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:. ABOUT US .:
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| Table of Content: |
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| Mission |
| OpenMute Project & Philosophy |
| OpenMute & Accountability |
| The Politics of Openness |
| Learning by doing |
| OpenMute and Mute History |
| OpenMute Social Contract |
| OpenMute Charter and Team |
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| Mission |
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OpenMute is a web resource project aiming to support cultural practice in the information age. Through the provision of server space, tools, practical guidance and critical contextualisation, we seek to develop open and collaborative ways of working, and contribute to the kind of public knowledge architectures that will serve practitioners' needs over the long term.
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| OpenMute Project & Philosophy |
What We Do
OpenMute provides web-based services for publishing and collaborative working. These include:
- News
- WiKi
- Gallery
- Forum
- Events
- Polls
- Partners
- Downloads
- FAQ
- Headlines (RSS Newsfeeds)
- Links
- Sections
- Web stats
- Shopping
- Advanced calendar
- Mega search engine
- Blogger
- Email lists
- Advanced wiki
- File sharing
- Chat (IRC)
- Instant messaging
- Web news (RDF) to email list
- Task manager
- Document manager
Why We Do It
Cultural communities have often been stymied in their efforts to build links with technical communities due to a basic skills-gap and problems of translation (technical and cultural languages being deemed incompatible). As a host of powerful, free online tools became available, individuals and groups without the relevant technical skills are often unable to independently engage with them. Having come from a cultural background, Mute sought to share with other cultural practitioners the experience it acquired automating Mute magazine's web publishing activity and familiarising itself with open source web tools. The OpenMute project is the result of this process. By making a selection of trusted tools available from one, easy to find, web location, it aims to simplify the control of these tools and widen their user base among the cultural community. OpenMute's core process involves the provision of these softwares (wikis, weblogs, mailing list administrators and forums, among others), server space and user support. In addition, OpenMute encourages the sharing of related information and experience by providing an infrastructure for exchange between participants.
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| OpenMute & Accountability |
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As a recipient of public funds, OpenMute's own working processes are open for reasons of accountability and transparency. The existence of privacy and security issues means that user data are an exception, but in all such cases, users will be informed of the nature of the material, and the rationale for closing it. Having engaged with the framework of Open Organisations (http://www.open-organizations.org) when it initiated the project, and taken guidance from it and Debian (http://www.debian.org), OpenMute is now in the process of adapting its first social contract and charter to better reflect its divergent history, context, financial responsibilities and working practice.
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| The Politics of Openness |
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OpenMute believes openness to be an ideologically malleable term, which can provide a fig leaf and support for soft and social forms of capitalism and state control as much as it can call to account their more conspicuously oppressive manifestations. Additionally, as openness is often put into practice through internet-based platforms, OpenMute believes the term to be heavily reliant on the illusion that online information offers a rounded picture of communicative reality. As it stands, the documentary architecture of the internet is insufficiently reflective of the subtleties of offline communication and consensus building to function as the prime barometer for social responsibility. The only force which can challenge the dominant political paradigm (under whose terms the content of open data is judged as either good or bad) is the emergence of an alternative political paradigm and attendant models of social value. (Unless the impossible occurs and openness is achieved tout court in one singular instance, secrecy and closedness can be vital political strategies.)
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| Learning by doing |
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In its development of a sustainable economic model and decision making structure, above all OpenMute seeks to acknowledge and learn from the diversity of contexts its users are working within, and to build its efforts on a collaboration between beneficiaries, rather than the classical customer-provider relationship.
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| OpenMute and Mute History |
Mute: a network of Projects
OpenMute is one of the most recent projects to be initiated by Mute magazine. The publication was founded in 1994º to discuss the interrelationship of art and new technologies. Together with the web platform Metamute, it now contributes more broadly to debates on culture, politics and globalisation. In 2001, Mute initiated sister projects OpenMute and YouAreHere to share the internet tools and knowledge associated with its own development, and to support local networking initiatives in the East End of London. At this point, Mute also committed itself to a participative working model¹, the principles of open organisations², and free software³.
Mute: History and Context
Mute was co-founded by artists Simon Worthington and Pauline van Mourik Broekman in 1994. The magazine was a response to several factors more and less familiar from popular descriptions of the early 1990s: the development of digital technologies and the World Wide Web; the gradual popularisation of a specifically British avant-garde art in the mainstream media; and the explosion of DiY culture across the UK. These exerted mutual pressure, and forced many artists to reassess the place of art and artists not just in relation to the market, new distribution platforms and the public sphere, but also to the politics of information, technology, and science.
