Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Serge Proulx, who is interested in how sharing practices are organised in the collaborative knowledge environment Tela Botanica. What does it mean to contribute to this type of online environment? The site is a French-language site for discussions on botany, founded in 1999, and highly successful in its field (with some 12,000 members to date).

The site publishes a weekly newsletter with some 7,700 subscribers that is open to contribution to all and allows for comments attached to articles; it also posts events and job offers. There is also the E-Flore …

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Anders Madsen, whose focus is on design choices in policy-oriented technologies of knowledge management. This operates in the context of discussions over the role of knowledge in democracy – how is the relevance of information and facts settled? Two divergent approaches to this highlight the role of science in generating evidence-based policy (which responds to well-defined problems), or alternatively see a range of wicked problems that need broad participation and socially robust policies.

Digital democracy can aid policymaking in these contexts; policymaking procedures can be grounded in new technologies of knowledge management …

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Jonathan Morgan, who shifts our focus to Wikipedia. His interest is in how communal values are expressed by participants on the site – for example around specific controversies on the site. His project examined the debates around the Jyllands Posten / Muhammad cartoons controversy; here, the editors who created the Wikipedia entry covering this issue decided to include the offending cartoon in the entry at first, which generated substantial debate.

The site’s professed aim is to empower and engage people around the world, and founder Jimmy Wales has echoed these sentiments …

Hamburg.
The next session at ECREA 2010 is the one I’m in as well – but we start with Stine Lomborg, whose interest is in relationality on Twitter. This build on my concept of produsage, and examines this especially for the case of mundane, ordinary conversational activities. To engage in such communication, Twitter users must establish networks with each other – but such networks are non-symmetric, as followees won’t necessarily always follow back. This creates a particularly interest network structure.

Stine examined the activities of six Danish Twitter users, and captured their tweets and @replies over the course …

Hamburg.
The last day at ECREA 2010 starts with a paper by Tom Bakker, whose interest is in mapping participation in citizen media activities in the Netherlands. He notes that participation in social media still appears to be growing strongly overall – and these shifts in the media ecology necessarily bring about some significant changes. The potential for such change has been highlighted for journalism (gatekeeping is said to be declining, agenda setting, news values, standards, and ethics are shifting, and diversity is increasing), as well as for the wider public sphere (thought to be more inclusive, active, deliberative, with …

Hamburg.
The last ECREA 2010 panel tonight starts with my QUT colleague Tanya Nitins, whose interest is in locative media. There’s been significant development in this in recent times, through wireless devices and and GPS-enabled phones. This divides into social-annotative, commercial-annotative, navigational, and combined forms of locative media.

A number of concepts have been applied to this – LBS, geospatial Web, GeoWeb, pervasive computing, sonic signage, GPS, and many other terms. We must therefore develop the language to communicate more clearly with one another as we research these technologies.

Social annotative media allow us to add geographic data to content …

It’s that time of the year again – I’m frantically working to get ready for my October overseas trip, which will take me through much of northern Europe. Here’s what’s on the agenda – if you’re in the neighbourhood, say hi (and connect with me on Dopplr to make catching up easier).

My first stop is in Berlin, where we’ve scheduled a couple of workshops for our Mapping Online Publics ARC Discovery team (involving my CCI colleague Jean Burgess as well as our partner researchers Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai from Sociomantic Labs). From there, I’m heading on to …

Canberra.


Another day at ANZCA 2010, another keynote: we're starting this last day of the conference with a keynote by John Keane, whose theme is monitory democracy. He begins chronologically, in 1945 - when there were only 12 parliamentary democracies left in the world. Democracy was a beleaguered species.

John himself is in search of a 'wild category' - a category that provides a new way of seeing conventional wisdom, provides alternatives to traditional ways of ordering thought. We need a new term for describing the dynamics, changes of language, shifts in institutions, of democracy - and monitory democracy is the term he offers. We need a new term to describe these novel trends (which exist all over the world, especially also outside the traditional democratic countries), and in particular to better understand the intersections of democracy and communication forms.