missing. And it requires, we do believe, a specific emphasis on the variety of memories circulating, appearing and dying.
Of course, chronos hasn't solved out those questions, it has just been a common process, a tentative to issue those questions and to develop a technopolitical tool to be used and appropiate by researchers, activists and social movements. Let's see now which have been the several steps of this process, the most important questions and problematics raised in each step, and how the technical area and the political/research area have been interacting.
> The genesis: what we really want to do?"Chronology is extensively understood as the science of determining the order in which events occurred: related to this first sense there is three majors maners to understand it: "A chronology, also called a timeline, is an arrangement of events into chronological order. It can be understood as a "temporal relation" in a sense of an arrangement of events in time, a "communication frame inside time" in a sense of a record of events in order of their occurrence, or a "cognition interaction" in which it tries to achieve a determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events."[source]
As we can see, the exercise of developping a chronology shall try to give light (even if subjective) to some repetitive and precise points:
>The need/desire to determine the evolution of something: in our case we wanted to identify the evolution in their complexity, richness and multiplicity of social movements
>The need/desire to identify where does this evolution expresses itself as a qualitative or quantitative evolution, in our case it would be: why can we say that there has been a significant evolution/change/breakpoint of a social movement/organization involved in social transformation and where was taking place this evolution?
>Is there a date (day/year/month) that can be extract related to this evolution that interest us?
Related to this three first questions common to any chronology we would also add:
> From who and where does come out the chronology? Is it a matter of activist research, is it related to an historical-academic process, is it a process coming out of the communicational energy of the social movement? To repeat ourselves, does the chronology comes from a "collective memory" on going and able to produce its own determinations of what has been chronologically relevant, or, is it a historical exercise coming out from actors that were not inside the social movement that they are trying to synthetize?Those questions were the ones that we originally focused, nevertheless they have been transformed in more pragmatics questions when the project did turn from an activist research into a research aiming to develop a technopolitical tool, an online database programmed with free software.
In relation with the programmation of this online database, the euromovements network did have some previews exchange to see how to best address this demand. The decision was settled to divide the calendar of development in three phases, see the document.
> Choosing a language/vocabulary for the research and for the programation:
This choice is generally embedded by political and ideological choices, the contextual situation and the availability of ressources (human and material) that makes possible those choices.
There is set of questions we did address to ourselves between the process:
- free or proprietary software?
- performative/flexible language for our purposes?
- time/money to program with it?
- does a lot of people from social movements use those language to program or not?
- does visitors and users of the chronos project will need to install a lot of plug ins to see and use the database?
- design results
> Free software and Copyleft/ Creative commons:
As euromovements tries to develop a confluent space for activist research [visit the activist research directory] , it tries also to do so using free software tools and making all the contents developped inside the euromovements network as copyleft or creative commons license. In that sense, what is developed and done inside the euromovements network is to be make available on a public space for everybody to be used and completed. Those developments tries as frequent as possible to use free software tools and not propietary tools, but it isn't a systematic option. Sometimes some funcionalities aren't so much developped or easy to use inside free software than inside propietary tools. Per exemple, we didn't use a free software to edit the video of the chronos website. In the same way, the demo map has been programmed with flash: firstly because we didn't count in our near networks with free software developers and designers who knew about SVL or about processing, this one is a quite recent language to make animations; right now its major problems is that it requires to have all java applet set up inside the computer of the users, and because as it is quite recent there is still few persons who really know how to manage with it.We won't extend more on that question, we would just like to add that choosing free software is a political choice, we shall always privilege this option but we must also see that sometimes the access of users to the information (universal access) and the easy to use (appropiation degree) of a software may conditionate the choice towards propietary software.
Related to copyleft or creative commons license we shall be really precise about what we do include inside this license in the chronos project:
We are specifically talking about the database that has been programmed for chronos and the information and data that will be entered by the users on the database. In the actual stage, those informations related to social and political mobilizations have been entered using actual available information online.
