View video interview here: http://www.collaborativesociety.org/2016/04/18/cameron-neylon-2-years-after/
Stories are powerful. The choice of words is powerful so we should be careful about the words we use and the stories we tell ourselves.
It's hard to think back two years because so much has changed and it becomes quite important to try and figure out just where we were at that point in time.
The availability of research outputs, the access to research papers in particular, has shifted from being an issue that various people were interested in to really a very mainstream policy issue. And at the same time, there's been a really substantial increase in the question of how does the public get engaged in science. And I think it's hard to say exactly what's been the positive moves and what's been treading water and what has changed, but this is now a mainstream conversation. It's moved from the periphery to the mainstream and the fact that ministers and heads of industry are engaged with it and asking intelligent questions and interested in the opinions of people is a real shift.
That's a really interesting question. The question of communities and where they are rooted. And it's interesting you used the word counter-culture. Because, of course, the last time we met you were staying in Berkeley, we were in San Francisco and there is a very real sense in which the San Francisco hacker culture grows out of some of the counter-cultural elements from Berkeley in the 60s, also very much Silicon Valley and the attitudes and thinking of Silicon Valley.
I wonder whether there is a sense in which European hacker culture is actually different. I wouldn't want to pin my finger on what that is. But I have a sense there is a greater sense of history, there is a greater sense of culture.
Counter-cultural is a funny word in its own right. One of the things that has changed in the last two years has been a much deeper understanding of context and the questioning of cultural contexts and, I think, the questioning of that Silicon Valley narrative of technological determinism, of the assumptions of disruptive innovation. There is a real sense in which the very white, male, often middle-class culture that has driven and supported and built-up hacker spaces is at odds with the narrative of those spaces about diversity and inclusion. Anyone can come, but who really does come and how does the culture that you set-up include or exclude certain kinds of people. That's a conversation I've really seen grow in the last couple of months and year. To really question the stories we tell ourselves about what "open" means.
The question I feel that we should be asking ourselves, and this is not rooted in any particular scholarly understanding of the issue, is how do we build the systems and institutions that enable these processes? And, if we don't institutionalize the principles and the systems that support those behaviors. . .it's just another way of saying the incentive system is wrong. When we talk about the incentives being focused on the wrong kinds of activities and the wrong kinds of directions, what we're basically saying is the institutions that we live within and that we've created do not serve to support the kinds of actions and behaviors that we're trying to create. And so we just need to say "what should those institutions look like?" and as long as we can persuade those people with power to say "these are the things that we want to see," but not "this is how it has to happen," then I think we can have both: we can create stability and structure and incentives that support collaboration and engagement and involvement, but also have that stable enough that it doesn't depend on the goodwill and free time of people who also have lives to lead. Otherwise you're left with those people who have the resources and the spare time and the freedom get to create what the freedom looks like.
There's a word I discovered today which I was really taken by. It's a neologism. A meritocracy. We want to have a meritocracy. Everyone wants people to be judged and supported on the basis of how good they are at doing the things that matter. But very often what we do instead is recognize ourselves in other people and we see in the mirror the person who reflects our values and we support them. And I think part of the value of institutionalization is that you can institutionalize the systems that force you to question those judgements. And when we do that, we create the space for more freedoms and more freedoms for more people. I don't think those two things have to be in opposition. They can be in opposition, but they don't have to be.
The keynote speaker talks about a new "revolution" -- 'I think the revolution is actually happening and we have a decision to make as Europeans. Are we going to lead this, are we going to be in the lead or are we once more, like happened with Web 2.0, are we going to miss out. If you look at what has happened, as I said in my speech, on the technology side how science is being communicated now, how scientists are working together, how information is being gathered and shared and all of that -- that's a revolution. If you look back a couple of years ago to the way science was done then. So, for me, the revolution is here. The scientists here need to decide are we going to lead this revolution.'
