This took way too long for me to discover. Open Source | Open Access at University of Toronto may be the answer to many of the questions I’ve been looking for.
Firstly, I’ve been grappling with this damn Mozilla / POL 108 project and attempting to figure out a place for MUG@TU (or any of the several other projects I’ve got going on up here (by which I mean my brain)). Open Source | Open Access seems like as good a place as any to plug into.
Secondly, I’ve been looking to start (or revive) a cross-disciplinary open source / IT association here at UofT and I think I may have found my org. OSOAUT isn’t dead, but it certainly doesn’t have the vitality that it could.
It seems to be more academic and research oriented than I think it should be.
Moreover, I think I could represent the IR / P&C faculties pretty strongly in this arena and push to get some research/tools developed within the structure as a vast majority of the research seems very dedicated to the natural sciences.
The Citizen’s Lab, which is the civil society flipside to the kind of things I want to study, would be a brilliant partner for the kind of organization I would like to form. The irony of course is that mine would have to be a grassroots organization whereas the Citizens Lab has financing and official support from the Uni.
Discussing the opportunities for ICT and the social sciences is a discussion worth having and one that I don’t think is happening enough - particularly outside the confines of the firm.
Knowledge management, decision support, data mining, text mining, social network analysis tools and other software shouldn’t be foreign, scary or useless to future politicos. They need to learn this stuff to hold competitive edge over a) the entrenched Gen Xers and Boomers and b) the uber-wealthy tech business people who won’t be staying out of politics for very long.
Bill Gates 2.0 is coming and he won’t be content with just starting a charity.