Pat Kane, author of The Play Ethic, just mailed me about a presentation he recently gave at Urban Learning Space called Soulitarian City? Looking for the ‘hacker ethic’ in Glasgow. It’s a fascinating insight into the way the hacker ethic is starting to seep into other cultures through open-source projects (both in the software realm and in daily life) and creative collaboration.

Kane covers a lot of ground in the paper, from schoolchildren in Glasgow through PhD students to artist/hacker activist projects and draws some interesting comparisons. As he says, “In many net observers’ minds, the ‘digital divide’ is now as likely to be drawn between exploiters/controllers, and explorers/users, as between those with or without access.”

There is one other quote I’d like to pull out from his interview with Simon Yuill for its reference to Joseph_Beuys

It’s difficult to underestimate the originality of Yuill’s project: an attempt to fuse the bottom-up collaborative spirit of open source and social software, with the hitherto highly top-down code structures of computer games, and place this within the context of public and community education about the digital age. In his paper, ‘Everyone a Programmer’, Yuill takes inspiration from the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys’s claim that ‘everyone is an artist’, demonstrated by his suspension of entry requirements in his classes at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art in 1972. When an operating system allows its core code to be amended and built on by outside coders – rather than being held behind a protective kernel, as in most proprietary software – it ‘suspends entry requirements’, says Yuill, in the same way as Beuys did. Yet Yuill goes further, and says that software might succeed where conceptual art failed.

These different models of forming social structures have a lot to teach us about online creative collaboration (both in terms of when they are successful and when they fail). They also have a lot to teach about current educational structures and how they might shift themselves to a more civic/social responsible model.

(N.B. I couldn’t find Yuill’s essay in its referenced location, but you can find it in the Internet Archive here ).