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I'm from New Zealand
and you have to pronounce that correctly New Zealand
and
I'm here to talk about the death of the reader
but it's a specific take on the death of the reader
it's talking about the empowerment of the reader
to spot waiting for publishers, in essence
so I'm going to unpack this a little bit. I framed it as the transition from reader
to
collaborative knowledge producer. A little bit of background on me very quickly
I've been an artist, was involved with an organization radio
some years ago. I've been a manager of radio stations
and I sort of found my way into the space of publication
I guess you could say, or knowledge production through floss manuals
an organization I started for production of free manuals about free software
and from this developed platforms for collaborative knowledge productions
book production and also methodologies and one of those being the books print
so the books prints I've been working on for six years or so
I founded this methodology about five and a half, six years ago
and really been exploring it in a lot of different areas
and I just want to unpack that with regards to this idea of not being
a reader anymore
thus the context, so I want to just throw a rope around
what a reader is. I want to define a reader for this instance
and I know readers are many thing, but I want to look at the reader as being
somebody with knowledge needs. So I'm talking outside of the fiction box right now
I'm just talking about books as units of knowledge
and the reader typically being somebody who has knowledge needs, buys a book and
get fulfilled on some level towards satisfying their
goal of learning something or knowing about something
so I want to also define the reader as not necessarily being
someone that consumes what publishers make which is I think
we get confused when we talk about books and knowledge, knowledge artifacts
we confuse this question about what is a book with actually what is
the publishing industries business model. I want to get outside of that. I want to talk
about
the reader as something else, specifically this idea a person with knowledge
needs. It's typically
we think about readers with knowledge needs waiting for knowledge
artifacts to be produced and delivered to them by the publishing industry so this is
what I would
refer to as publishing and I know this is a very specific
take on it. I'm not trying to argue outside of that, I just want to cut off the slither
and just look at this proposition. So I want to
talk about specifically collaborative knowledge produciton where readers don't have to
wait for the delivery of this knowlege, but they can actually work together to meet their
own
knowledge needs, so produce knowledge for their own needs. So you might need a book
on something
so instead of waiting around for the book to come to you form the publisher
that you actually get out there and you make this book for yourself
in a very immersive and interesting way
so this is what I would call collaborative knowledge production
readers producing their own knowledge
and I want to just talk a little bit about you know I've done a lot of quantative
empirical research and I've made a very sophisticated graph here
which represents the colloborative spectrum
and I want to talk about
not about crowdsourcing. I want to put crowdsourcing
at the weak end of a collaborative spectrum and I want to put at the
strong end of the collaborative spectrum other things
one specifically that I want to unpack because this is where I draw my experience
from BookSprints is at the strong end of the collaboration spectrum but it
not the only item. I'm just placing this
case here because this is what I have knowledge of
so weak collaborative knowledge production, I'm not talking about weak in the sense
of it's no good. I'm just talking about its weak collaboration
we typically have thrown a lot into the crowdsourcing pot and said well
that's where all the cool stuff is. We can all get together and things happen
but I would like to put forward the idea that this is weak collaboration
and it's generally a passive model and I'm talking in
generally. It's coordination through technical frameworks often
I'm thinking about this
the here comes everybody kind of ideas. It's little or no human
coordination and it's coordination rather than horizontal
collaboration, isolated producers, small contributions
no shared visions. That's one end and
on the other end I want to talk about strong collaboration which is something more active
It's not passive. The techinical framework is not the coordinating mechanism
it's an enabler for the collaboration to happen, there is strong human
facilitation. This is extremely important. Its intensely connected
contributors, its large contributions, shared vision and
one of the examples is the BookSprints
so for collaborative knowledge to work we must learn the mechanics of the collaborative
spectrum
we must know where on this collaborative knowledge spectrum we must sit ti
derive the kind of knowledge that we need from the resources that we have
I want to go very specifically into one
example. This is an example of strong collaborative knowledge production. This is a small
NGO called Open Oil, a fantastic
NGO. They're all about oil transparency, oil industry transparency
what they call the extractive industries
This is Johnny West, great guy, lives in Berlin. He's the founder
of the NGO Open Oil and Johnny
needs a book. He's been waiting for a book so that he can do workshops
to actually make the oil industry transparent
to people so that they can have a voice in it, they can understand what's going on
because he's in this network, he also realizes that there are other people need this
kind of book. One of them is
Jay Park QC. He's a managing partner. This is a real
story, I should say. I didn't deliberately choose people
that you think would not normally collaborate
but I kind of did, but it's from a true story. So Jay
great guy, managing partner at Park Engery Law and Petrolium Regimes
Advisory. This is a snippet from his CV
and he is the instructor of a petroleum traditional
international petroleum transactions course at the University of Calgary
He's been around for a long time. He's been on all sides of the fence and
he's an oil contract lawyer.
He needs a book because he teaches this stuff and he needs a textbook
to get it in front of people so that they actually have a textbook. They're no textbook
out
there that will suit his needs to teach this kind of material
and there are other people out there in this network that they reach out to
and this is again a very interesting
cross-section because this is not necessarily the kinds of people you think about
when you think about intensive collaboration. You know multinational oil
company lawyers. People like Peter Eigan
head of transparency international, he needs a book. Cindy Kroon
Again these are all part of the network. She needs a book for the World Bank.
