Berlin Symposium 2011

Berlin.
Now that the Berlin Symposium is properly underway (congratulations to all concerned!), I’ve made my way into the workshop session on social media governance. The featured speaker in this session is Niva Elkin-Koren, whose research is on governance structures within social media themselves. Social media participants in the first place constitute an unorganised crowd outside of traditional organisations – from open source development outside of companies to political action outside of traditional parties, as we have seen in various countries around the world over the past twelve months. This can lead to real political change, as well as to real violence, of course, which makes it even more important to study.

Research in this area has focussed variously on collaborative content creation, crowdsourcing, organisational processes (without organisations), etc. Niva’s interest is in challenging this idea of the unorganised crowd, then: what processes of governance, including emergent self-governance, apply in these cases? Who are the players, the actors, the individual users and collective groups participating here? Term being used widely here include ‘strangers’, ‘crowd’, as well as ‘community’ – but what do we mean by these terms, and what are the differences between them?

Berlin.
The first keynote of the Berlin Symposium is by Oliver Gassmann, whose focus is on societal innovation. He notes the changes to communication which are associated with the popularisation of the Internet over the past twenty years; when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, for example, there were no online platforms to tweet the news; there was no Google to search for information with.

In 2010, some 107 trillion emails were sent; Facebook has 800 million users (and 35 million update their profiles every day); but we still don’t live entirely ‘virtual’ lives – rather, the Net has become central to our actual lives. This also raises significant privacy concerns, of course; in Germany and Switzerland, there were substantial concerns about Google Streetview, for example, but at the same time we also give a great deal of information about ourselves away freely all the time.

Berlin.
I’m in Berlin for the opening of the new (Google-sponsored) Institute for Internet and Society, a very exciting new research initiative which was launched today. The launch itself is accompanied by the three-day Berlin Symposium, which will map out some of the research agenda of the Institute, and the Symposium opens with a few statements of intent by the founding directors.

Jeanette Hofmann begins by highlighting her research interests – including issues of privacy, and broader online regulation (including co-regulation with users and operators, beyond state regulation itself – what Jeanette calls ‘online ordering’). Other key areas include intellectual property, of course, and collaborative online content creation. There’s also a need for further interdisciplinary education of participating online actors: content, technical, and legal fields have yet to speak to one another more effectively and more frequently.