On the final day of Winter Camp Upgrade! coordinator Kyd Campbell ‘released’ the outcome of three days of hard labor, during which I both heard and witnessed that some moments of crisis were overcome. Kyd clarified a point-to-point summary posted on the Upgrade! Wiki, which is showing some concrete progress made during the Winter Camp get together. Signaling the becoming of a proper organized network that aims at the unification of art and technology, and the bridging of cultural divides.

Before presenting the points made, it’s Kyd’s first remark that deserves to be highlighted. It brings out an important strength as well as weakness of the Upgrade! Network, certain qualities realized by the group during Winter Camp activity. Namely, that it’s the collaboration within the local nodes that forms the strongest part of the network, harboring most of the activity, while communication about local activities on the International level of the network often is lacking, signaling a crisis in both local and international network identity. But now this network ‘error’ is detected, time has come to strengthen the local to the international, and vice versa. It’s time for interaction and the Wiki summary indicates it’s happening!  And as the Wiki pretty much speaks for itself, I have been so free to re-map these outcomes, listing the concrete practices of Upgrade! during Winter Camp successively as; considerations, realizations, initiations, collaborations and decisions.

Considerations:

• Consider giving the option for people (organizers/participants) to make their own profiles etc. to dialog online (visibility)
• Considered voting systems, did not like them (central structure and decision making)
• Wanted to be more open, not to feel just like a network of organizers. (opening up)

Realizations:

• Important to share info about our collaborative activities with each other in order to avoid frustrations that the network is not working. Helps with motivation. (invisible networks)
• Realized we must better use our own local/personal network resources to make our international projects visible (visibility). Realized we have many resources of connections to universities (education)
• (Not yet realized) Planned to but did not manage to rewrite our mandate/list of core values (central structure and decision making)

Initiations:

• Started an open mailing list http://open.theupgrade.net (opening up)
• Made some progress on web presence (each node has an aggregated WordPress blog) (visibility)
• Will create a resource list of artists residency and exchange possibilities that exist already in the network (exchange of artists/cultural actors)
• Exchanging and disseminating art works through collaborative curatorial projects (exchange of artists/cultural actors)

Collaborations:

• Encountered FreeDimensional, discussed many possible collaborations, especially in Sao Paulo
• Met Genderchangers, possibility for upcoming collaboration in Istanbul
• Attended the FLOSS manual writing workshop (useful for our bi-annual publications?? or more opensource oriented contents)
• Connected with EduFactory + Creative Labour
• South network: as a problematical etiquette, breaking the cliche; making bridges between isolated communities, upgrade concrete projects to link Latin America/Africa by actions, events, network… project on mapping digital art productions and diffusion ‘tools’, networks and cultural actions in under-represented regions, find more other synergies through the network.

Decisions:

• Decided to focus on educational projects using this opportunity (education)
• Decided to form small committees when projects arise (central structure and decision making)
• Decided to leave each city’s ‘main goal’ up to them to decide freely (central structure and decision making)

Although a debate regarding the realization of a central decision making structure is still in process, and definite conclusions still have to be drawn, progress has certainly been made. For the next Sao Paulo event in 2010 separate Upgrade! committees have already been formed, with their own responsibilities, and mandates to make decisions.

In the previous two days, after having discussed their identity, mission, core values, and crises, the sixteen members of Upgrade! gathered this morning with several issues on their agenda, which have not yet been touched upon this week at Winter Camp: collaborative tools and managing collaborative tools, lists and managing lists, and the decision making process. The discussion about potential models of network organization was combined with discussing the upcoming event organized with the assistance of Upgrade! International in Sao Paolo.

Upgrade! defines itself as a decentralized, non-hierarchical network of currently thirty local nodes, which started in 1999 in New York City. It seems to me rather that the network has a distributed structure, considering that all the locally defined nodes are equal and autonomous. The network structure fundamentally defines the decision making process. While the network maintained a quite democratic mode of organization and decision making so far, this model has its weaknesses as well. Not all the members felt motivated to contribute in the decision making process by voting at the right time. A potential solution that has been discussed during the group meeting today was voting versus mandate, or a combination of the two, according to the various circumstances. In situations which require higher effectiveness over a short period of time, the democratic procedure would be ‘sacrificed’ in order to meet deadlines and objectives, and the decision power would be delegated to a smaller representative group. As a matter a fact, working in smaller groups has proven to be an effective method to reach results also during work at Winter Camp.

