Call me Al: Alison Powell on Community and Technology

Sleeping in my own skin

On Sunday night at 8:15 pm I woke up in the back of a car, blinked, and saw the the lights of St-Leonard off the Metropolitain.

At 7:45pm I fell asleep speeding south out of the mountains.

Before that there was no time, just sun and clouds, and blackberries hot from the sun falling into my mouth, and water. Mountains all around. And up the hill a fire and some slow jazz, and people I didn't know last week, but who cares, really, if there is no time you are always a part of someone else's story. Today, or yesterday, or next week. For a while. And then you are not, and you blink and see the lights, and see that even if everything is changed you are still sleeping in your own skin, wherever that might be.

Ghosts like the cooler weather

. . . so says Hawksley Workman. I think it's time to get my ghosts out of the closet, to let them walk around a bit so I can see what they're made of before they disappear again into the back of my mind. It's also time to end the madness of summer and settle into what is most important in my life -- thinking and working and developing projects that reflect what it is I can do.

I'm working on a propsal to determine the cultures of development and use of open-source software -- there seems to be a gap in the literature concerning "bottom-up" development as culturally speaking the developers don't think of themselves as users. I want to try and think about this more.

My trip to London also made me think more about the intersections of culture and policy with grassroots tech development. The German wireless community groups like Freifunk are purposefully decentralized; there seems to be a political motivation for this linked to postwar German culture.

Food for thought, and thought is the theme of the month.

. . . and on the mountain

Away from the books, Saturdays are a heady mix of sun, snow, mud, leaves and sky, with excellent and charming company to boot. From theory -- “wait, hasn’t Latour gone back on actor-network theory – oh, watch out for that tree” – to practice -- “Technology is useless! Do you have the trail map?” – it’s a pleasure to play. Thank you to Antoine, Steph, Anne, Agnès and Eric for proof that there’s more to life than the city.

Happy International Women's Day

Was I born a feminist, or am I always growing into being one? Sure, I was born a woman, but as we all know, that's neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for being a feminist. Many women won't or can't call themselves feminists. My brothers and some good male friends are what I would call feminists, in that they are aware of their inherent privilege, work to live with it and to mobilize it against injustices (individual, systemic) that affect women.

I am a feminist myself in that I try to do this too, even though I sometimes find myself unwittingly participating in situations where sexism and patriarchy are reinforced. In these moments I remember that being feminist is not about proclamation, but about action -- beginning in our everyday lives and practices but grounded in social justice. So, today, on International Women's Day, I would like to provide some reminders of why we, women and men, still need feminism. For our bodies, our selves, our work and our lives.

Wisdom

From Marcel Proust's Within a Budding Grove :

"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness, which no one can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world."

I am feeling a bit wiser these days. Older, sadder, wiser. But in the end, better.

My favorite police state (OR: Who is the media?)

May Day we took a day off and took to the streets to support fair labour laws, human rights, and the right to peaceful protest. Red flags in the street, yellow police jackets on the sidewalks. It seems the British still have the right to protest -- sometimes. But certainly not anonymously. With all this camera equipment on the sidelines, the exercise became as well-documented as a trip through the London Underground -- never far from the camera's eyes. But as InnerHippy found out last time he took pictures of the cops, the right to record doesn't seem to extend to everyone . . .

In front of the Houses of Parliament, protest is another matter. It's recently been made illegal within 100 m of the buildling. The BBC explains that most protests now try to draw attention to this fact. I decided to find out more. With my best Canadian accent, I asked these police officers whether it was really true that the British no longer had the right to protest. One of them carefully explained that they could protest, but only after filing paperwork with the police detailing the number and identity of protesters. Why? "To prevent just anyone from coming up and protesting". Of course.

All those other lives I never lived

I recently applied for a conference to be held in Montreal in May. The brochure for the conference was illustrated with "typical" Montreal images: curving metal staircases, lights on the St-Lawrence seaway, neon signs on St-Catherine. An offer of what the city is meant to give to tourists.

Biking home in the golden light this afternoon I passed hundreds of "typical" blocks of flats, engaging in my usual habit of imagining "what would my life be like if I lived somewhere else -- on the Plateau, downtown, in St-Henri . . " I imagined the tiny but important differences from my life at Jean-Talon. A different vegetable market. Fewer Mexican restaurants. Another café with different owners. Would they remember my allongé, collect my forgotten mittens for me?

Next month, I will live in a Victorian row house in West London. From the back window of that house, you can see the planes land at Heathrow, above the rows of chimneys, the thick trees full of birds. The London tourist brochures show images of these white-fronted terrace houses, window boxes full of flowers. The brochures include pictures taken down along the Thames where I run sometimes, past houseboats and waterfront pubs and parks. Beyond what's in the pictures, the river has surprising beauty. The city noise falls away, leaving the sound of rowing skiffs, clinking glasses, and geese. On the far bank, bicycles careen through mud left by high tide, against the backdrop of wild parkland. Even in winter, the trees are green.

By the time I come back to Montreal it will be spring. I have never lived through a winter with no snow, without the bitter cold jab of air in the nose on a February morning. This feeling is never described in a tourist brochure. Neither is the precise quality of light reflected at 4 pm through my office window.

The fact is, we can never know what things, exactly, change our lives. I came to Montreal almost by accident, but living here has given me something I never could have imagined. Paris, too. As I prepare for a new life, in another city, I wonder -- not even daring to imagine -- what surprising beauty I will find.

Research roots and wings

So, I’m in London. Waking up in the morning in a house in West London, next to the person next to whom, out of all the people in the world, I most want to be waking up with. Riding my bike in traffic in London, on the left hand side, circling buses and avoiding pedestrians and sometimes looking up at the Regency mansions on the way to the library. Writing in a café in London, listening to accents from the edges of the empire. In these first few weeks in a new place, the differences between where I come from and where I am seem most marked. I don’t know the conventions here – Christmas is Happy, not Merry. Mistletoe is a plant, not a plastic symbol. More beer is drunk than I am used to, and sex is taboo in a way I don’t expect – jokes about it crop up everywhere as if to urgently break the tension.

In these days, at this time, I cannot yet say that I am truly living in London. I am, in some ways, still in transit. Once, someone asked me whether I thought I would spend my life as an “uprooted researcher living in a global city.” That question has followed me since, as I have travelled farther and farther from the place I grew up with, the culture that I could have called my own. But in a way, nomadism is also my culture: from the Polish orphan who landed at Ellis Island and lost his name, to my grandparents fleeing postwar England for the warmth of Africa (and then again for the cold of the Midwest), and of course my parents, driving their tiny cars full of possessions here and there across the continent.

But that question came back to me today: not the bit about being uprooted, but the bit about being a researcher. As I clicked off the reading light, packed up my pads and pencils, passed through security, and walked into the central atrium of the British Library (looking like nothing else in its airy magnificence than a cruise ship for the bookish) I felt as if I were travelling from one world to another. From the world of my thoughts, the true site of my research, to the reality of being in London: the cold fog descending, Christmas lights twinkling, and the same buses and taxis to avoid on the long descent down Notting Hill. A strange world, after the deep and commanding one of my thoughts – and more strange for being still unknown. I think this is why researchers, even those who like me are committed to understanding and participating in situated and particular knowledge, need sometimes to travel. When the world outside is strange, the world in your head, the world you are excavating every day through writing, feels familiar, comfortable, and known.