In fact we did include in the project the research for chronologies from the global justice movement and the international meetings resulting of the recent european and international cycles of mobilizations. We did also seek for specific chronologies and hits from specific groups or organisations, or from specific froms of collective actions [you can view them in the bibliographic section]. It doesn't means that those chronologies [roar material entered inside the database] are all copyleft or creative commons. Nevertheless a major part of them are under this kind of license, but some are not. In any case, we shall always type the source of the data we are entering inside the database.
> Remarks about the several steps to decide a language and a technical system to program the online database:
> Activist research vocabulary
We should never underestimate the time needed so that everybody participating in the project (in every aspect, research and networking, programmation and design, coordination between those tasks) are speaking together having established in common a set of definitions for each word defining the research project.
In the concrete case of the research part there has been quite a lot of exchanges to define what senses everyone was attaching to the following words:"A chronology about european political and social mobilizations from when?":
Global questions and definitions to be established:
some answers based on a workshop in Amsterdam during the CASA meeting, and through the exchanges in the elist chronos@euromovements.info , See the document
The achievement of a concens from the group on the definition of the centric words of the research is of course issued in the activist research process, but it is also issued during the process to decide the technical system and the language for the programmation of the database
Skype meeting, See the document
> Programation vocabulary
As we can see through this extract, the people that were involved in the task of programming were localized in several parts of Europe(two in Barcelona, one in Rotterdam, but that did came for one month to Barcelona, and one person in Andorra). The second point is that even if they all came from programmation and design backgrounds they do also have difficulties to concens the correct word for the several tasks they will have to face (design interfase or language of programmation, there is diferents individual representations behind those concepts). To end, it is really important when the technical choices of language and system are being made to know the exacts priorities of the project: is it more important to program a stable database with an efficient search engine and a friendly design or to develop a visualization of the data inside the database and the generation of visuals
Those questions are generally regulated by the last aspect of the decision taken: the availability of ressources:- Who is where?,
- Can do what because of which kind of needs (money, activist interest in the thematic, professional development, hacker passion for programmation, all or none of them?)?
- How many of them?
- How many time and how many money?Those questions are evidentely not trivial and they influence the whole process of development. The chronos project merged from the euromovements network and has been impulsed by some of its actors and financially from the Di Vittorio foundation. In that sense it is a project that merges from a set of actors involved in activist research and systematization of memory on social movements. It is a fact that a lot of those persons are activists and are active part of social movements or civil society. We did thought that it would be useful to explore the chronology and recent collective memory of social movements in Europe. Nevertheless, making an activist research is different in some ways from (even if can be part) developing a technopolitical tool.
Generally, the most used, succesful and appropiate technopolitical tools are the ones that have been directely developped by the persons that were going to use them: indymedia, wikipedia, tiki wikis, communities media such as radio or televisions, etc.
In that sense we must be aware of this original paradox, even if we as participants of the chronos project and the euromovements network estimates that the use of the online database will be useful for us, we can't automatically assume this same assertion for the social movements, we would like but we will have to work towards it if we want to make it.
In the last section related to projections we will adress some recommendations for those further developments.
Related to the choice of a programation language:
Php language has been chosen to be the main language used by the developpers nowadays. If the idea is to construct a open tool that others developpers will be able to reappropriate in the future, the chosen language had to be a popular language able to offer a powerful, strong and easy tool. Python was a solid option, but it was a more 'hackers' specialized language.
> Developing the skeleton of the database: entrances, categories and search engine
>Categories and entrances:
Every debate and decision that was taken at this level was affecting the programation, we can clear see in that link why we are talking of technopolitical tools.
Categories Definitions + final structure
>Input form, login/users, compulsories fields, search engine and design: some comments:
The input form and the search engine are the central nodes of the technolopolitical tool Chronos. They are both differentely conditionated by the login/users.
