View source for ISpace


=Description=

Ron Eglash and Ellen Foster:

"iSpace is located in downtown Accra and is a place for local creators and innovators to meet-up and work on their projects using a collective space and some shared tools. It has been host to civic hack-a-thons, including a hack4good event in July of 2014 which brought together individuals with expertise in computer programming, information technology, the medical world and beyond to work on local problems within the field of medicine. The goal of the meet-up was to have technologists talk to medical workers to find out their needs in terms of an opensource IT platform. The dialogues that transpired also made the technologists aware of the different special knowledges to formulate helpful technologies for their local communities. The iSpace initiative is focused on building local economies, but they are also invested in helping to foster alternative educational practices and skill-sharing beyond these innovation endeavors (About iSpace). They hope to build skillsets and possible economies from the ground-up to ensure local economic stability and growth, one hub at a time. The founders of iSpace, Fiifi Baidoo and Josiah Eyison, have IT and entrepreneurial backgrounds, and they are supportive of both open source code and a kind of spatial open source; they see community-oriented spaces built from the ground-up as equally essential. There is a recognition across African countries regarding the importance of these places and their malleability for supporting various initiatives. Josiah Eyison is confident in the Ghanaian people to create change from within, and generate more value through creative practice, focusing on ground-up technological transformation instead of hoping for policy or governmental action from above to foster technological development.

There is, of course, a double-edged sword in the independence of these initiatives: a neo-liberal ideology would jump upon these programs as justification for withdrawing government support.  However once we start thinking of generative justice as orthogonal to the ideological spectrum, we can see how both conservative and liberal political perspectives can be held accountable for providing support. Meyer (2014) for example notes that the issue of Net Neutrality--preventing internet service providers from charging variable rates depending on use or content--has attracted supporters at both ends of the spectrum. Research on  policies for supporting generative justice -- legal support for open source, institutions for fostering civic organizations, public use spaces, etc.--are both unexplored and critical to advancing its spread."
([https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YzzuH10iVm8QgYSccV5s6cRbLpFS-0jckG_Zv_w0DgY/edit])

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