A response to the Open Objects Initiative and the Cross-Cultural Partnership, both presented at the conference Subversion, Conversion, Development organized by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, 2008.
I must begin by saying that though this is a critique, to a degree, of the OOI, I largely agree with the underlying goals and principles of the OOI. Certainly, all good thinking people must agree that there is a fundamental asymmetry between ownership, access and use of knowledge, especially in regard to marginalized and indigenous communities. In fact, these asymmetries run very deep and extend very widely to most people within society. It is a myth that contemporary programmes of collaboration, as well as the prototypic "open access" media "-- the web, are symmetric. Knowledge is a prime commodity and, as with all commodities today, it is fiercely sought after and huge resources are invested to appropriate and control it. Insidious programmes of control, such as the Semantic Web, are marketed as improved means for accessing the world of knowledge. However, they are little more than thinly disguised means for a Wellsian technocratic control and appropriation of diverse and sovereign knowledges.
In this sense, the OOI is to be applauded. It is one more initiative that seeks to explicitly recognize and support the diversity and sovereignty of knowledge communities. However, in this programme, I find some fundamental asymmetries. I must also say that it is a bit difficult to comment fully on the OOI as there is little information available. The OOI website offers little explanation, and the workshops and downloads of the site almost universally meet with a 404 error. However, there is enough to see that there are fundamental confusions underlying the project.
The About page of the OOI website tells us that the OOI "is a consortium of researchers and institutions driven by a desire to address questions of openness and diversity as they relate communication and exchange across cultural divides.", and that this is to be achieved through a concern for how groups "intersect through objects". Again, this is to be applauded, but it goes on to say that:
This expresses clearly my first concern with the OOI. It is the "provide deeper insights" bit that concerns me. I have seen nothing from the OOI that speaks of ensuring that these communities have the means for local archiving and managing their local knowledge, for creating and promoting those programmes that ensure real symmetry between knowledge communities in the access to, use of and ownership of knowledge, nor for the programmes and protocols that will ensure symmetry of control when different knowledge communities actually meet over these objects. The impression that I get from the statements on the OOI webpage is strongly appropriative. That the real goal is to gain a, different, academic understanding of how people do meaning. In my experience, it is just this programme of research objectification that most of the communities that I work with object to.
What most knowledge communities want is not just to be taken seriously, not just to have their forms of knowledge recognized, and its authority recognized, but also the right and the means to control and manage who can speak about their knowledge ”" to stop the Western Liberal programme of speaking and performing for others ”" of appropriating these statements and performances. I am sure that the members of the OOI will say that they have no such intentions, and I would happily accept that they mean it. However, their programmes suggest that they are proceeding down just this track, no matter how unintentionally.
An example of this is the Cross Cultural Partnership Agreement Template. Though, again, seemingly laudable, this project suffers from just the issue I raise above, that of creating a generic, universal template for use by diverse, sovereign and competent knowledge communities, from just those people who are not locally involved. Though I recognize that the document is intended as a 'boundary object' between the diverse needs of collaborating communities and the law, it remains an example of the error of generalization. Not only does it not recognize that for the majority of indigenous communities, today, there is sufficient legal expertise to cover these situations, but that real symmetry is achieved not through global generalizations, but through local negotiations and the creation of local objects (by which I mean local, negotiated agreements). Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) have filled this role for over 20 years, and are now the preferred legal document for collaborations with Native American and First Nation peoples. Where more formal contracts are needed, and the CCPA is but a contract, these groups have legal departments who are well skilled in drafting them for the local needs and cultural requirements.
However, the real failing of the CCPA, in my mind, is that it seems to accept, uncritically and unreflectively, that a local collaborative negotiation between some academics, some legal experts and some local communities, can be generalized for diverse and incommensurable national if not global collaborations. This is the typical Western and Enlightenment assumption applied, that underlying all objects, all practices, all social communication is s set of, largely if not universally, transcendent principles. It may seem absurd that I am invoking enlightenment assumptions in this day and age, but simply because we are dazzled by the pastiche of a post-enlightenment critique, does not mean that these transcendental assumptions do not remain built into the fabric of our cultural practices, nor that these practices do not remain a form of philosophical colonization. They remain programmes of imposing one set of cultural assumptions onto others, and they do not promote symmetry, they denies it.
Today, the key issue in knowledge management and IPR is not the creation of standardized modes, meta-descriptions and forms of practice, but of ensuring, often under law, the rights of individuals, communities and institutions to the ownership as well as the local control and means of distribution of their knowledge. This too goes beyond Copyright, but not in the direction of Copyleft. It is moving, clumsily, toward a realization that whole new means are needed to ensure the preservation of the local means of knowledge production, use and reproduction that do not demand of it the role of a universal resource.
So what is the alternative? There are certainly many, but one critical feature must be that in any collaboration, any meeting of diverse knowledge communities, over objects or not, must first deal with the issues of symmetric power. It must deal with the issues of individual and cultural privacy, community ownership and rights to the dissemination and performance of that knowledge. Power of the control and rights not just to their knowledge, but to the means of ownership, expression and distribution of that knowledge. Also to the rights to determine and manage who can speak for that knowledge community. To this end, I feel that the concept of a Contact Zone, in Jim Clifford's sense rather than Marie-Louise Pratt's sense, is a more useful concept to the one that seems to be promoted by the OOI of observing the performance of the Other while being sympathetic to their difference, but of largely ignoring the real asymmetries of that engagement. Contact Zones, in Clifford's sense, promotes the idea of a symmetric space, where communities with quite incommensurable ontologies meet on largely equal terms. Where the communities have ultimate control over not only what they say and how they say it, but over its performance for an 'outside' community. It is this that is critical, the recognition that the presentation, the performance, of knowledge is as much a part of knowledge as is its content, and that symmetry must be extended to performance as much as to content. It is here that I find the OOI fundamentally lacking.