Actually everyone that visits the chronos website and want to acceed to the input form/insert event must register inside the system, meaning they have to give a name/ an avatar/ an email of contact and they do get a login and password; but if they want to log as an organization, and not as a person they just give a name/ an email/ a link to the website of the organization.
Those logins inhabits to have descriptions of events inside the database that are always entered in name of somebody or of an organization, that permits two kind of researches orientend to chronologies:
- you can click on a personal name to see which events she has entered in the chronological order (time of the insertion, and time of the events)
- you can click on the name of an organization to see which events it has entered in the chronological order (time of the insertion, and time of the events) and you get an overvieuw of the importants events for this precise organization, in its historical development and related to its organisational subjectivity.
To be logged inside the system brings you to the possibility to insert data inside the database through the input form, that is a graphic interphase to interact with the database online. As we said before the first question is to determine the squeletton of the input form (entrances, sub-categories) and the segond question is to determine the compulsories fields of it (which information is obligatory?).
Compulsories fields + database structure
Compuslory fields brings you to deep political7ideological debates and choices that may difficult the programmation tasks. Per e.g. there has been discussions around if the european state/country shall be a compulsory field inside the "where" entrance. Some did think that wouldn't be fair/respectful in a political perspective, we could exclude autonomous and independendist struggles form the users of the chronos database. That is why it is not actually a compulsory fields. But in a nother way, if we would like in the future to generate automatic maps from the database it wouldn't be possible if the field of european state/country isn't compulsory.The design: It hasn't been easy, and we must underline that setting up a design between a group of researchers and/or developpers is hard work. Generally what happens is that design comes last, it is the part with less money to be inverted and as it is a creative task that requires patience it is generally let to one or two persons that following some elemental suggestions make some proposals afterwhile. Of course, it would be nicer to have a design that has been thinked, suggested and developped by all the group, but that is a luxury that in our case we couln't face off.
The idea of the design was to suggest visually that social movements have always developped databases as documentation centers with their brown carpets, their clips and their typewriters machines; we wanted to suggest by this way that the chronos project was a normal continuation of a long tradition of systematization of collective memory that did move from paper and ash to digital and pixels. By the other way the aesthetic of the coulours was to remind traditional fights and resistances that did use white and black copies, spotting some red in some parts.. the importance of black, white, grey and red coulours in traditional social movements is very clear, it is in a way iconographic colours of the traditionnal social movements.
> First Feed backs
Changes to be set up inside the actual chronos website:
based on exchanges and feed back from marco, mayo, alex, nico, thibault, jul, alex...and more in general people inside the chronos elist and people taht did visit and used the dabase with us.Note that it was not really possible to enter a lot of data and events inside the database because as we knew it will have new changes we could have lost part of the work to enter events inside it.
Email exchanges
> Projections:
Those porjections are based upon the fact we have only made a first step. Now it is time to test it and develop it. "Eat your dog food", means for communities of programmers that you have to be the first to try your own tool.
In the evolution of the project we could imagine several ways of using, practising, and researching with the chronos tool. Some groups of users are already pointing the possible interest to reconstruct the several subjective and organizations' memories. In that sense we could also immagine to have a common archive, but that oucl become also differenziated for each organization registered, habilitating funccionalities to customize/adapt the database possibilities. That would generate specific(s) database(s) archiving memory of specific oprganizations.
All the folowing evaluations are estimations based in one person working/task
> Technopolitical changes:Change server... two possibilities, transform it! or lubjmila
Develop an elist for the newsletter, it would be send through the administrator interfase (still to be programmed) of the database
Organize a publishers team networked around europe, developping workshops, connecting with activist research networks and alternative, free, autonomous medias, inteviewing networks and activists to feed the database
Reinforce technical team to maintain, actualize and develop website and database funccionalities, develop projects around maps and visualsRevision of the written english of the chronos project
Traductions: spanish, french, italian, greek, german..
