Encouraging and Mapping Political and Creative Engagement

Vancouver.
We're coming towards the end of the last day here at AoIR 2007, and Kirsten Foot is the first speaker in the post-lunch session, presenting a co-authored paper on link structures and engagement practices in U.S. and U.K. fair trade networks. Fair trade movements aim to develop more equitable practices in international commerce in a variety of commodities (not just coffee), and Kirsten and her colleagues examined fair trade movements' historical roots (since the end of World War II) in a previous study; in the U.K., contrary to the U.S., there are also important relationships with government bodies (and there are a number of official 'fair trade towns' in the U.K., but only one in the U.S.). U.K. movements are now having some impact even on European Union policy, in fact. In the U.S., targets of such movements are usually corporations, by comparison.

So, how do the Websites of fair trade groups in the U.S. and the U.K. reflect these differences? The study began by examining interlinkage between fair trade sites (using IssueCrawler), and especially focussed on the one hundred key sites identified in this way; the distribition of sites was 44% NGO, 40% business, 16% umbrella organisations in the U.S., and 64% NGO, 19% business, 13% umbrella organisations, and 4% other sites in the U.K. Engagement practices in such sites included calendars, membership opportunities, email contacts, donation requests, and others. Mobilising features included downloadable action information, public support statements to various levels of government and business, organisation suggestions for users' local spheres of influence, and reports of other participants' actions. The level of adoption of involvement tools was relatively high (and slightly higher in the U.S.); at the same time, the level of mobilisation tool adoption was considerably higher in the U.K. than in the U.S. (but lower than that of involvement tools in both countries).

The U.S. peak in involvement was mainly driven by 'buy fair trade' features; the U.K. peak in mobilising was driven by invitations to organise on the local level and to make public support statements to governments and business. Additionally, content contribution functionality was higher in the U.K., while U.S. sites focussed more strongly on fair trade buying opportunities. U.S. NGOs were more likely than business to seek involvement and mobilisation in visitors; in the U.K. NGOs were more frequently mobilising, but businesses were more likely to involve users.

The U.S. network of sites had more of a star shape; it was more strongly organised around a few key actors in the network. The U.K. network was more evenly distributed across all participants. This indicates a greater inequality in the U.S. network. Additionally, this can also be understood from a perspective of cooperation between sites; U.S. organisations were most likely to cooperate in the field of involvement, and least likely to cooperate in the field of mobilisation, while U.K. organisations were more moderate on both counts, and about the same for both forms of engagement. This may explain the more even distribution of network actors in the U.K.

There's more to do here to interpret link relationships between sites, however, and there's an opportunity here for deeper studies of specific interaction features and their effect on site interlinkage opportunities - this could be represented using three-dimensional graphs of the network, for example.

The other paper is by Sal Humphreys and me, and deals with our edgeX project in collaboration with Ipswich City Council. The Powerpoint and full paper are below, and I hope to add the audio recording of the paper soon!

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