Introducing OpenMute

In September 2003, Mute will officially launch OpenMute, a web
resource for cultural production. Here, we explain its aims, context
and history. By Toni Prug. Edited by Pauline van Mourik Broekman

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OpenMute is an ambitious free resource project aiming to support
cultural practice in the information era. Through the provision of
server space, tools, guidance and research, OpenMute will demonstrate
and advocate open and collaborative ways of working and contribute to
public knowledge architectures that serve practitioners' needs over
the long term.
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'METAMUTE OpenMute proposal' to The Arts Council of England's
Publications and Recordings Pilot Programme Phase 2
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OpenMute aims to cater for both funded and unfunded organisations and
individuals. Its ethos of free provision means that funded
organisations/individuals will be encouraged to pay a fee in line with
their means.
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Expression of Interest form, Publications and Recordings Pilot
Programme Phase 2

In the field of net culture, numerous attempts have been made at
building and sharing infrastructures and resources, including servers,
tools, organisational practices and funds. Mute aims to put to use a
variety of these disparate but overlapping experiences from the
spheres of art, corporate IT, Free Software, independent media
production/distribution, political activism and networked
organisation. Through its new project OpenMute, it will distribute a
selection of free softwares, manuals, and organisational techniques,
together with related research and critical writing. Net culture has a
near unparalleled capacity to generate utopian concepts, but most
either forget *the net is not the World*, or die a death in their
passage from theory to practice. Avoiding another Universal Theory of
Everything, OpenMute will provide a variety of tried-and-tested tools
to reflect lessons learnt by ourselves and others, and so attempt to
concretise certain collective experiences into something of use to our
wider reader and user community.

The theoretical framework for this project was laid out last year in
our document 'Ceci n'est pas un magazine' (Mute 19, May 2002; see also
previous page). Building on this plan, Mute has already radically
changed its publishing model by making its magazine bi-annual, fully
integrating its development with that of website Metamute and
orienting itself towards digital tools and research provisions that
complement them. OpenMute, for which Mute has since received
development funds from The Arts Council of England, emerged when Mute
realised that all the free tools it used, and all the research and
beta-testing it completed, were worth comparatively little if stored
merely in its producers brains and private hard disks. Hence, the
decision to redistribute our experiences, together with the tools
which catalysed them, in the form of a network resources project.

OpenMute's provision will be principally free of charge. Since the
project strives towards economic self-sustainability, it will
encourage organisations and inviduals with significant or
project-specific funds to make contributions.

OpenMute is being run on the premise that the participatory model it
advocates will ultimately extend to both decision making and
ownership.

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'The Placebo effect' <+-+> 'Fake participation'
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The key issue in the participatory models that the Internet makes
possible is the question of the 'placebo effect', which asks the
question, Is our participation real? Or, are we participating at all?
Slavoj Zizek describes it in his raw and inimitable way:

<start quote>

It is a well-known fact that the 'Close the door' button in most
elevators is a totally disfunctional placebo, which is placed there
just to give the individuals the impression that they are somehow
participating, contributing to the speed of the elevator journey ?
when we push this button, the door closes in exactly the same time as
when we just pressed the floor button without 'speeding up' the
process by pressing also the 'Close the door' button. This extreme and
clear case of fake participation is an appropriate metaphor of the
participation of individuals in our 'postmodern' political
process. And this is occasionalism at its purest: according to
Malebranche, we are all the time pressing such buttons, and it is
God's incessant activity that coordinates between them and the event
that follows (the door closing), while we think the event results from
our pushing the button.  *** For that reason, it is crucial to
maintain open the radical ambiguity of how cyberspace will affect our
lives: this does not depend on technology as such but on the mode of
its social inscription. ***

<end quote> 

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00019.html 

Slavoj Zizek: 'THE MATRIX, OR, THE TWO SIDES OF PERVERSION' (from
'Inside the Matrix?' - International Symposium at the Center for Art
and Media, Karlsruhe In cooperation with EIKK and Bluebox e.V. -
October 28, 1999.)

*** What is the Social Inscription so far? ***

Often, the internet is presented as the place for radical new modes of
collaboration. However, most of the time, due to its design, tools and
usage practices, it only makes basic consumption and specific types of
communication possible. Genuinely *participatory* modes of
collaboration, whose openness extends to those outside the existing
spaces of collaboration (by virtue of being exterior to its social
networks, having different working practices/habits, or even being
hostile in some way) are limited by many factors.

Two of the most obvious of these are the same structures of power and
ideology, which play a crucial role in our everyday lives -
irrespective of our operational 'sector', declared intentions or
political status (profit/non-profit, arts, political activism or
neo-liberal imperialism). In the context of the internet, despite
frequent allusions to power and ideology, they remain nebulous enough
to make them hard to evaluate.

A new field of perception is being created by the internet. Not only
for those who work through it, with it, or alongside it, but for all
of us - regardless of personal use. The type of governance the net is
facilitating, and the type of power relationships it is fomenting,
mean that it now affects the constitution of our identities.

Since power is never strictly individual, not even when someone
occupies a strong position of political authority, it is crucial to
pose questions about participation in the organisational processes and
social networks that the net brings about.

What constitutes power; what are its features and forms; how is it
created, nurtured and distributed by and within organisations,
networks and society at large? No matter how difficult these questions
may sound, for OpenMute to be truly helpful to organisations and
individuals in their use of the internet, it needs to address such
questions.

Since power is so easily concealed by dominant ideologies, and
this counts for Free Software culture as much as for any other,
we have sought to incorporate an ongoing reflexivity into the
heart of this project. Our so-called social contract (1),
inspired by similarly binding statements that software projects
like Debian feature, states:

Never regard a position on OpenMute core commitments(2) as
ideologically neutral, nor - in the context of discussion -
accept the popular postmodern solution that difference is
unproblematic because, in the absence of 'reality', all
interpretations can co-exist(3).

Going back to Zizek's observation: pressing the 'Close the door
button' is a sign of failure. The sign of fake participation is always
the sign of an inability (or lack of determination) to perceive power
relations. Considering the internet, this new realm of perception we
inhabit, it is a sign of having missed the mode of its social
inscription.

In short: neither the internet nor the tools that OpenMute will
provide offer some utopia where existing problems go away. On the
contrary, they become even bigger if not carefully observed and dealt
with. If that is done, radical new possibilities of participatory,
collaborative acts can emerge.

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[1] OpenMute Social Contract:
http://www.openmute.org/view/Open/SocialContract

[2] Core commitments from OpenMute Social Contract: '(a) host and
provide software tools for open and collaborative working on-line;
(b) research and develop organisational processes for using those
tools.'

[3] See Slavoj Zizek in 'The Spectre of Ideology', Slavoj Zizek
(editor): Mapping Ideology, Verso 1994 - pages 16-17

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The Framework of Open Organizations
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OpenMute is working within the framework of Open Organizations,
an autonomous initiative whose principles OpenMute shares. The
core objectives of the Framework for Open Organizations are to
promote and enable participation, transparency, social ownership
of knowledge, self management and accountability, and diversity.

It is a collection of organisational practices that can be
combined and used modularly, according to specific needs, with
the purpose of meeting the core objectives stated above.

Organisations are encouraged to use the framework primarily as a
starting point, to help them think about the way they work and
organise (process), rather then as a goal on the horizon.
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http://www.open-organizations.org