Category — social informatics

The Living Edge:
David Sifry has just put up The State of the Live Web, April 2007. To explain the Live Web, he points to a pair of pieces I wrote in 2005. If you’d like a more visual explanation, follow the slides from this talk I gave at OSCON last summer, starting here.

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Doc points toward Dave’s use of some of his work in the live web and more important the communal or collective web as compared to what might be thought of as the individualistic web. Of course, in my view, the www is a policy regime, a device that constrains and constructs relationships, not merely among data, but primarily among humans. The current transformation of the web into user-generation and user-integration is fascinating because it is making possible a much broader mode of awareness, communication, and community construction.

U Michigan Unveils Master’s Degree in ‘Social Computing’:
The University of Michigan’s School of Information (SI) announced a graduate-degree specialization in “social computing” through a Master of Science in Information. The university said the program is the first in the country to focus on social computing, the term describing the wave of open technologies that enable masses of people to interact and exchange and sort information.

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Wow this is an interesting event. I wonder where it will lead.

Announcing the release of the International Journal of Internet Research Ethics

Call for Papers for the Premier Issue of IJIRE

Description and Scope:

The IJIRE is the first peer-reviewed online journal, dedicated specifically to cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural research on Internet Research Ethics. All disciplinary perspectives, from those in the arts and humanities, to the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences, are reflected in the journal.

With the emergence of Internet use as a research locale and tool throughout the 1990s, researchers from disparate disciplines, ranging from the social sciences to humanities to the sciences, have found a new fertile ground for research opportunities that differ greatly from their traditional biomedical counterparts. As such, “populations,” locales, and spaces that had no corresponding physical environment became a focal point, or site of research activity. Human subjects protections questions then began to arise, across disciplines and over time: What about privacy? How is informed consent obtained? What about research on minors? What are “harms” in an online environment? Is this really human subjects work? More broadly, are the ethical obligations of researchers conducting research online somehow different from other forms of research ethics practices?

As Internet Research Ethics has developed as its own field and discipline, additional questions have emerged: How do diverse methodological approaches result in distinctive ethical conflicts – and, possibly, distinctive ethical resolutions? How do diverse cultural and legal traditions shape what are perceived as ethical conflicts and permissible resolutions? How do researchers collaborating across diverse ethical and legal domains recognize and resolve ethical issues in ways that recognize and incorporate often markedly different ethical understandings?

Finally, as “the Internet” continues to transform and diffuse, new research ethics questions arise – e.g., in the areas of blogging, social network spaces, etc. Such questions are at the heart of IRE scholarship, and such general areas as anonymity, privacy, ownership, authorial ethics, legal issues, research ethics principles (justice, beneficence, respect for persons), and consent are appropriate areas for consideration.

The IJIRE will publish articles of both theoretical and practical nature to scholars from all disciplines who are pursuing—or reviewing—IRE work. Case studies of online research, theoretical analyses, and practitioner-oriented scholarship that promote understanding of IRE at ethics and institutional review boards, for instance, are encouraged. Methodological differences are embraced.

Publication Schedule:

The IJIRE is published twice annually, March 1, and October 15.

Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis, and are subject to

Editorial and Peer Review.

Subscription:

Free

Editors- in- Chief:

Elizabeth A. Buchanan, Ph.D.

Director, Center for Information Policy Research

School of Information Studies

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

elizabeth.buchanan@gmail.com

Charles M. Ess, Ph.D.

Distinguished Research Professor

Drury University

cmess@drury.edu

Editorial Board:

Andrea Baker, Ohio University, USA

Heidi Campbell, Texas A&M University, USA

Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State University, USA

Jeremy Hunsinger, Virginia Tech, USA

Mark Johns, Luther College, USA

Leslie M. Tkach-Kawasaki, University of Tsukuba, Japan

Tomas Lipinski, JD, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

Ulf-Dietrich Reips, Universität Zürich, Switzerland

Susannah Stern, San Diego State University, USA

Malin Sveningsson, Ph.D., Karlstad University, Sweden

Style Guidelines:

Manuscripts should be submitted to ijire@sois.uwm.edu; articles should be double-spaced, and in the range of 5000-15,000 words, though announcements of IRE scholarship, case studies, and book reviews of any length can be submitted for review. Please ensure that your manuscript is received in good format (proper English language usage, grammatical structure, spelling, punctuation, and compliance with APA reference style). The IJIRE follows the American Psychological Association’s 5th edition. Articles should include an abstract no longer than 100 words, full names and contact information of all authors, and an author’s biography of 100 words or less.

Copyright:

In the spirit of open access, IJIRE authors maintain copyright control

of their work. Any subsequent publications related to the IJIRE work

must reference the IJIRE and the original publication date and url.

Web site: http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/cipr/ijire.html

Links for 2007-03-09 [del.icio.us]:

• Big Brother State – an animated short by David Scharf
• fantastic animated short about government surveillance and our rights — i’m going to show this to my students.

