Open Culture for Education: How can community labs contribute to democratize knowledge?

Abstract

Information is power, but how is this power distributed in our society? It is a fact that the distribution of information (the public knowledge) is not equal for all of us. Conventionally, this is called inequality of educational opportunity. Currently, we are living within the impact of such inequality, also with the globalization phenomenon, which has left us inside of a global crisis (the most important capitalist crisis since World War II). Nevertheless, we have the community forces. For example: The Fab-Labs networks, which are a global network that encourage the empowerment of communities through grassroots technology, being the most significant culture to an open access. Moreover, we have do-it-your-self and open source/hardware to promote the inclusive education in Latin America.

This article pretends to contribute with a big proposal: the democratization of knowledge from Fab-Labs in all Latin American. This approach is aimed to impulse the reciprocity principle (known as Ayni in Quechua) by encouraging to generate community labs based on PUQUNA vision. Such initiative is described here for trying to achieve an open dynamic social ecosystem, and how we are going to get it by empowering citizens, through self-management and cooperation between us in order to reach an authentic cultural integration.