The first day started off with an ice-breaking exercise. Everyone was asked to write down one key word on a piece of paper, and then another person (word) that could be paired with your keyword. For instance my keyword was mobilization, and I paired this with the word activism. You where then asked to talk about your word and the connections to the other word for 10 minutes. And then repeat this with two other words. What started off as an ice-breaker actually gave enough material to write a dissertation. The stories behind the key words made your heart beat a little faster. My key word was mobilization and I paired up with activism, potential and anomaly. During the conversations I discovered that there were so many links and connections that all three keyword paring could be integrated into one large keyword pairing.I found several common denominators. The first one is that ‘change’ should be all about people. It is not about process. People should be at the centre of all the acti...

Adam Haupt is a South African scholar and author of Stealing Empire, which tells the story of people defining themselves as active, creative and politically conscious agents in a consumerist society. For the ‘My Bubble, My Space, My Voice’ workshop he is introducing a number of key questions that will guide the participants in reflecting upon their own practices in the first day of the workshop. According to Adam, when looking at youth agents who have grown up with technology, these key questions are: What is social change? What is power? How is social change effected or how is power exercised? What tools do you use to exercise power? How do you use technology to exercise your creative and/or political agency?In his research Adam looks at music and the way music can and has been used by people to express themselves politically and be subversive. “In the 1980’s I discovered hip hop artist in Capetown who where expressing black consciousness through hip hop”. For them music was a way...

 Yesterday we have been trying to locate each other’s work in the political. Therewith exploring the political in the broad sense and deepen our understanding of each other’s activities. It displayed the many different perspectives, approaches, forms of engagement and tools the different participants use. For instance the anti-acts of Soft Revolt use art and technology to trigger discussion, whereas http://theoryandpractice.ur is a social network for knowledge sharing. Not only did it bring new perspectives on each other work, it also triggered ideas to go beyond “traditional” notions of what constitutes the political in transformation processes.

The second days is about technology and we kicks off with a presentation of Sibley Verbeck, a gaming expert who uses the mechanics of gaming in everything around him. “Games can save the world, specifically the idea’s behind gaming can make all projects more successful. The keywords in game design are: directing, challenging and giving back feedback to people to maximize their motivation. What you see in the online gaming world is that people want to work together to overcome challenges, are matched with something that is hard but not impossible, are always optimistic that their close to an epic win and should document their action to receive points of wins.Then, how can we use these principles for social Change? In general Sibbley says that you see people who want to use games for a social cause and look at games to change the world. He doesn’t think that this is necessarily the most productive path, you need to look at the design and rational behind the games and incorporate this...

Is copyright in relation to content sharing online mass criminalizing the people? Are the users responsible and liable for pornographic spam in their inboxes? What rights does the Sri Lanka police have to check your mobile phone on pornography? Or are these all just excuses to control us and the technology? These and more question rise when one starts to think about new technologies and the responds of governments to these new innovations. But the question remains how open and free will technology be in 10 years from now?The book ‘Wireless’ fits right into this discussion on technology and power, however this book was written in 1912. At that time radio and telephone communications came into being and these mediums where not controlled like they are now. People where very optimistic about the free flow of information and the ability to express one self. Sounds familiar? Back then they were feeling the same as we are thinking now. But once the technology grew more and more popular, r...