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  Dan points toward this cool flash video explaining the nature and issues with the big brother state and mass surveillance.

Internet should be run by key players: new ITU boss | Tech&Sci | Internet | Reuters.com:
The Internet should continue to be overseen by major agencies including ICANN and the ITU, rather than any new “superstructure”, the new head of the International Telecommunications Union said on Friday.Hamadoun Toure, who took up the reins of the United Nations agency this month, said the ITU would focus on tackling cyber-security and in narrowing the “digital divide” between rich and poor countries.

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or perhaps… it should be run by …. its users?

The $100 laptop: What went wrong – MSN Money:

Anyway, in general a free computer to everyone on the planet it interesting. The tool is cool. And there are many massively problematic issues involved. But that’s interesting is that this article is publishe din MSN Money. MSN isn’t part of this. I’ve read the M$ does not like open source. I wonder how much big computing, like big oil and big tobacco is willing to thumb the nose at doing something good (Gate’s work on aids in africa is not part of this debate of course) useful when it might get in the way of a little well planned out hegemony. But that’s just my personal opinion on it.

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This is one place where i disagree with Jason. The ‘cool tool’ is not a solution, it is a distraction from more serious infrastructural and educational issues and the ‘leapfrog’ of those infrastructures that it ‘represents’ actually will be impossible. I don’t think big computing is actually against this, in fact, most of them have bought in. You see, you don’t sell these things to people… You sell them to governments and the money that comes from governments will be be backed by other governments, so there is no real possibility of profit/loss . The economics of this project looks great, I think, for companies. The future of these objects as computers… is not great. The design is completely wrong for any use outside of a clean, classroom environment. It has too many moving parts and it is ‘american cool’ instead of globally useful. If you look at army troop laptops, designs that actually work in diverse environments…. they do not look like this and there is a good reason for that….. Design is one issue with OLPC, but there are certainly major socio-political implications… I’ve written on that before here. I think… OLPC is a bad program and mainly exists as a promotional tool. Putting the same money into the Million-book project’s bookmobiles would be far more productive.

Largest archive of free culture to be built in the Netherlands:
From the Netherlands, the “Images for the Future” project is building a large-scale conservation and digitization project to make available 285,000 hours of film, television, and radio recordings, as well as more than 2.9 million photos from the Netherlands’ film and television archives. A basic collection drawn from the archive will be made available on the Internet either under CC licenses, or in some cases, in the public domain. The Government of the Netherlands, a long time supporter of the local Dutch CC project, will invest a total of 173 million Euros over a seven-year period. Their aim is to spur innovative applications with new media, while providing valuable services to the public.
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this will be great… free content is the backbone of innovation and production.

Web Curator Tool:
The Web Curator Tool (WCT) is a tool for managing the selective
web harvesting process. It is designed for use in libraries and
other collecting organisations, and supports collection by
non-technical users while still allowing complete control of the
web harvesting process.

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this looks like a great tool.

Around the Corner v2 – MGuhlin.net – Librarians are obsolete:
A few folks–David Warlick (2cents) and Chris Harris (InfoMancy)–are
complaining about how librarians have been left out in the cold, found
to be obsolete/irrelevant to a world that can do its own research, work out information literacy
on its own, and really, come on, do we REALLY need those grumpy librarians?

You know, I bet librarians are laboring under the same draconian policies teachers are…basically that there are too many OTHER duties in addition to being a teacher-librarian to engage a classroom full of students in learning information problem-solving a la Big6/Super3, that there just isn’t time in the day to engage in the levels of reflection required by the Read/Write Web.

So, School Libraries Work…but are the people who advocate for technology instead of people…well, do they even care what people are going to help students use that technology? If teachers and librarians can both teach Technology Training in a 2.0 World, why should anyone think they have to pay extra for a librarian?

What’s the value-added of a librarian?

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SO there is a huge debate about the value of librarians now? is there? buy laptops fire librarians? is that the real answer? I think not. However, i do no think that librarians and archivists have an easy argument when so many different fields now make strong claims to performing all but their most mundane tasks.

I made it to newark airport… My only hangup of course is that is did something to my back yesterday afternoon and basically haven’t slept much, but eh, that only caused me to walk up and down 34th street for 10-15 minutes wondering where the heck the penn station door was, because I’d never been in before, eventually i just decided to walk against traffic and voila, it was at the end of stream of people. Beyond that, the symposium looks interesting, I’m really happy that I was invited even though… it means flying across the u.s. 2 times in 48 hours so that i can be back in time for the digital archives class.

Governance and conflict resolution in probably a better construct for the Linden Lab meeting, but I think that I’ll easily fit in, and make some of my points. The symposium is all day tomorrow. Tonight I’m trying to meet up with my friend and colleague David Silver, whose teaching until 8pm.