Intelligence (squared)

February 26, 2010 at 11:48 am · Filed under deliberation

A interesting crew from Sydney called Intelligence Squared that run deliberative Town-Hall style debates and online forums.  The first one in Melbourne is on the Nuclear Energy debate on March 4 and is run in conjunction with the new Wheeler Centre.

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The value of slow thinking?

June 23, 2009 at 9:24 am · Filed under blogs, deliberation

(thanks to that wonderful blog net.effect for the image)

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Podcast/Press Release: ‘HE in a Web 2.0 World’ report

June 1, 2009 at 1:50 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, digital humanities, eresearch, humanities computing, web2.0

JISC recently released a report on ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’. The aim of the report is to critically assess recent Web-based developments commonly termed ‘Web 2.0′ and assess them in relation to education and pedagogical practice. The report is available on-line and in hard-copy; plus some of the key findings are discussed in a podcast with David Melville, one of the report’s authors.

Some of the key findings of that report are that students may not be developing the critical skills to evaluate information and that ‘Web 2.0′ may be promoting shallowness. And although Melville discusses Web 2.0 as a solution to all sorts of social ills from those associated with multiculturalism and globalism to a ‘collaborative’ deficit in education, I do worry that the report itself is not critical enough as many technologies are produced within commercial and other contexts that may not have the unique interests of education in mind.

The report and podcast is available on the JISC website; discussions in this forum are most welcome.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/05/podcast80heinaweb

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Private Sheriffs in Cyberspace: Jonathan Zittrain OII Event: London, 19th May 2009

May 21, 2009 at 4:27 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, creative commons, deliberation, design, digital humanities, events, governance, humanities computing, internet, political communication, web2.0

On Tuesday evening I attended an Oxford Internet Institute sponsored lecture by Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Harvard Law School, Co-Founder and Faculty Director, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society (at the salubrious legal offices of Wragge and Co). Zittrain talked about regulation on-line by major Internet players such as Facebook and Apple and asserted that many of the regulating methods employed by them were outside of the rule of law. His contention was that many ‘Web 2’ companies have immense and increasing social and economic power within the fabric of our lives and are regulating their sites in a rather ad hoc and random way in terms of banning application developers, individuals, and groups that do not adhere to their governance structures. He used a number of examples to support his thesis, plus introduced a simple graph to illustrate emergent styles of governance:

Top-down

Hierarchy >poligarchy

Bottom-up

As an example of a ‘bottom-up’ governance structure Zittrain cited Wikipedia which includes a deliberative system to manage thorny editorial decisions. As a top-down system of governance he cited Facebook; although Facebook is beginning to include the community in decisions relating to its structure and functionality. He used the term ‘social governance’ to describe this bottom-up governance approach and suggested ways in which this approach may be designed into a system (through flagging certain tasks that help tap into the ‘reservoir of good will’ of the community). A well-designed system should have mechanisms to ask users for their input.

Although I tend to agree with many of the arguments of Zittrain, I feel there is a tendency to overstate the importance of sites such as Facebook and Youtube to the broader public. Sure they are popular, but this isn’t the British Library, the University of California, or the Library of Congress we are talking about! They are just large and fashionable web sites; a small part of the fabric of our complex lives. And commercial companies will perhaps always act in their own interests; either commercially or ideologically.

I suppose what is needed is some sort of bill of rights/responsibilities that is general to the operation of the Web within a certain geographical region balanced with the specific values of the site in question. There is nothing wrong with sites asserting behaviour norms upon users; but then again governance structures should be transparent and open; not outside of acceptable norms of the broader public sphere. A site should never assert policies that are deemed racist nor discriminatory (perhaps this is Zittrain’s anxiety when he claimed than many sites operate outside of ‘the rule of law’). The relationship between the community and the platform should always be fair and equitable; especially in large user-based sites such as Facebook. In my mind, governance structures, whether online or off, should always be open and transparent.

One of the respondents to the talk, Ian Brown, a Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (and author of the recent report Database state) asserted that the relationship between Citizen and State and Cyberspace needed to be reconsidered. He also claimed (from his experience) that that the issues raised by Zittrain are not well-known in the UK;  especially in senior government levels. As an historian (and not a legal expert), my  scepticism relates to the actual significance of the entire debate.  I suppose that the significance of the debates depends on the importance the public places on systems such as Facebook and their governance structures. I may agree with Eric Hobsbawn that Terrorism is more a perceived threat in the UK that an actual threat (to the state), but then again the public is led to believe otherwise so it now painfully significant.  So if the debates about governance are perceived to be important by the public; then they will become important. So we may have a ‘Facebook Parliament’ in the making deliberating about the rise of rudeness on Facebook . They should start with the Tube system!

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Soap Box Project

April 11, 2008 at 10:43 am · Filed under deliberation, political communication, politics

This project led by Dr Sally Young at the University of Melbourne will be of interest to those who wish to understand the history of political advertising in Australia.

