To see the Scratch Cat rolling through the floors of the MIT Media Lab does not happen quite often. However, for some especial events and adventures the orange cat rolls down the halls with confidence and glamour holding the Scratch flag. The especial occasion last weekend was the Scratch day, a celebration of the Scratch […]
Continue reading →Although the marketing campaign and the creation of the OS revolution have been a success regarding the mainstreaming the OS label and the creation of a grand narrative around the OS mode of production, they can be criticized because their modern aspirations. The mere intention of creating a myth that relies in the idea of […]
Continue reading →Open Source (OS) can be associated with several things, a community, a movement, a revolution, a mode of production, a culture, a non-propietary computer software. Its wide connotations make open source difficult to grasp, to comprehend. In this essay I reconstruct the OS revolution as a modern mythmaking process and elaborate a critique of it. […]
Continue reading →OSM in Action. During the six years of history, the OSM project has been able to grow thanks to the volunteer work of an active community of amateur mappers and developers. Although this community is geographically dispersed around the world, it has organized itself in several localized projects. In the OSM wiki it is possible […]
Continue reading →In July of 2004, Steve Coast, a 24-year-old British computer scientist and entrepreneur, started OpenStreetMap (OSM) with the objective of creating a free editable map of the world. Tired of the problems data proprietary companies generate by the restricting geographical information (In the UK, as in other European countries, geographic information is very expensive and […]
Continue reading →On January 12 2010, after the catastrophic earthquake (magnitude 7.0 Mw) near Port au Prince that triggered a humanitarian crisis, hundreds of volunteers distributed across the globe worked together to create an updated and complete digital map of Haiti. Using computers, photographic imagery, and the tools from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, they were able to […]
Continue reading →Children-Computer Symbiosis and the Reinvention of Childhood Since the 1950s, researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and computer science, were asking questions about how humans learn and think. At university laboratories they were designing theories of the mind and imagining machines that could think and augment human intelligence. One of the most influential […]
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