Quitopres-en


Quitopres-en



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Rights, Equity and the Democratic
Construction of Knowledge
Presented by
■ Julian Fox sdb
Event
■ Quito Congress
■ 21-24 October 2008

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Overview
■ Part 1: establishing a platform
■ Introduction
■ Bringing personal experience
■ Clarifying the topic
■ Setting up a discourse framework
■ Seeing this in practice
■ CST Principles
■ Technology as the missing link (religious dis-
course)

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Overview
■ Part 2: tackling the issues
■ Knowledge and information
■ Knowledge versus information
■ A Salesian addition
■ The changing world of information
■ Software Libre as a response
■ Concrete action
■ To Do List

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Introduction
■ Two examples (DB's Circular, Information
on rare plant)
■ Two approaches to knowledge
■ We will plot our way between these two
poles...as well as between the religious and
the secular

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Spreading good books
....It can even enter homes
where the priest cannot.
The dubious will
take it as a gift
or remembrance.
There is no blush in the offering of it.

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Rare plant in Canary Islands

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“you are not currently authorized
to access this article”!

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I am not an expert!
■ I have never been to a computer class in my life!
■ But I began building websites when Tin Berners Lee
set up the World Wide Web*
■ I bring 20 years of hands-on experience
* “1989....the driving force I had in mind was communication
through shared knowledge and the driving 'market' for it
was collaboration among people at work and at home”

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Clarifying our topic
■ Equity! There is obviously rather little of it!
■ A range of issues are involved in the 'democratic
construction of knowledge:
■ Collective nature of knowledge implies an epistemo-
logy and pedagogy
■ The strong presence of market forces
The collective nature of knowledge – and indeed knowers –
involves questions of epistemology and pedagogy

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Discourse framework 1
■ Technocratic discourse tends to dominate
■ So try to 'tell the story' with Christian vocabulary and
grammar
“Can theology aim at understanding technology? Can we put the
words God and technology together in any kind of meaningful
sentence? Can theology guess what God is doing in today's
technology?

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Discourse framework 2
■ Critique the ideology presented by FSF and
OSI
■ Critique the concept of 'information society'
■ Be aware of the threat of neo-liberal dis-
course colonizing other discourses
■ Habermas: faith and knowledge must live
together in a self-reflective way

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What might it look like in practice?
1
■ Lk 4:18-19: “He sent me to proclaim
freedom...”
■ Liberation of informationally poor communit-
ies (NZ example)
■ Maori
■ Pacific Island peoples
■ Lower income earners
■ Sole parents
■ People with low/no qualifications
■ Unemployed
■ Without telecommunications structures

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What might it look like in practice?
2
■ Catholic Social Teaching principles
■ Human dignity
■ Common good
■ Solidarity
■ Subsidiarity
■ Technology the missing link in religious dis-
course
We need a theory of technology based on Christian
principles

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Theory of technology based on
Christian principles
■ Catholic anthropology
■ Social institutions facilitate personal development
■ Gospel imperatives (Second Judgement, Great
Commandment)
■ Trained lay apostolate
■ New vocabulary
■ New forms of governance for new authority
■ New institutional ethics
■ Public theology to convert ethics to norms
■ Re-invigorated notion of common good
■ Technology apostolate for laity
■ Application of CST

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Part 2: Tackling the issues
Knowledge and Information
■ Democracy needs 'knowledge spaces',
'virtual agora'
■ Avoid a commodity view of knowledge
■ International law assumes that knowledge is
a commodity.
“A propensity in policy for
resorting to technocratic,
instrumentalist and anti-intellectual
views of knowledge”

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Knowledge versus information
■ It is important to distinguish between know-
ledge and information
■ An over-abundance of information does not imply
the wisdom to deal with it.
Learning environments
which enculturate into a
practice...such as
Linux and Open Source

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A 'Salesian' addition
■ Don Bosco's notion of 'honest citizen,
good Christian'
■ Citizenship for him implied rights, duties,
participation, religion, and education
■ We could add this notion to Catholic
Social Teaching since it was explicitly
recognised by the Pope who 'launched'
CST in the modern world

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The changed world of information
■ Castell's notion of the 'networked society'
■ Networks have replaced hierarchy. It is crucial to
be 'in' the network' and/or 'switched on'.
“If you do not care about the networks,
the networks will care about you anyway.
For as long as you want to live in this society,
at this time and in this place, you will have
to deal with the network society”

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Software Libre as a response
■ FLOSS helps bypass the Intellec-
tual Property regime
■ FLOSS helps avoid a situation of
dependence (on foreign devel-
opment), passiveness (because
one cannot access the source
code), inequality (because all the
cards are held by the informa-
tionally rich) and the hegemony
of English!

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Concrete action
■ We need to re-interpret the debate in Christi-
an terms
■ Take into account education and citizenship
needs via FLOSS
■ Formation of a free-judging spirit who feels re-
sponsible in society
■ Balance personal formation and encyclopedic in-
formation
■ Urge and enable ongoing education
■ Networks, connections, choice, ecology of
knowing and learning = WORLD WIDE
WEB

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TO DO list ....
■ Tim Berner Lee's vision of communication
through shared knowledge?
■ Challenge practices, policies, technologies
that disenfranchise.... and liberate communit-
ies
■ Join WACC
■ Where do we stand on FLOSS? Policies?
■ Salesian action on behalf of young – net-
works
■ Salesian international learning environments
which enculturate into a practice?

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TO DO list (cont)
■ Making the Third Sector a more self-aware
force
■ Models for sharing information, stimulating
innvoation
■ Overcoming difficulties regarding awareness,
qualified teachers, appropriate educational
materials in FLOSS