I couldn't understand the call to action, of which kind of revolution she was talking about. Then also in this Horizon 2020, she's encouraging everybody to get out of the silos because there are problems out there that need to be solved and can't be solved by the system alone and one of the core arguments in collaboration and so. I understand it, I really do, but then again now it's very normative and we expect it to be something, but can we fulfill this expectation when it comes to reality the practices and the dirt we have to go through. . .
It's really interesting the point you make: that revolution and disruption have become normative. This is a very strange place to be. In a sense, we have lived through a revolution. The capacity to connect with people, to share resources, to push information around. It has been a revolution. And a revolution that I feel is unprecedented, possibly in human history. At the same time, at the point when it becomes the mainstream, normative statement about how the world needs to change we're obviously in a process of implementation and of evolution. I think many of us struggle with this term Science 2.0 precisely because we were engaged with it nearly ten years ago when it did seem revolutionary. And now we are in this question of implementation, of tracking, of understanding, of decision-making about what other right choices to make about the systems to create and now we're talking about a revolution. The revolution is already here in a very real sense. The question is the choices we need to make are about what to do about it.
There are definitely some possibilities, but there is definitely also dialectic of the social element, so norms will be something totally open, tools for control. . .
There's a whole series of things in there. I think there's an important concept that I came across as introduced to me by a philosopher called Britt Holbrook. The conception of freedom in two different ways: a positive conception of freedom and a negative conception of freedom and I can't actually remember which one of the two is which. But the point was that there's a conception of freedom which is about the freedom to have no restrictions at all. Which again, very Silicon Valley, disruptive, revolutionary ideology. And then there's a different conception of freedom which is about enabling, which is about understanding what are the restrictions that we accept as a way of enabling us to be able to do certain things. That seems to me to apply to people and to institutions and corporations in a very broad sense.
I'm consistently struck recently by the memory of a poem I studied in school by an Australian poet called Bruce Dawe and the title of the poem was "Only the Beards are Different." The point of the poem was that all of these revolutions in South America, there's a revolution and it's supposed to change things and yet at the end only the beards, the dictator, is different. And there's a very real sense in which revolutions struggle to change the underlying power structures, the underlying freedoms of communities. I do feel that because the pace of change has been enough over the last 10 to 20 years in technology and because we've observed different phases of it, we can actually seen some of the traps that it's easy to fall into, that the consumer space has fallen into, but because the research community is further behind we could, if we were smart enough and organized enough and thoughtful enough, decide to avoid those traps. Some of the ways we would do that is by insuring that the key pieces of infrastructure are owned by the community, that the key underlying information is a community property.
Of course, then we need to talk about what that community is and who gets to take part and what the price of admission is. But I think there are real opportunities, and maybe this happens in every change that occurs in history, but if we choose to learn from the mistakes of the recent past then we stand a real chance of shaping a future in which we can achieve those goals in which collaboration does become the norm, competition is less emphasized, the constraints that we accept on our freedoms and the price we're prepared to pay for services is one we understand and one we actively choose to take part in. As opposed to the system at the moment where you don't know what you're giving up. No one really understands what it is you're giving up when you choose to have a Google account or use Amazon or Yahoo because we don't wrap our heads around what that looks like.
I found this meeting really encouraging in the sense that very senior people are getting some of the key concepts, articulating some of the key concepts and talking about them in terms of collaboration, new forms of assessment, new forms of interaction and engagement in the research space. I think that's really positive. I think it's incumbent on those people who are creating those narratives and starting the process, and this has been going on now for 5, 10, 20 years in many cases. We also need to build the structures that support the right things happening. We've got to build the foundations so that the direction is correct and at some level that's not a democratic sense, it's an assumption that we know what the right thing to do is.
The core should not be based on consensus, but based on leadership? Because open cultures, hacker cultures have a consensus culture. . .
I think we have strong evidence that there are limitations to the scale at which consensus systems of governance can work. There comes a point when you have too many people to reach an overall consensus. So you need to create different mechanisms to make decisions at larger scale. And even at the level when you can reach consensus, you need to inform that consensus and to inform that decision-making and that's the positive way of phrasing it, the negative way of phrasing it would be to say you need to influence, and direct, that consensus or influence the politics at larger scale.
