UK.gov appeals for developers to mashup 1,000 datasets

October 1, 2009 at 5:19 pm · Filed under political communication, politics

UK.gov is calling on developers to consult the Cabinet Office on its prototype website that will open some government datasets to the public.

It wants the developer community to get involved in shaping what apps, data sources and features the website should contain.

“With over 1,000 existing data sets, from seven departments (brought together in re-useable form for the first time) and community resources, we want developers to work with us to use the data to create great applications; give us feedback on the early operational community; and tell us how to develop what we have into a single point of access for government-held public data,” reads a post on the government’s digital engagement blog (link).

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Social Media vs the Dictator – Clay Shirky

September 22, 2009 at 1:02 pm · Filed under political communication, politics, social media, web2.0

Lessons learned. The social context of technological-use is as important as the technology itself (try telling that to the practical minded Dictator!)

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Quick Response: Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 #oxsmc09

September 21, 2009 at 5:14 pm · Filed under conferences, events, internet, political communication, video, video diary, web2.0

(Transcript below if you can’t follow my polemical prose; and sorry but the synchronisation in this clip has a mind of its own).

I attended the Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 on Friday (18 September) at the Said Business School. The theme of the Convention was ‘assessing the evolution, impact and potential of social media’; a fairly monumental tasks for a one day convention with speakers from both sides of the Atlantic and from the Academy, business, media, and politics. The Convention was ordered around panel discussion with a lot of participation from the audience. At times subversive and always humorous ‘tweets’ from the audience were also projected on the wall behind the speakers (we voted to do this earlier in the day).

Rather than divide my time between all the speakers, I will concentrate on two of the most distinctive speakers that hopefully convey the timbre of the conference. The first speaker is Mathew Hindman, an academic at the University of Phoenix and author of the recently published ‘The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton University Press; 2009). The other speaker I will discuss is Kara Swisher, the Technology Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
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Headsup

September 15, 2009 at 4:01 pm · Filed under political communication, politics

(Another online political engagement innovation from the Hansard Society).

HeadsUp is a moderated, online space for under 18s to debate the political issues important to them. Young people share viewpoints with their peers and decision-makers up and down the country (link).

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TheyWorkForYou.com

September 13, 2009 at 6:23 pm · Filed under political communication, politics

On of the best online political engagement sites in the UK is the TheyWorkForYou.com which is a system that monitors your local Member of Parliament’s voting patterns/speeches (in my case Meg Hillier in Hackney South/ Shoreditch).

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Lords of the Blog: Life and Work in the House of Lords

September 9, 2009 at 9:42 pm · Filed under blogs, political communication, politics

Lords of the Blog is a collaborative blog written by Members of the House of Lords for the purposes of public engagement. The aim of the blog is to help educate, raise awareness and engage with the public on a range of issues relating to the role and business of the House of Lords. The blog is authored by a group of Members from across the House. Each Member has their own profile and personal section of the blog. A ‘homepage’ provides an at-a-glance digest of the latest post from each Member

(An initiative from the House of Lords and the Hansard Society).

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Building Social Media Infrastructure to Engage Publics

July 9, 2009 at 10:23 am · Filed under communuity informatics, political communication, politics, web2.0

An interesting new report from the Centre for Social Media at American University is Washington DC.

This field report traces how a committed group of volunteers harnessed the micro-blogging tool Twitter to create innovative public media 2.0 experiments—first to actively engage users to report on their voting experiences in the 2008 U.S. election, and then to document their experiences of the 2009 presidential inauguration. Along the way, these two projects demonstrated how journalists and advocates can effectively leverage a range of both commercial and open source social media tools to organize, publicize and implement citizen reporting projects, creating infrastructure for related future projects. Organizers have since worked to archive and repurpose the code and collaboration materials from these efforts for use in 2009 election monitoring initiatives in India and Iran (link)

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Photos from Iran elections #iranelections

June 16, 2009 at 9:31 am · Filed under political communication

A smashed computer monitor in a room in a Tehran University dormitory after it was attacked by militia forces during riots in Tehran (thanks to Payman for the link).

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How to track Iranian protests online #iranelections

June 15, 2009 at 9:53 pm · Filed under media, political communication, politics, video

Here is how to find out about the Iranian elections online. Please send me your links. Also, Twitter’s down time has been rescheduled because of the important role that it is playing in the US elections (see link).