Herbert M'cLeod needs a book. He's from Sierra Lione. Susan Maples
a legal advisor to the liberian president
Jeff Peters of corporate counsel
Nadine Stiller from GIZ in Deutschland
Lynn is from an NGO in Uganda. Sebastian who's actually a
environmental contract lawyer and N--- who's a
legal advisor to Azerbaijan's state oil company
These people, very high-level people who know this stuff
intimately all from different sides of the fence, watchdogs, oil companies
and governments
and they all deal with oil contracts and they all want
material to explain how oil contracts work so they can all do their job better
So what do they do?
They hire a small castle, they hire me
and they don't wait for the publisher's importantly
They decide to make the book themselves, the book they need
and the readers produce a knowledge
by this strong collaborative knowledge production method that I'm talking
about. So this is what it looks like in essence. It's a strongly facilitated
process. These people that I showed you in this
previous screenshots all getting together and working together in a very intensive and
merciful way. So it's a fascinating process and I was
taking the photos so you can't seem me but I would be here
and they're paying such
attention to what I'm telling them
but it's a fascilitated process but a very egalitarian process like brining
all of these people to the same table on the same plane and taking
them through a collaborative knowledge production process in this instance to create an
artifact and I'll talk about that in just a little bit. This is just some
ambient shots of this process
One of the most important things
in this kind of process is literally breaking bread together, sitting together and eating
talking about things, living together in the same room
in the castle, working together and eating together
And just some photographs of the process
So they make a book. They go to this small castle just outside of Berlin
schloss and they conceptualize the book, so they go
there with the title, they go their with the network and that's it.
and then they conceptualize the book. They kind of have title, subtitle
oil contracts: how to read and understand them. They get together
they conceptualize it, facilitated through the process of understanding the
scope of what they can achieve in that period and what this book is gonna be and who
it's for. They write it. They illustrate it. I had a picture of and illustrator
there, Lynn Harris, who was part of this and they proofread it
They edit it. They do everything. At the end of the process
they send it to the printer. They product epub, mobi
screen formatted PDF, everything that they need to do
They do this all in five days and they produce this
knowledge artifact which I would call a book in this instance and the book being very
important in this area because it's good for finding grants, it's good for
putting on the table at workshops, it's good for acquittals, it's good for outreach, it's
good for textbooks
all of this stuff. It's a unit of knowledge that people understand and has a transactional
value. And it's successful.
So we all know downloads. I can't tell you how much of that is spambots
but 49,800 this is a very specific niche that
these guys are fulfilling with this content. So at least we can think they's a
significant percentage of that that is going to the right place but the most important
thing
about this is that they're fulfilling the knowledge needs of their constituency and
that
they are the best people to do that because they are the reader. They are the consumers
of this material. They know what they need and they also know the information
they have it all together and they bring it to this book, so they're fulfilling
their own needs. They fulfilling the needs of the constituency. Much more important
than sales or download numbers in these kinds of instances
It's being translated already. There is a second BookSprint lined up
for mining contracts. There are two more localization
BookSprints. Now this is very interesting. This looked at
I think, eight different oil regions, this book and
generalized it into what a general
generic oil contract might look like and how you would understand it. So now they're taking
this and their taking it to specific countries and taking it to people locally
and doing the same thing again, using that as the base point but using
but localizing it and looking at specific issues to generate another book using
the first book as the baseline content and making it
specific to their country. So this is why, for example, Peter
here, pictured left, is very interested in it because he wants to do this for Nigeria
He's part of the extractive industries transparency initiative
and he couldn't get a book and the book in this instance, this is a book, you can hold
it and print it out, but he didn't have a
copy of the perfect bound book, couldn't get it, so Johnny printed one
off and what was interesting in the e-mail that I got from Johnny about this is that
Peter then asked Johnny to sign it, this print out
So this has the transactional value. This has
authority that people are so worried about what is a book and where is this
authority going. This book has that authority in my opinion from what I understand
from the people inside of the sector. And it's not just a book
It's a website. It's a PDF. It's a print out.
And it's been used for teaching and outreach
and it's been used by, I can't say who, by one of the evil
empire oil companies for induction training, interestingly
and it's been used by Peter. So I want to say
I just want to pause at this point that we don't have to think of this model of
book and everything, the ecology that we have understand that's associated
around it in terms of non-fiction works, in terms of
the authoritive publisher creating a work and then delivering it to you
and you're waiting there for that
book and there it comes
and you're happy to have it at last
or it didn't quite suit your needs. You needed something that was just
a little bit more about
this
that actually you don't have tot
be that person that just consumes what publishers make. You can actually be
someone with knowledge needs and not wait for
it to be delivered
but actually produce that knowledge yourself and
I think
this idea
of taking responsibility for our own knowledge needs and producing these artifacts
through strong collaborative knowledge production
I personally believe has
a massive and very interesting future
and I'm happy to talk to anyone further about
that that wants to
here me rant. Thank you.