The fundamental challenge of politics, ultimately, is how do we reconcile a desire for consensus with a need for expertise and leadership, those two different things? And how do we reconcile the rights of people to self-determination, to the differences in expertise between people? And I don't think anyone's solved that problem. It's certainly the public engagement with science, the public understanding of science, whatever we want to call it, whatever it should be called, really delves at that problem directly. How do we engage people who have a right to be involved in the decision-making process, but do not have the expertise and maybe do not have the expertise to determine between conflicting, supposedly expert, views with the need for evidence and the need for intelligent and informed decision-making and leadership?
Writing about collaboration is one thing, this experiment in collaboration is another thing. . .I've been really struck by the camera in itself is creating a space. . .
The answer to that is that the world has changed. In my own experience as a supervisor, the world has moved from where it was very much the place that people without the right kind of credentials were never going to make it to the next stage to a place where actually your profile and, in some spaces at least, that profile you gain from being more open and putting out a more diverse range of research outputs in and of itself is what's needed to get to the next stage. That's one part of the story. And I think in the case of the camera the notion of a video culture that people engage with on a day-to-day basis, the expectation that people are engaged on a day-to-day basis with video that has been created both by professional organizations and by people sitting in their bedrooms staring at their computer screen, that was very nascent two years ago. The space that the camera creates today is different to the space, I think, that the camera created two years ago.
You made the comment at one point, on Saturday, that the shape of the camera wasn't what people expected. And that has also changed. The notion that what looks like a still camera is now actually a video camera has changed the way people react too. I think you're right at the center of it when you talk about the creation of spaces. That, to me, is what this is really about. The creation of spaces where communities can convene to talk about, discuss, critique, build things that matter to them.
I think film creates a different space. In particular, I'm often struck by the videos of presentations that are now readily available I very rarely watch. Sometimes I'll watch them at high speed, but the notion of sitting and watching a video of a presentation where I'm no longer in control of the timeframe and it's not the interaction that was meant. This is a representation of a different kind of interaction. So I very much prefer to read transcripts in that setting because it's much easier to get into and to skim and to work through and find the important bits. I think the notion of something which is, I don't even know what the right word is, filmic, is set in the context of a interaction which is designed for the medium. It's something that's, one could quote Marshall McLuhan I suppose, but you end up in that space of having to build the experience for the medium and what's the right way of communicating a particular kind of thought, a particular kind of idea or concept.
Where would you recommend we focus our energy and how?
The thing that in my presentations and my thinking has really helped to focus my attention is two things: one is focusing on telling the story and then the other is turning that on its head and saying 'what is this story? what are the choices of words I'm adopting? what are the choices of words other people are adopting?' So, it's a process of identifying a narrative, pulling that apart and then using what you find from pulling that apart to rebuild it and tell it again. Whether you can do that in 10 or 11 months is an interesting question.
Enough about film. . .it will work out one way or another. . .
So, the problem we have as humans is that we're absolutely intent on fiddling with things. We have to make this choice over that choice, choose this person for the job that person for the job, this project the other project. We're really, really terrible at leaving things alone. And yet, it seems that the answer to this problem of institutionalization, of making things too rigid, of taking the playfulness out of the system, can be solved if we abstract the institution up to a higher level. And so the concrete thing I think we really need to focus on is how do we construct these systems, construct the architecture, construct this public infrastructure so as to support these systems. And I think the important thing, and we've made mistakes on this in the past, is that the tools we use to measure, to assess and to do the research, the data we create and the evidence we use, the processes by which we do it, must remain in the hands of the community, must be a public good.
CollaborativeSociety.org is a site which explores the thinking of researchers, academicians and thought-leaders on the topic of collaboration, among other things. Thanks to Alfred Birkegaard and Katja Carlsen for providing the video content. The contribution of The Collaboration Project is these transcripts.
