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This website documents the genesis and progress of my master thesis with the title

Urban spatial information as commons: Potentials of mobile communication
for peer based "produsage"

I will try to merge scholarship with grassroots activism by looking at applied mobile communication methods used by social movements or communities/people for their struggle in urban areas.

The thesis will draw upon the concept of the network-society which provides the theoretical background and the self-conception of the thesis and a case study whose aim is to deploy a small and lowcost d.i.y. text-messaging and digital map system in cooperation with a local community or local people in São Paulo/Brasil. This system shall be used by the people, for the people, according to their local context, ideas and wishes. It provide means to gather information submited by text messages and display them on a map of the local urban environment. The information on the map could then be used by the people to analyse the displayed information and initiate and realize steps that could lead to change or improvement of percieved problems but could also be used to further push already good things forward.

A more elaborated introduction into the whole topic can be found at the Introduction page.

This thesis is going to be writen at the Institue of Technology and Resources Management in Tropics and Subtropics (ITT) at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Johannes Hamhaber.

In order to answer the research question of this thesis,
the following overall objective and the corresponding sub-objectives
shall be achieved:

Implementation and analysis of the
methodology that allows the community based mapping of the urban
environment in a peer-2-peer “produsage” process.

Determination
of the theoretical concepts for the intended produsage process.

Produsage
of an indicator system that takes the restrictions of mobile phones
and the structure of the communities’ urban environment into account.

Produsage
of a (digital) map that is fed with urban spatial information from
mobile phones.

Knowledge
exchange with the community.

Documentation
of the produsage processes and creation of a corresponding info-kit
as possible guideline for similar projects.

This
master thesis will be placed within the framework of the
network-society. The network-society allows many-to-many
communication, self-production, -publishing, -usage and facilitate
social change from the grassroots level. Several related concepts are
therefore important for this research:

Self-production
and usage means that we become produsers,
producer and user at the same time (Bruns,2009). Produsage also means
that information creation and usage is peer based, which assembles
the network-society’s concept of many-to-many communication.
Peer-based means that a network of interconnected people continuously
creates, changes and uses information (P2P
Foundation, 2009).
By nature, this information is common because everyone can access
these information without restriction (P2P
Foundation, 2010).
Peer-based also means decentralized, thus no central instance exist
that determines the purpose of the network.

The
network of interest for this master thesis connects people by mobile
phones. We have seen that mobile communication is the most widespread
technology which should allow many people to construct such a
network. Mobile communication is considered as the suitable tool to
form a peer-based network of people that produses common information
in order to provoke social change according to their needs and their
local context.

The
geographical focus of this thesis will be put on the urban
environment because the highly urbanized conglomerations of our time
are the place of highest disparity between rich and poor and host the
majority of the worlds population. At the same time, a large number
of social organisation and struggle can be found in this areas, ie.
local communities, cooperatives and urban (social) movements. As
shown earlier, urban areas are also those areas with the highest
concentration of mobile phone subscribers which is a prerequisite to
allow peer-based mobile phone networks to emerge.

Coming
finally back to the meaning of information itself it was shown that
information is the main good of the network-society. Information
represent political messages if they can reach the members of
society, because society construct itself around available
information, thus their public availability can be used to exercise
social power. It is therefore necessary to make information
available. When considering the urban environment, user generated
digital maps can be used to publish common information and
simultaneously provide the means to analyse and reuse them in order
to develop strategies for social change. This leads to the research
question of this thesis:

Can
mobile communication be used to map the urban environment of a
community in a peer-based “produsage” process?

The purpose of the following text is to give an overview about the
worldwide rise digital activism to provoke social change with a special emphasis on mobile phone activism. It is work in progress and by
far not complete
yet. This initial version is based on the corresponding
paragraphs written for the research proposal of this thesis. 

The current text tries to classifiy different forms of mobile activism according to existing projects and movements that facilitates mobile phones in their struggle. The classification is currently somewhat limited and needs to be elaborated further. The main aim is to get a rough overview about the context in which mobile phones are used more frequently (such as advocacy or crisis monitoring to name just a few) and in which areas mobile phones are not used yet used so frequently.

Read the rest of this entry »

The purpose of the following text is to give an overview about the worldwide rise of information and communication technology (ICT) with particular emphasis on the spread of mobile phones in Africa, South-America and Asia. It is work in progress and by far not complete
yet. This initial version is based on the corresponding
paragraphs written for the research proposal of this thesis. 

Read the rest of this entry »

The purpose of the following text is to introduce the theory of the network-society which provides the theoretical framework for the master thesis. It is work in progress and by far not complete yet. This initial version is based on the corresponding paragraphs writen for the research proposal of this thesis. 

Read the rest of this entry »

here are the first drafts for objectives and hypothesis of the master thesis that were assembled after some thinking

Read the rest of this entry »