Politicians and members of the public would once stand atop a soapbox in order to shout their message across to an audience. Now they use a wide range of media including TV ads, social networking websites and all manner of radio and television appearances. This website will harness a range of materials ─ including photographs, texts of speeches, transcripts of debates and political ads ─ to allow visitors to see (and assess) how Australian political actors communicate.

Election campaigns are usually focused on the short-term – the hectic 3 to 6 weeks of the formal election campaign. This website instead allows you to see elections as a continuum; to look back over time to see what the parties and their leaders have said (and promised) in the past. The website includes material dating back over a hundred years so that visitors can recall recent campaigns or compare current events with historical ones (link).

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Online Democratic Deliberation in a Time of Information Abundance

September 14, 2007 at 11:17 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, design, digital humanities, gemeinschaft, governance, humanities computing, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

This article of mine recently appeared in the journal, Fast Capitalism.

The intensified use of the Internet by civil society groups and governments for political purposes has left many questions unexplained—especially in terms of the Internet’s effects upon deliberative democratic processes. The Internet was first imagined as a means to revitalize deliberative processes. However, poor design and lack of usability research meant that many ambitions went largely unrealized. With a new wave of Internet technologies, ‘deliberative design’ has become even more important to stem what many claim is a trend towards political fragmentation and disaggregation. In a time of ‘information abundance’ mounting political communication online may also undermine collectivist, deliberative democratic processes, distinct from the ambition to renew these processes. There is therefore a pressing need to design Internet technologies that serve deliberative democracy, rather than unwittingly undermine it (link)

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FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES

August 15, 2007 at 7:50 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, creative commons, deliberation, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, social media, web2.0

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
(607) 255-9222, payette@cs.cornell.edu
http://www.fedora-commons.org
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson
(415) 561-7427, greg.nelson@moore.org

FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES
(Ithaca, New York, August 10, 2007) – Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.

With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.

Recognizing the importance of multiple participants in the development of new technologies to support this vision, the Moore Foundation funding will also support the growth and diversification of the Fedora Community, a global set of partners who will cooperate in software development, application deployment, and community outreach for Fedora Commons. This network of partners will be instrumental for making Fedora Commons a self-sustainable non-profit organization that will support and incubate open-source software projects that focus on new mechanisms for information formation, access, collaboration, and preservation.

According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, “the new Fedora Commons can foster technologies and partnerships that make it possible for academic and scientific communities to publish, share, and archive the results of their own work in a free, open fashion, and make it possible to analyze and use content in novel ways.”

“Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that provides the basic infrastructure for on-line communities of scholars will have enduring impact. The unanticipated cross- disciplinary uses of this open platform are the hallmark of this revolutionary infrastructure,” said Jim Omura, technology strategist with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Payette also noted, “The open-source software that is developed and distributed by Fedora Commons can impact the entire lifecycle of what is often referred to as “e-Research” and “e-Science,” including storage of experimental data, analysis of experimental results, peer review, publication of findings, and the reuse of published material for the next generation of scholarly works. We will also continue our work with libraries and museums to facilitate the sharing of digitized collections, making previously locked away material available to wide audiences. Also, building on our attention to digital preservation in the Fedora open-source repository system, Fedora Commons will continue to stress the importance of the sustainability of digital information in applications of our work.”

About Fedora Commons
Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to provide sustainable open-source technologies to help individuals and organizations create, manage, publish, share, and preserve digital content upon which we form our intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage. Since 2001, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell University and the University of Virginia have collaborated on the Fedora Project which has developed, distributed, and supported innovative open-source repository software that combines content management, web services, and semantic technologies. The Fedora software has been adopted worldwide to support an array of applications including open-access publishing, scholarly communication, digital libraries, e-science, archives, and education.

Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science Building at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The Executive Director of Fedora Commons is Sandy Payette, who co-invented the Fedora architecture and led the Cornell arm of the open-source Fedora Project. The Board of Directors of Fedora Commons provides leadership from multiple communities, including open-access publishing, digital libraries, sciences, and humanities. For more information, visit http://www.fedora-commons.org.

About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to advance environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific research around the world and improve the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation’s Science Program seeks to make a significant impact on the development of provocative, transformative scientific research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields. For more information, visit http://www.moore.org.

–
Carol Minton Morris
Communications Director
National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
http://NSDL.org

Communications and Media Director
Fedora Commons
http://www.fedora-commons.org

Cornell Information Science
301 College Ave.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607 255-2702
clt6@cornell.edu

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From Google to gaggle

August 13, 2007 at 7:12 pm · Filed under deliberation, media, political communication, social media, web2.0

From the Guardian Unlimited.

People quoted in featured stories on Google’s US news site now have the right to reply, marking a fundamental shift in the search engine’s role (link).