Faced with the phenomena of bulging art markets, stagnant international dinosaur exhibitions and artists motivated by a serious case of popstar envy, the social questions posed by new digital and network technologies appeared to hover somewhere near the bottom of art's priorities. Business on the other hand, saw ample use in the creative application of technology. As sales of commercial technoculture bible Wired went through the roof and a new cyberspace lexicon was born, desire for a critical response increased exponentially. Mute was one such response, and took negative as much as positive inspiration from a great number of publications present and past. At the positive end of the spectrum, trailblazer extraordinaire Mediamatic deserves special mention, as does The Daily Courant, 1759, whose format acted as a template for our pilot issue. From its inception, Mute has regarded message and medium, content and carrier as inherently intertwined, an approach which has meant a constant reinvention of its publishing format and model. Perhaps you could say that, rather than pursue individual artistic projects, the magazine and associated projects have functioned as a means for a group of people to foster the development of theory and practice in tandem.
º The present Mute magazine could not have existed without a predecessor and namesake published through the Slade School of Art from 1989-1992. Mute v. 01 was an open contributions publication in a variety of formats edited by Simon Worthington, Daniel Jackson, Helen Arthur and Stephen Faulkner.
¹ During 2001, Mute published Ceci n'est pas un magazine, which outlined plans for the gradual devolution of editorial control. This process later got underway with a provisional forum structure. These having been closed for relaunch with Campsite, the impetus of the later document Ceci n'est pas un magazine 2 (The Magazine that Mistook its Reader for a Hat), Winter 2002, was to increase participation in Mute's different outputs without pretending that we sought to cede editorial control absolutely (a project we think is impossible for a magazine).
² Open Organizations is a developing Framework promoting and enabling organisational transparency, inclusiveness (participation), self management and accountability, and diversity. See http://www.open-organizations.org.
³ The licences we consider to be Free are those specified in the Debian Social Contract.
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| Social Contract¹ |
This OpenMute Social Contract is a set of commitments that we, producers of OpenMute, agree to abide by
- Host and provide software tools for open and collaborative working on-line
- Research and develop organisational processes for using those tools
- Pursue the above to meet the needs of community organisations and groups in the arts and culture sector that are small to medium sized
- Only use software that can be used for free² and whose source code can be obtained and modified
- Demonstrate and advocate open and collaborative working - in software through the use of open publishing tools, and in organisational structure through the creation of an open framework reflecting our organisational history, financial responsibilities and sector
- Never regard a position on open organisations or open source tools as ideologically neutral
¹ The OpenMute Social Contract was inspired by the Debian Social Contract.
² The licences we consider to be Free are those specified in the Debian Social Contract.
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| Charter & Team |
This social charter is adapted from that written at the start of the OpenMute project, in Summer 2002, with then project leader Toni Prug. As stated in OpenMute Project & Philosophy, we are working on a new charter that better reflects our methodologies, history and financial responsibilities in late 2003; until this is in place, the following holds true.
Participation
Open Mute is open to all who wish to contribute to it, and who accept its SocialContract and Charter. Some tasks require certain specialist skills. However, we will be providing documentation that should make acquiring these easier. In general, it is one of our on-going tasks, a permanent priority, to share our knowledge and experience, be that through documentation, lists, or meetings.
Decision Making
Decisions are at this stage made by the people in the core OpenMute team: Simon Worthington, Darron Broad and Ian Morrison. We are using a 'rough consensus' model, and the Mute office as a sovereign place of decision making (this will move towards a more 'virtual' platform in the future). Roles and areas of work cross over, but ultimate responsibility is carried as below.
Roles/Areas - as of July 2004
- Core team (Simon Worthington, Darron Broad, Ian Morrison)
- Project coordinator (Simon Worthington)
- Conceptual development (core team and Pauline van Mourik Broekman)
- Documentation (core team)
- Development (Darron Broad)
- Communication and project planning (Simon Worthington)
- Network administration (Ian Morrison)
- System administration (Ian Morrison)
- Software (Darron Broad and core team)
- Graphic design: Raquel Perez de Eulate (graphics)
- Finances (Simon Worthington and Pauline van Mourik Broekman)
- Interns (Mathew Kabatoff)
Associate Organisations
Our associates are other companies and organisation that we work with on the provision of the Openmute services.
Merz Akademie - Intern from the interactive design course
Credits and special thanks
We would also like to extend special thanks to Southspace, for temporarily providing the server space and list tools for Openmute development to get underway in 2002. Early work associated with the project remains archived here.
Interactors - internet communications design, for there contribution in the area of strategical development and hands on design coding
Our very special thanks to one-time intern Laura Oldenbourg of the Merz Akademie
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