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Archive for April 2008

Politics: Web 2.0 Conference April 17-18 - final programme published

Posted on Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 6:03 PM by Andrew Chadwick

I'd just like to bring to the attention readers of the Internet Politics blog the final programme of the Politics: Web 2.0 conference I'm organising at Royal Holloway. We started planning for this back in September. The call for papers far exceeded our expectations and it's probably going to be one of the largest academic conferences on the internet and politics to date.

The conference will feature six distinguished keynotes, 120 papers organised into 41 panels, and over 180 participants drawn from over 30 countries. The keynote speakers are:

Robin Mansell, Professor of New Media, LSE: "The Light and the Dark Sides of Web 2.0."

Helen Margetts, Professor of Internet and Society, University of Oxford: "Digital-era Governance: Peer production, Co-creation and the Future of Government."

Rachel Gibson, Professor of Political Science, University of Manchester: "Trickle-up Politics?: the Impact of Web 2.0 Technologies on Citizen Participation."

Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication, University of Leeds: "Networks and Commons: Can The Popular and The Political Be Connected?"

Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum/TechPresident: "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America."

Michael Turk, US National Cable & Telecommunications Association and e-campaign manager for Bush-Cheney 04: "Managed Chaos: Bringing Order to User-Generated Activism."

Quite a few papers have been uploaded already, and I expect to see several more on the site by the end of tomorrow.

Lawrence Ampofo, a PhD student, will be liveblogging the event. There's also a Facebook Event Page where you may see the odd video or photo.

For more information, see the relevant section of the New Political Communication Unit site.

If you'd like a quick take on what web 2.0 means for politics, there's an excerpt from the introduction to the Handbook of Internet Politics (Routledge, July 2008), by Phil Howard and I.

I also have an article coming out toward the end of this year in I/S: The Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society. The article is entitled: "Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance."

WikiCandidate

Posted on Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 12:57 PM by Andrew Chadwick

WikiCandidate is a fascinating experiment in user-generated content focused on a very specific exercise: the creation of a virtual campaign for a fictional presidential candidate.

Run by a team of students led by Professor Tarleton Gillespie of the Department of Communication at Cornell, the site aims to enable you, the plain old regular internet user, to:

"create a "perfect" presidential candidate unfettered by a checkered past or foot-in-mouth syndrome. The only stipulation is that the candidate you build must be agreed upon by the other participants on the site. To reach an agreement, you may need to promote your opinions and positions on various issues, or compromise with other users on some points to gain support for the candidate."

The project has only just begun and things are likely to heat up soon. The most interesting pages to date are those set aside for "Issues." These contain entries on affordable local food, education reform, healthcare, and so on. There is also a section labelled "Coalitions" as well as a Donate button (not for cash donations, but for "donating" survey answers when the team conduct analysis of the experiment later on).

The site is based on a hybrid blog and wiki platform, the aim being to get some discussion going about the candidate's policies and character.

This is an interesting project - a nice mix of ideas about sociotechnical design and civic engagement. The WikiCandidate experiment will be the subject of a panel at next week's Politics: Web 2.0 Conference at Royal Holloway, University of London, organised by the New Political Communication Unit. The final conference programme is now published.

WikiCandidate.

New UN data access site

Posted on Sat, Apr 05, 2008 at 12:32 PM by Andrew Chadwick

The UN has unveiled its new data access system and it is pretty slick and powerful. It allows for intuitive keywords searches followed by refinement of the results. Downloads in various formats are available.

This is a quick and easy way to access data on communications and information technology indicators. If you're so inclined, you can play with some figures and update some of the data I used in chapter 3.

ITU data.

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