Beware the traduction is hard work because the part of text is smaller than the php pages that must be also translated
It could be really interesting to involved the babel network about it
Work on developping the design of the website: adding images, style sheets, emprove general look
Evaluation: 4 days
> Specific website development:
---> Input form:Change the design of the input form, applying to it the same design than the advanced search engine, transforming the check boxes into multiple list
Target people: Registered user
Evaluation: 5 daysAdd Key words related to the event:
This category is specifically useful to complement the scripts that could be programmed for the search engine. The key words merging from the users to characterize the event they are inserting could help us to have a bottom-up thesaurus of words that refers to social and political mobilizations. It could complemented with the one built by the search engine. Each user should inscribe about 5 key words maximum that he does relate to a specific mobilization, per ex: Genoa: Red Zone, Carlo Giuliani, disobedienti and black block
Target people: Registered users
Evaluation: 2 daysRelated qualitative information:
Develop database to permit to enter more than 4 related qualitative docs in internet
Target people: Registered users
Evaluation: demands deep changes inside databse structure - weeksUser can relate the event he's inserting with one or several other created events inside the database
Target people: Registered users
Evaluation: alej, julHabilitate an php dynamic selection of the contents listed by users inside the check boxes
Target people: Registered users
Evaluation: The main problem of this functionality is the interface to synthetize multiple and dynamic information. An interface as such has to be able to:
1.retreive from the database all resources of european movilizations.
2.make it accesible to the user in such a manner that will not overload the amount of written information, considering for instance already existing categories. A work on visual interfaces is our proposal. Through an scrollable list of thumbnails, each resource (ficha) it is displayed when clicking on 'browse related resources'. The user may then click on a picture and by doing that, displaying on the form in the field 'related resources' an identifier such as R456 .Different sorts of visual interfaces made with php.
Target people: Registered users
Evaluation: 3 weeks
---> Logins/users:Develop an intranet in the website specifically for the team of administrators.
Funccionalities: permit the administrators to take out, erase, change information entered in the input-form/events, send newsletters.
Target group: administrators
Should be for active participants/euromovements people in the chronos publishing of news/events
Evaluation: one week programmingProgram change/enter information
Funccionalities: reminding your personnal password by email, desincribe from the elist
Target group: Registered users
Evaluation: one weekProgram the register.php page to let a new user to register as a person or only as an organization/group.
Target group: Registered users
Evaluation: one weekProgram anti-spam emprovement, so that collective email only appears as collective(at)mail.info
Target group: Registered users
Evaluation: one weekWhen an user register herself she has the possibility to associate her profile to an image
Target group: Registered users
Evaluation: one week
---> Database Information Visualization:Improve design
Target group: Registered users
Evaluation: half day
----> Search engine:Program scripts to get statistics of the researches and to develop thesaurus of key words
Target group: administrators
Evaluation: XXSearch related qualitative documents inside all internet
Funccionalities: In order to search information from the web we need to work with links to pages we want to be searched and then scripts that will harvest keywords based for example in the frequency of repetition of a word (word counting) in these locations. These text processing operations will be programmed with python
Target group: registered users
Evaluation: a month
----> Maps and Visualizations:Thumbnails: a visual map with the images of each event organized in a chronological order (of their insertion and/or the event) organized as a kind of rectangular frame, cliquing in each image would send you to its input-form results viewing [see for e.g > but not programmed with flash in our case]
Connection of some data to maps (flash, processing, etc.): interconnecting some data we shall select with an automized map(first we propose to finish the geographical demo, connecting countries/major cities with demo map, [see for e.g]
----> Transforming towards a CMS?
Before starting the development of this Demo we looked for a tool to manage chronologic information. We found open history timeline for example. But in order to be specific about the content of this research and the format to handle information, we decided to develop a CMS from scratch. Following that model is that we would like to develop it furthermore and release it as a tool for social researchers under a Creative Commons license.
In doing this a group of advisors will be consulted. We are specially refering to ljudmila media lab and riereta.
---> Taking care and maintaining website:check broken links
check new resources
check statistics
clean server
Evaluation: 20 hours/month