GROKIPEDIA ARTICLE ON FUNREDES

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https://grokipedia.com/page/funredes

The Grokipedia article on Funredes (Network and Development Foundation), built on Grok exploration of multiple sources, 80 % being Funredes own web archives and publications, is really impressive in terms of digesting and reorganizing a large amount of information and giving respective priorities between a large set of elements. Hereafter, we share some comments which could correct, precise and enhance this large and complex narrative about the endeavor of an NGO lasting almost 30 years and prolongated by a new NGO, since 2017, the Observatory of linguistic and Cultural Diversity on the Internet (OBDILCI), which activities are also evocated in this Grokipedia entry.

This article created by Grok IA does not show hallucinations, only one error in attributing elements from Pimienta’s activities during his IBM career to Funredes  (“including early work on OSI protocol compliance and voice/data integration systems” in “Achievements and contributions” section). Grokipedia has the fame to be biased towards extreme right political vision; in that specific case no political bias appears, not even on the “Criticisms and limitations” section that we avoid to comment in order to remain neutral.

The introduction is excellent by its summarizing capacity, except that the CARDICIS project, the fourth more important project after REDALC, MISTICA and OBDILCI, should be more emphasized than CARDICIS3, the coining of the influential and most cited concept of “paradigmatic divide” should be highlighted, as well as the pioneer and early effort conducted to experiment with automatic translation in discussion lists. Finally, the transversal and very early workshop dense activities of Funredes on digital  and information literacy are a signature of its more impactful contribution.

  • CARDICIS was a project dedicated to the Caribbean to sensitize civil society on the importance of considering linguistic diversity in the co-building of a regional information society and it was concreted in 2 workshops gathering a representative sampling of Caribbean civil society players, in Santa Lucia (8/2004) and Juan Dolio (Dominican Republic, in 12/2005). The website (https://funredes.org/cardicis) holds all the relevant information including notable outcomes which could still today orient public policies in the subregion.
  • The article coining the concept of paradigmatic divide has been cited 217 times in its Spanish version, 29, in the English version and 9 in the French version; however, the concept has been retaken hundreds of times without article citations, and have deeply fed some very influential publications:
    • as, for example, in French, “Rapport de la mission parlementaire de Jean-Michel Fourgous, dĂ©putĂ© des Yvelines, sur la modernisation de l’école par le numĂ©rique : “RĂ©ussir l’école numĂ©rique », 15 fĂ©vrier 2010 – https://www.vie-publique.fr/files/rapport/pdf/104000080.pdf
    • in Spanish, it has served as material for several thesis and Master studies.
  • Also, the pioneer and extended efforts of Funredes of experimenting with early use of automatic translation imbedded in discussion list should have deserved more attention;
  • Funredes has educated hundreds of internauts thru early and numerous digital and information literacy workshops, in different venues, contexts, languages and formats and helped transform them into netizen aware of the stakes behind being an internaut. This could be its most impactful action and its concrete contribution to information ethics.
  • the same for the most recent researches from OBDILCI on web multilingualism (https://obdilci.org/projects/other/mlreports/) and on the relationship of translation and AI (https://obdilci.org/projects/other/ai ). However, those could be input for a future article on OBDILCI.

The Grokipedia article does provide a deep, large and fair description of the main activities and products of Funredes’s life. It could have however beneficiated from listing (and exploring for some of them) some additional key publications belonging to Funredes.

In the Network Building and Virtual Communities section, it would be fair to mention, at the side of UTOPISTA, three additional documents reflecting, each one in a different manner, the richness of the collective effort proper of the MISTICA virtual community:

  • “Working the Internet with a Social Vision”, the result of the collective thinking and writing of the MISTICA virtual community; a gathering of reflections made in 2007 about the Internet which is still, 20 years later, extremely valid and actual. There is a text version and also a graphic version nicely illustrated, all in 4 languages accessible from https://funredes.org/mistica/english/cyberlibrary/thematic/
  • “At the Boundaries of Ethics and Cultures : Virtual Communities as an Open Ended Process Carrying the Will for Social Change (the “MISTICA” experience)” – https://funredes.org/mistica/english/cyberlibrary/thematic/icie/ This published article from Daniel Pimienta focused the complex of methodologies put in experiment thru the MISTICA project and the philosophy behind.
  • “Other side of the divide. Latin-American and Caribbean Perspectives on the WSIS”, this document, coordinated by Luis German Rodriguez, is a compound of various contributions from MISTICA most active players which would serve as input to the WSIS process. It is accessible at https://funredes.org/redistic/index.htm?body=proyectosjen, again in 4 languages.

Those 3 documents, together with UTOPISTA, could represent the most elaborated heritage from the MISTICA experience, which transcend the elapsed time and offer knowledge perfectly meaningful to contemporary reflections.

Additionally, the following publications could have been explored and mentioned to complete the article, although some are not in English:

– “Parte de la prehistoria de la Internet en AmĂ©rica latina y el Caribe: la experiencia de la FundaciĂłn Redes y Desarrollo, FUNREDES, en su periodo inicial 1988-1995”, Proc. of IV Simposio de Historia de la Informática de AmĂ©rica Latina y el Caribe (SHIALC), 2016, –https://is.cos.ufrj.br/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ProceedingsSHIALC2016v5Dic.pdf#page=78. This article offers a description of Funredes’s activities between its origin, as a department of Union Latine, its birth in 1993 and 1995.

– “Rock the Internet Blues A critical view of the evolution of the Internet” – https://funredes.org/RockInternetBlues (in 3 languages), 2020. This article written by Pimienta and Rodriguez collect the vision from 2012 to 2020 of how Google decision of making advertisement the business case in the Internet has ruined the utopian promises of the Internet.

– â€śUna historia breve de la observaciĂłn de las lenguas en la Internet”, en Proc. del VII Simposio de Historia de la Informática (SHIALC), pp294-312, Univ. de SĂŁo Paulo, ISBN 978-65-981536-3-2 – 8/2022 – https://is.cos.ufrj.br/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/ebook-shialc-2022-final-compactado.pdf.pdf#page=294  This article which also exists in French, focus specifically the history of linguistic diversity in the Internet, a theme where Funredes and its son OBDILCI have been major players.