Talk (download pdf) invited at Quality of Experience in New Media Landscape
Seminar, R2D2 Networks – project
29. June 2011 9:00 – 12:00
SINTEF, Forskningsveien 1, Oslo
Title: Engagement through Art and Open Source Software
Project ArTe www.artentnu.com
Abstract
Science and technology communication is important to recruit young
students to scientific studies and to increase awareness of technology
issues among citizens in the society and decision makers. Software
science and technology communication poses specific challenges as
software is by its nature not tangible and not visible. Our argument
is that Science in Society events which gather artists, developers,
researchers, and citizens around an Open Source Software project,
are effective for both communicating open source software issues to a
broad audience and for collecting open documentation that has both
research and artistic value. This paper examines four projects that
have been designed according to a combination of both practical and
research goals. For each of these projects, one or more artists played
a significant role. Moreover, we collected open documentation and
published it on blogs and other open platforms. Retrospectively, we
drew on performativity theory to reflect about the research questions
that guided our study. The analysis of the collected data lead to
our results. Our results suggest a model based on: 1) a stakeholder
model for Science in Society Open Source Software events where
stakeholders are artists, developers, researchers, and citizens; 2) a
open documentation model for open source software events where
documentation consists of a patchwork of words, still and moving
images, music and sound, and digital code.
Letizia Jaccheri 