Meeting Two – Open Culture
The readings for this week gave me an opportunity to reflect on the concept of an open culture and the realization that the technical realm may differ from the social, political and economic realms. Perhaps one of the challenges that we face when we attempt to create an open ecosystem is that the cultures/norms of these realms have different origins and are in different stages of openness. As discussed in the Sui article, the GIS community has made strides to create an open culture for several decades out of a desire by the actors to engage in this collective efforts. While the open government movement has existed for much longer (FOIA 1967), the mandate to become more transparent, at its core, creates a fundamentally different foundation for an open culture. The political, social and economic realm are often dichotomized into winners and losers – us vs them, which may make it more challenging to create an open culture that is more inclusive at every stage of the open data process. Info-mediaries become power brokers. I’m not sure if this is the case in the technical realm to the same extent that it is in the other realms.