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Cyberinfastructure for Collaboration and Innovation (selected papers)

August 3, 2007 at 2:41 am · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, design, humanities computing, web2.0

selected papers from the conference 29-30 January 2007 (link to First Monday)

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Humanist List 20 Years Old

May 9, 2007 at 7:37 am · Filed under deliberation, digital humanities, humanities computing, social media

Humanist, the online discussion list for the Digital Humanities, run by Willard McCarty here at King’s College, London is now 20 years old. Renown for it’s erudite discussion, here is a telling snippet from Willard. Humanist must be one of the oldest lists on the Internet; perhaps the oldest. I would like to hear from anyone who knows of older lists.

Collaboration is a fine thing, but merely working together is not
enough, as the metaphor suggests in its depiction of a person’s
imagined spatial entrapment within his or her surrounding sphere,
which seems all the world, but isn’t. Building a common perspective
on computing — or better, a shared way of gaining perspectives — is
the state of maturity we’ve been growing ourselves into for more than
the last 20 years of Humanist’s being-in-the-world, which I celebrate
today. I like to compare our socio-intellectual place to a sea-going
explorer’s, on board a methodological vessel in an archipelago of
disciplines. Northrop Frye, combining the ancient definition of God
as “centre everywhere, circumference nowhere” (”centrum ubique,
circumferentia nusquam”) with Blake’s metaphor of “expanding eyes”,
spoke of one’s own discipline-of-origin as a centre of all knowledge
that expands into all others. The key is the expanding.

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Brown University Causal Reasoning Survey System

May 3, 2007 at 8:25 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, deliberation

The Scholarly technology group at Brown has a whole range of digital humanities projects. I find there Casual Reasoning Survey System of particular interest (although there are no surveys on it at the moment) (link)

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collaborative software for decision making in i-labs

April 16, 2007 at 7:23 pm · Filed under deliberation

I-Labs are a collaborative space used for group meeting and video conferences. And these systems have come along way in recent years. The i Lab at essex uses deliberative software with its system.

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2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web

April 2, 2007 at 11:10 pm · Filed under deliberation, design, events, web2.0

A European conference for you pragmatic deliberators out there.

THE PRAGMATIC WEB CONFERENCE is a unique forum to envision and debate how the emerging social, semantic, multimedia Web mediates the ways in which we construct shared meaning. While there is much research and development into topics relevant to this challenge such as collaboration, usability, knowledge representation, and social informatics, the Pragmatic Web conference provides common ground for dialogue at the nexus of these topics.

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Hypermedia Discourse, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University

April 2, 2007 at 10:55 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, deliberation, digital humanities, gemeinschaft, humanities computing, web2.0

The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, has produced an enormous number of noteworthy projects. Check out the Hypermedia Discourse project:

Hypermedia Discourse website, a research programme launched in 1995 at the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. Our focus is on what we are finding to be a powerful and intruiging intersection: the meeting of Hypermedia and Discourse theory and technology. Our interests are both conceptual, and intensely practical: the co-evolution of digital tools and associated work practices for sensemaking.We hope you find this engaging, and look forward to hearing from you if this sparks ideas for your own work (link).

Also check out their other projects; particularly GlobalArgument.net

And also, ScolOnto (the Scholarly Ontologies Project)

In 2010, will scholarly knowledge still be published solely in prose,
or can we imagine a complementary infrastructure
that is ‘native’ to the internet,
enabling more effective dissemination,
debate, and analysis of ideas?

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[view academic citations]

[hide academic citations]

AMA citation:

Bellamy C. Hypermedia Discourse, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University. craigbellamy.net. 2007. Available at: http://www.craigbellamy.net/2007/04/02/hypermedia-discourse-knowledge-media-institute-open-university/. Accessed March 13, 2010.

APA citation:

Bellamy, Craig. (2007). Hypermedia Discourse, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University. Retrieved March 13, 2010, from craigbellamy.net Web site: http://www.craigbellamy.net/2007/04/02/hypermedia-discourse-knowledge-media-institute-open-university/

Chicago citation:

Bellamy, Craig. 2007. Hypermedia Discourse, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University. craigbellamy.net. http://www.craigbellamy.net/2007/04/02/hypermedia-discourse-knowledge-media-institute-open-university/ (accessed March 13, 2010).

Harvard citation:

Bellamy, C 2007, Hypermedia Discourse, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, craigbellamy.net. Retrieved March 13, 2010, from <http://www.craigbellamy.net/2007/04/02/hypermedia-discourse-knowledge-media-institute-open-university/>

MLA citation:

Bellamy, Craig. "Hypermedia Discourse, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University." 2 Apr. 2007. craigbellamy.net. Accessed 13 Mar. 2010. <http://www.craigbellamy.net/2007/04/02/hypermedia-discourse-knowledge-media-institute-open-university/>

E Government in Britain

February 18, 2007 at 3:20 am · Filed under deliberation, governance, politics, web2.0

E Government is an established field and practice in the UK. The Guardian Online has an entire section devoted to e-government and its recent controversies (link).

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