Hash Tag: #Iranelections (search and post your blogs and tweets with this).

• Breaking Tweet http://www.breakingtweets.com

• Andrew Sullivan’s Blog (link) Thanks to D.P. for the link

• uk-iran.com (link) Thanks to Payman for the link

• Monitter.com (real-time trending tweets)

• Mashable.com http://mashable.com/2009/06/14/new-media-iran/ (and excellent guide to using new media to track the election in Iran).

• Google Blog Search http://blogsearch.google.com/

• (Flickr. search on Iran and Protests)

• Youtube (Citizenstube)

“The popular Iranian cartoonist, Nikahang Kosar, depicts Ahmadinejad as a bandit holding Iran to ransom. This is his take on the official result” (from the Guardian)

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Obama’s speech in Cairo

June 4, 2009 at 11:03 am · Filed under pod casts, political communication, politics, web2.0

Online political communication has travelled well since the days when a web site had a manifesto on it and pictures of cops bashing your mates at the last anti-globalisation demo!

• Watch Obama’s speeck on Whitehouse.gov (link)
• Discuss it on Facebook (link)
• Check Obama’s twitter feed (link)
• Discuss on Myspace (link)

I asked him about what hotel he is staying in in Cairo and what the weather is like; but he hasn’t got back to me yet.

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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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Twitter activism

April 19, 2009 at 1:34 am · Filed under political communication, politics, web2.0

(picture from the Independent)

This story is from the Guardian, then to the Melbourne Age, then to this  blog. I am not sure if this was truly ‘twitter activism’ as the story claims; but still the nativity in which many institutions approach Web 2.0 and its potential for political mobilisation astonished me.  All technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.  All people are neither good nor bad nor are they neutral.

THE woman behind the mass protests which rocked the capital of Moldova last week has gone into hiding after the so-called “Twitter Revolution” forced a recount of the general election.

Natalia Morar, 25, a Moldovan who has already been banned from Russia for opposing the Kremlin, feared arrest after organising a flash mob which ended with 20,000 people storming the parliament building (link).

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#amazonfail

April 12, 2009 at 11:16 pm · Filed under gadfly, political communication, politics, social media, web2.0

(read analysis and find more links here on ‘what the hashtag’ (link)

(This original post is from ontd_political on Live Journal…link)

If you’re a twitter user, you may have noticed that #amazonfail is the top trending topic for today. Here’s the basic gist of it:

Amazon seems to be stripping the sales figures and accompanying rankings from GLBTQ books, erotica, and romance novels, particularly those with what they term “adult content” thus preventing them from showing up in some bestseller lists and searches (and potentially directly damaging their sales), on the grounds that they are “adult” material.

(This is regardless of whether they contain any explicit sex. Meanwhile, books with explicit heterosexual sex scenes retain their sales rank, as long as they’re not overtly marketed as “erotica”.)

A quick search reveals that books that have had their sales ranks removed include James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.

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(Guardian) How G20 Ian Tomlinson footage spread shock around world

April 11, 2009 at 1:05 pm · Filed under blogs, political communication, politics

Here is some interesting media analysis from the Guardian newspaper relating to the use of amateur footage during the recent G20 protest. Increasingly, the democratic power game is being fought out in the media and I am surprised the police didn’t realise this and moderate their tactics accordingly. For a broader analysis of contemporary new media politics, see Manual Castells lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute titled ‘communication power in a network society’ (link).

Should anyone still doubt that the era of a citizen-led, electronic news media is on the way, then the sudden arrival and rapid global spread this week of the Guardian video showing police mistreatment of Ian Tomlinson shortly before his death at the G20 protests provides compelling evidence.

Firstly, the footage was shot by a non-professional – an American fund manager visiting London – rather than one of the scores of news crews who were there at the time. More dramatically, within hours of the video going up on the guardian.co.uk website on Tuesday afternoon, it was being watched around the world as an ever-widening network of newspapers, bloggers, Twitter users and others spread the word and passed on links (link).

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Media Talk: Twitter @G20

April 3, 2009 at 4:14 pm · Filed under media, pod casts, political communication, web2.0

Here is a podcast (audio); a reflective analysis of the use of new media such as twitter at the G20 protests by a panel of media experts.

Matt Wells and the panel discuss Twitter and the new forms of digital journalism at G20 (link)

Here is the app. for the iphone called Audioboo that is discussed on the podcast (link).

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