Warren Sack


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Peer to PCAST: What does open video have to do with open government?

16th January 2013, 3:00 - 4:30 pm
Amphi Saphir, Télécom ParisTech - 46 rue Barrault Paris 13 - Metro Corvisart (how to get there ?)

Abstract

The Obama Administration has outlined a set of principles and practices to support Open Government in which citizens can collaborate with the government to solve problems. The Administration is using technology, especially web-based technology, to support Open Government in practice. Many of the government’s websites include video. We examine the website built to support the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST). We critique it and argue that a number of important design decisions made for the current site should be changed to better support Open Government. Key to our argument is what has come to be known as Open Video, an application of the ideals of Open Source Software to video. Our critique is followed by a discussion of a prototype system we have built to demonstrate an alternative to the current PCAST site. Our prototype is called Peer-to-PCAST to call attention to the similarities between our proposals and Peer-to-Patent, the first Open Government system built for a different context, the US Patent and Trademark Office (Noveck, 2009).


Biography

Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Associate Director of the Data & Democracy Initiative at UC CITRIS (University of California, Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society); and, for 2012-2013, a visiting researcher at Télécom ParisTech. He earned a B.A. from Yale College and an S.M. and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. Warren's writings on new media and computer science have been published widely and his art work has been shown at the ZKM|Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the artport of the Whitney Museum of American Art; and, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.