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Copy file name to clipboardExpand all lines: _posts/2024-02-07-cultures-of-science-technology.md
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@@ -10,19 +10,26 @@ _Back in August of last year, I wrote a blog that aimed to collect (or at least
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Scientific research is not the same as technological development – their cultures, norms, and practices are different. But it took me a while to understand this.
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I first approached this kind of work from the lens of Science and Technology Studies (STS). STS is an interdisciplinary field that emerged in [the interwar period](https://sts.hks.harvard.edu/about/whatissts.html) when historians, sociologists, and scientists took a growing interest in understanding how science and technology was influencing society.
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I first approached this kind of work from the lens of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and as an ethnographer. STS is an interdisciplinary field that emerged in [the interwar period](https://sts.hks.harvard.edu/about/whatissts.html) when historians, sociologists, and scientists took a growing interest in understanding how science and technology was influencing society.
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When I became a community manager, in many ways, I was guilty of merging the two together. I assumed that scientific practice and technological development were one and the same.
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Since completing my MA, I have moved from ethnographer to practitioner. When I became a community manager, in many ways, I was guilty of merging the two together. I learned that while I had once conflated scientific research with technological development, their institutional cultures, incentive structures, and epistemic norms differ in crucial ways. Similar cultural differences seemed to apply in the context of hardware engineers as opposed to software developers, often collectively grouped under as STEM professionals.
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I gave a talk at the [Data Justice conference](https://zenodo.org/records/8060167) in 2023 where I tried to tease out these differences, which stemmed from my own experience in the open ecosystem. In many ways, I was trying to understand
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I gave a talk at the [Data Justice conference](https://zenodo.org/records/8060167) in 2023 where I tried to tease out these differences, which stemmed from my own experience in the open ecosystem.
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![[/images/Screenshot 2025-11-06 at 19.54.33.png]]
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I gave an updated version of this paradigm later on during that summer, at [['Moving frontiers of the demos: Enfranchisement, youth participation, and digital technologies'](https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/programmes/moving-frontiers-demos-enfranchisement-youth-participation-and-digital-technologies)](https://zenodo.org/records/8063396).
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This significantly expanded my framework, describing funding, their roles, and the crises that defined them.
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![[/images/Screenshot 2025-11-06 at 20.02.16.png]]
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It was interesting d
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Over time, I also came to understand how “openness” emerged as a response to the crisis of reproducibility in scientific research, reflecting not just technical challenges, but broader anxieties around public trust and accountability.
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In my experience, documentation (ranging from reports to guidebooks to other informal notes) has often served to mediate this both internally and externally, a phenomenon I know might be useful to analyse through the lens of ‘audit cultures’ (_[a la Marilyn Strathern](https://www.routledge.com/Audit-Cultures-Anthropological-Studies-in-Accountability-Ethics-and-the-Academy/Strathern/p/book/9780415233279)_)
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I'm keen to see how my thinking of this develops over time. My research and applied experiences have sharpened my conviction that humanitarian technologies – often piloted on the most vulnerable – serve as “canaries in the coal mine” for wider technological governance.
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In my experiences so far, questions of trust, accountability, and legitimacy that arise in humanitarian contexts seem to be precursors to issues that later surface in more mainstream settings.
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But the technologies that are developed by and for open scientists? That's another question entirely.
Copy file name to clipboardExpand all lines: _posts/2024-02-10-brussels.md
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layout: post
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title: brussels over the years
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title: "experiencing (open) culture(s) en bruxelles: from transmediale to FOSDEM"
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date: 2024-02-10 23:00:00 +0000
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category: blog
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# Experiencing (open) culture(s) en Bruxelles: from Transmediale to FOSDEM
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I first came to Brussels in March 2022 for the Rendering Research workshop at Transmediale, an annual festival for art and digital culture that usually takes place in Berlin. Miriam Mathiessen, my collaborator at the time was there with me. We shared a presentation about [ideologies that shape open knowledge projects](), later publishing an "anti-paper" about open knowledge and [maintenance approaches to knowledge-making](https://aprja.net/article/view/134303).
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During that trip, we saw a version of the city that more closely resembled the Bruxelles that Miriam grew up with (while not Belgian, she spent the majority of her life in the city). At this workshop, we made risographs for the first time, and learned that a university website can be [hosted on a wiki](https://wiki.erg.be/m/), and that clothes make great lampshades.
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