kyle /danm 210 /projects /twinkle

The 'Twinkle' Project

twinkle homepage

First, some Background:

Though this project will pull on my skills as an artist and theorist, it is quite centrally rooted in my background in activism. All of the organizations that I have been involved with for the past ten years have used consensus-based decision making as a way to engage all of the stake-holders in participatory cultures of action. Consensus, it must be said, is not glamorous, and far from perfect, but it is, I believe, the best strategy that we've got for undermining capitalist cultures of representation (including representational politics, i.e. 'democracy'). Consensus works something like this:

If we are all a decision making body, and there is something that needs to be decided, one person would act as a 'facilitator' (guiding the meeting) and call on individuals to present their thoughts on the topic. The discussion is geared towards making a proposal. In order for a proposal to become policy all members present must approve (or "consense") the proposal. The benefits of this process include more active participation of members, larger pools of knowledge to draw on, and a non-hierarchical culture of communication that values the voice of each member equally. Ideally this serves to undermine the prevailing tendency in our society to have decisions made by few (typically wealthy, white, male) people or by what is referred to in the anarchist milieu as "the tyranny of the majority".

Consensus-based decision making is known for being a somewhat arduous process. One feature that can exasperate the length of meetings is the tendency of members to repeat one another or to add themselves to the speaker's list (the "stack") in order to make mundane or non-productive comments. Various organizations have developed myriad strategies for counteracting these tendencies while maintaining a healthy consensus culture.

Project Narrative:

• Thesis:

This project will focus on non-verbal communication strategies used by non-hierarchical organizations (co-ops, collectives, affinity groups, etc). In particular, there are a number of hand signals that are used by such groups during their consensus-based meetings that serve to convey thoughts or feelings without engaging the long process of waiting one's turn to speak. My intentions here are two-fold:

1. 1. to advocate for the spread of these strategies amongst such organizations and the greater world, and
   2. to explore the origins and morphology of such communication strategies, and publish my findings.

• Key Concepts:

  1. Non-hierarchical communication strategies form the backbone of effective collaboration; it is difficult for me to imagine serious discussion of 'participatory culture' that does not critique and attempt to alter the undemocratic communication strategies of our present-day, non-participatory culture.
  2. Collaborative input as to the history, shape, and use of these hand signs amounts to a collective research endeavor that would never be possible without the networking potentials of the internet and the collaborative structures made affordable by 'Web 2.0 Technologies'.
  3. The use of these strategies themselves both mirrors, and, I suspect, prefigures, theories of simultaneity and 'communities of affinity' that proliferate amongst web-philosophers.

• User Interface:

Individuals and organizations will be solicited to participate in the project through networks of personal contacts, existing web-based resources for consensus decision making, and the social networking sites. The website will consist of a list of known hand-signals--their use, what is known about their history, and discussion of how use varies from organization to organization--as well as graphic representation of each hand-signal. There should be a substantial wiki portion of the each sub-page so that users can amend the information presented about each hand sign, as well as a clear request that more hand-signals be added to the list. Some gardening will be required.

• Possible Deliverables:

  1. functional wiki with active community of user/researchers.
  2. web publishing of research related to the origins and morphology of one or more such hand signals.
  3. large scale digital prints of graphic representations of the hand signals, including textual elements (agitational propaganda)
  4. artist book/'zine archiving status of wiki at end of fall 2008 quarter.
  5. a wikipedia entry on 'hand-signals (in consensus decision making)'.

Design Narrative:

This project came out of a personal desire to understand the etymological background of the hand-signals that I have come to accept as common place. My initial inclination was simply to develop a web-community of folks who are familiar with the primary hand-signal of interest, the 'twinkle', and then utilize that community as a research base to explore the histories of the 'twinkle'. Though the scope of the project has grown somewhat, I still believe it to be something that can deliver worth-while results in a short time-frame (Fall quarter 2008) with very little need for funding or outside support. My hope is that other people engaged in consensus based decision making will be as intrigued by these questions of origins and morphology as I am, and that, together, we can source out the histories at hand and make those histories accessible to broader communities of users. There are a fair number of small-press and web publications in existence that mention some of these hand-signals in passing, and one (Shared Path, Shared Goals, anon.) that includes extensive discussion of the hand-signals used by the collective(s) that the author was familiar with. There is no existing comprehensive list of such hand signs, and, to my knowledge, no one has ever suggested before that the morphology of such signs could be researched. The design for this project is imagined as a non-hierarchical community of users. The results will be published as collective commons and anyone is free to utilize--and republish--the resources for his/her own (non-profit) needs. All of this neatly mirrors the structure of collectives and participatory decision making bodies, and only makes sense when dealing with folks who have background in collective endeavors.

Design Documents:

See website

Development Timeline:

• The conceptual framework of the project is, barring suggestions, largely in place as of 10.4.08.
• The site that I have linked here is, admittedly, a pretty shoddy prototype of the site that will exist. I plan to have a more complete--and attractive--site up within the next two weeks.
• The various deliverables will be ready for presentation at different points, beginning this quarter, and will be constructed concurrently.
• In addition to the ('volunteer') assistance from the community of users, I may require consultation with someone with experience building and maintaining websites/wikis. I imagine that, with a little arm twisting, I can find that person from within my DANM cohort.

Budget:

The major foreseeable cost will be printing the posters and artist books/'zines. This cost will be dramatically offset by our (DANM) access to the large format digital printers in the Cave (Art Dept.).

Assuming that the project continues to be viable and worthwhile, and planning for slow growth (in terms of user generated content and number of users), web-hosting of the site will be required in the future. For now, it is hosted on the DANM server.

Because of the, shall we say, "interdisciplinary" nature of the research (thinking about this project has, at various points, begged the question, "but is it Art?", even of me, rarely one to worry about such distinctions) there may be funding opportunities from other academic fields or organizations with interest in increasing the scope of consensus-based decision making. I am thinking specifically here of the Community Studies Department here at UCSC and the North American Student Cooperative Organization (NASCO) respectively.