The Mission of the Cyborg Institute

The Cyborg Institute is a cooperative research and consulting firm dedicated to exploring the "cyborg" moment, the convergence between humans, technology, and culture. Our work focuses on assisting individuals and organizations enhance and develop their uses of technology to more effectively complete work on important projects. Our work is thus both exploratory and applied, both technological and social.

The Cyborg Institute seeks to provide shared infrastructure, resources, and cooperation for theorists, researchers, and consultants in this "space." We work on understanding current technology and techno-social practice. We strive to develop new solutions and perspectives to help people and organizations use computers more effectively. In a very limited scope we also contract with people and teams to develop and maintain communities on-line, to promote productive collaboration environments.

In the pursuit of these goals and projects, the Cyborg Institute is dedicated to the cause of software freedom and the use of open source methodologies. Our own work is, as possible, completed in the open and licenced using appropriate copyleft and permissive licences. We also attempt to use free software tools in all of our workflows because of its superior quality and alignment with solutions that empower users in the cyborg moment.

Services of the Cyborg Institute

Below are the outlines of our primary services. We provide this as a way to introduce ourselves and the applications of our work. Indeed much of our efforts is presented to the public on this website, we often run the risk of being too abstract. This page outlines consulting processes and approaches to dealing with cyborg-related issues. If you're interested in discussing an engagement with us please be in touch so we can develop a plan to help enable you and/or your organization to work more effectively.

Informational Audits

The audit of current practices and goals is the basis of any engagement. The typical audit combines a series of discussions with you (or your team) with observations of your current practices, goals, and systems. This "data" provides the basis for us to help develop strategy, tools and practices to improve your workflows and increase your potential for success.

A report on this data can be furnished either as an end onto itself or a the beginning of an ongoing collaboration to help provide suggestions for implementing more effective tools and processes as appropriate, regardless of specific goals and needs.

Mentoring

Fundamentally, the Cyborg Institute is solution-agnostic. While we have tools and formats that we prefer to use for our own work, we recognize that a diverse set of tools is required to solve a diverse set of information management tasks. As solution mentors, the Cyborg Institute works to develop, document, and demonstrate specific solutions, either for implementation with direct clients or for the public good in collaboration with our community. In both cases we strive to generate and develop tools and practices in to enable more effective workflows.

Training

While more advanced tools and technologies do serve to advance the status of the cyborg, it is also true that cyborg experience can be expanded and deepened by training users and providing education for the human part of the cyborg-equation. The content presented in our blog and on our wiki are key educational resources, both for those that read and learn from them but also for the people who contribute to the wiki.

In addition, we are able to provide documentation, resources, and even hands-on-training for you and/or your organization to help promote efficient computer usage, and effective information management practices. Trainings and materials may be focused on specific tasks (e.g. note taking, collaborative writing, bibliographic tools, website management) or on specific pieces of software (e.g. emacs, org-mode, wordpress) as well as contemporary cyborg phenomena (eg. blogs, wiki's). These resources and engagements are tailored to your needs, interests, and if necessary size of your organization.

Specialized Networked Services

We have the expertise and skills to provide and support hosted services tailored to your needs on an ongoing basis. If you would like to have a blog, wiki, discussion list, git-hosting service, or other tool--for internal, or general public use--and are disenchanted with trusting your data to a big nameless organization, but still want to "outsource" some of the technical overhead, we would look forward to providing services so that you can focus on your work, rather than maintaing and supporting the technology itself.

We are particularly interested in offering infrastructure and resources to individuals and collectives doing work in the "cyborg" space and related domains.

Open Source Development

The Cyborg Institute is a firm proponent and advocate of software freedom and open source methodologies. As such, our projects--both software-code and textual--are when appropriate developed in the open, and offered for use under copyleft/permissive licences. We also wish to further the cause of software freedom and the use of open source methodologies, and in this direction we wish to offer our services to your open source project.

The Cyborg Institute is not a legal entity capable of providing protection and support to open source communities and projects. However, we have infrastructure and resources that we would be interested in offering to projects that address problems spaces related to the ones that our own projects address. If you're involved in a project, or would like to work with us to start a new project, please be in touch.

These descriptions of our services are merely an overview and we'd love to be able to help you and/or your organization work more effectively in any way possible. Contact us to begin a discussion with us about your project today!