A vulnerable point with which the network seems to be confronting at this moment is the decision making process, reason for which changing the currently used collaborative tools: mailing list, wiki, website, has been considered. There seemed to be an oscillation between working in a democratic manner, and giving people clear responsibilities and mandates to work on.

An important value for a distributed network like Upgrade! is transparency. Introducing a wiki as communication platform is a way to achieve transparency and avoid isolation of the local nodes.

The growing number of group members might also turn into a vulnerability of the network unless the mode of organization is adapted. An important point of discussion of Upgrade! at Winter Camp was precisely how the growth of the network should be approached and how membership should be defined. Since the network does not impose constraints of activity on its nodes, each of the nodes has the freedom to be active or passive. The nodes may be inactive until an activity of local interest determines the engagement of the node and consequently the network’s support. The weakness of this approach is that it is difficult to distinguish between temporarily idle nodes and ‘retired’ nodes, therefore it is difficult for the network to have an account of who it can count on.

The local nodes are connected in an online global network that meets twice a year. The question arose of how to activate the nodes and make them more efficient without imposing constraints on them. The network does not seem to have a set of predefined norms to regulate the interaction between nodes. The conditions of participation in local events are established ad hoc and depend on the circumstances of each event and the needs of the local host, as it had been evident from the discussion regarding the organization of their upcoming event in Sao Paolo.

The group also noticed a difference of involvement between generations of nodes. The old nodes seemed to be more involved and dedicated than the new ones. This situation may be connected with the fact that an important value on which the foundation of the network was based, and which guided their relations was friendship. Now that the network is growing and more nodes are being attached, the strategy of accepting new members might change from friendship to more formal criteria.

On the afternoon of the second day of Winter Camp a fruitful encounter occurred between the networks Upgrade! and freeDimensional, a real network-to-network confrontation. But as I arrived early, and freeDimensional wasn’t yet present, I walked into a vibrant discussion between the Upgrade! members. Apparently in the morning they had split into groups, which resulted in a clear division of tasks. On a practical level they discussed the splitting up of responsibilities. So one group being responsible for overall communication (website, mailing list, archive), another responsible for productional issues (Events, annual gatherings, products, etc.), and certainly important, a third group responsible for setting up and controlling a fund raising body. Of course as became clear in the follow-up discussion, several essential questions still have to be addressed. Like for example, will the separate groups have their own decision making power, or will this power be distributed within the network. Nevertheless, this division of tasks could be the actual seed for an organized international Upgrade! Network.

But then freeDimensional arrived and the topic changed to a mutual interest. When looking at the focus, and organization of both networks, this meeting seemed to be quite logical, as there are numerous similarities. Both have the same amount of local nodes that are geographically wide spread, and both offer a platform for artistic as well as activist strategies. But where the focal point at Upgrade! is more on the artistic side, within freeDimensional activism takes a dominant stand, thus in difference offering each other some solid ground for knowledge sharing.

After both groups explained the merits of their organization, previous collaborations were briefly discussed. Each of the networks zoomed in on their ideas and activities and addressed each other several questions. For example, Upgrade! asked freeDimensional if approached art centers ever refused a request for collaboration because they were afraid that activist projects would stir turmoil when being to politically sensitive? As freeDimensional cooperates a lot with human rights organizations, and addresses related issues, in the past they certainly dealt with art centers that were hesitant about collaborating and fearful about political consequences.

Without reiterating the specific merits of the discussion, it’s most important to notice that both networks benefited from this ‘confrontation’ through the sharing of ideas, as well as the sharing of their practical experience. At the end of their meeting even some concrete collaborations were offered over and over, which was certainly entertaining. While the Boston node of Upgrade! offered their Turbulence.org webspace to freeDimensional for exhibiting their net-art projects, freeDimensional responded directly, offering a position for Upgrade! as an affiliation on their site.