Domains, Publics and Access

An online collection of projects that offer different forms of access for the general public to the domains of art, science, culture, economics, politics and technology.

Cataloging, preserving and documenting the current forms of access.

open access, open content, open goverment, open science, open design, open education, open spectrum, citizen jornalism, citizen science, collaborative economy, sharing economy, commons, coops, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrencies, DIY, makers, 3D printing, free software, free culture, community currencies, solidarity economy, future, grassroots media, p2p, pirate, tactical media, tactical urbanism, private, public…

Collecting

Domains, publics and access is an ongoing research project in media archaeology of the present been developed in Mexico by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and the Alumnos47 Foundation since 2015. The core of the research is a wiki where we collect projects that offer access for the general public to the domains of art, culture, science, economics, politics and technology.

The Collection is dedicated to cataloguing, preserving and documenting projects that propose or investigate general access to the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services previously restricted mainly to specialists and professionals. Combining the mass media with heterogeneous social practices the projects question the vertical and centralized management of access by public and private institutions historically associated with art, science, culture, economics, politics and technology such as museums, galleries, libraries, archives, publishers, laboratories, universities, companies, banks, hospitals, governments, political parties, factories, etc.

Projects that experiment with more horizontal and decentralized management models appear on the web associated with recent terms such as open access, open data, open content, open education, open government, open design, open spectrum, open science, cryptocurrencies, citizen journalism, citizen science, collaborative economy, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, free software, free culture, p2p, tactical urbanism ... These new terms coexist with old terms such as commons, public domain, time banks, grassroots media, solidarity economy, community currencies, cryptography, cooperatives, tactical media, DIY or piracy. All of them constitute the vocabulary of current forms of access, keywords of a vanishing present.

The Collection brings together projects that have emerged in different countries from the second half of the 20th century to the present day, with special attention to those developed in Mexico where the research began. The only condition is that the projects should be associated with the vocabulary of current forms of access counting on the participation of the general public in all domains of social activity. The collection includes, equally, projects launched by public and private institutions and different actors of civil society, since the questioning of the vertical and centralized management of access by institutions historically associated with the various domains is taking place inside and outside of them. In this way the Collection deals with the contemporary coexistence and hybridization between new and old models of access management that present different degrees of centralization and decentralization, verticality and horizontality.

Cataloguing

Projects are catalogued according to the categories and subcategories associated with the three main sections in which the wiki is divided. In Domains, the projects are indexed according to their main ascription to one or several Domains: Art, Science, Culture, Economics, Politics and Technology. In Publics, projects are labeled based on their linguistic, geographical and temporal universe. We catalog all the Language(s) in which each project is published, the Start Country(ies), the Start Year and the Year of Completion. In Access, the projects are classified according to the vocabulary of current forms of access. As this vocabulary appears and is popularized mainly in English, the main menu categories are in this language: Citizen, Collaborative, Commons, Co-ops, Crowd, Crypto, DIY, Free, Future, Grassroots, Open, P2P, Pirate, Private, Public, Tactical. The translation is found in the subcategories that also expand the forms of access linked with each category in English and Spanish.

To show how the vocabulary of current forms of access is diversified with use, the wiki allows participants to add new categories and subcategories following the terms that the projects apply to define themselves. When the terms are not shown explicitly or appear under a slightly different version, the categories and subcategories already indexed are assigned according to the criteria of the participant. Only the subcategories No lucrativo/ Nonprofit (Private), Lucrativo/Profit (Private) and Estado/State (Public) are part of the cataloguing of all projects. In that way the public initiatives of governments are distinguished from all others and the business model and legal status of the project are indicated when they are clearly published. These cataloguing criteria also apply to projects that lack legal form or do not clearly state what their legal status is.

All the necessary information for the cataloguing is extracted from the project websites. Even the main sources for new projects are the links that they establish with other initiatives. Only in exceptional cases are secondary sources of information used to complete the cataloguing. The Collection does not pretend to be exhaustive. The selection is personal and depends on the online tours done by each participant as they register different projects in the wiki.