Goals, in no particular order

How does public participation transform the nature of discovery and innovation? How do particular sciences respond to new incorporations of publics, citizens and unconventional participants?  Does public participation reveal a new mode of veridiction in which the revelation of truth is tied to particular forms of participation?  How are those forms of participation adjudicated, contested, controlled or blocked? How can claims of participation, democratization, universalization, user-generation, etc. be historicized, periodized, contextualized? To what extent can democracy and contemporary life be re-described in terms of the affordances, effects and understandings of participation. Can there be an anthropology of participation? Can the effects of participation be identified, let alone measured?

Part.Public.Part.Lab grows out of recent work in three areas: 1) recent research in science and technology studies on public participation and public engagement; 2) studies of open source, open innovation, free software and the explosion of related “user-generated” projects and problems from web 2.0 to wikileaks; and 3) an aliquot of organizational theory as it relates to knowledge production, circulation and governance. The lab exists to foster discussions and research at the intersection of these areas and to explore both the theoretical implications of the changing nature of participation and the empirical cases and concerns of actors involved in trying to make participation occur, or occur differently.

Part.Public.Part.Lab runs on the enthusiasm and ideas of its participants, and is open to anyone willing to bring some. It also runs, for the time being on an NSF grant (thank you America!).

PIs

Christopher Kelty

Aaron Panofsky

Host

Center for Society and Genetics, UCLA

Lab Denizens

Ramesh Srinivasan (co-confabulator)

Adam Fish (investigator of money and culture)

Luis Felipe Murillo (investigator of freedom)

Lilly Nguyen (investigator of software and circulations)

Morgan Currie (investigator of the internets)

Seth Erikson (the Rubyst)

Join us…

Money

National Science Foundation Grant #1025569

Publications

Birds of the Internet (coming soon)
From Participation to Power (coming soon)