William H. Dutton

Pleased to see this old article online as I continue to find confirmation of our basic finding: Information systems in local governments were most useful for ad hoc queries, such a providing a list of personel ranked by salary, in contrast to more rational-comprehensive management information reports. Simpy having information in digital form enabled managers [...]

A new plan for increasing digital participation — getting more Britons online in four years, has been posted at: http://www.bis.gov.uk/uploads/plan-digital-participation.pdf It was launched today, 2 March 2010, by the Minister for Digital Britain, Stephen Timms. Ofcom’s Stewart Purvis, who coordinates a consortium of actors addressing digital participation, summarized the aim of the plan in [...]

Cheryll Barron has written a new OII Internet Issue Brief (No. 4), entitled ‘The Keiretsu-Cooperative: a Model for post-Gutenberg Publishing’, which is available online at SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1532173 It is an imaginative proposal for a new business model to support publishing in the digital age. Cheryll has written about computers, culture and society for [...]

You might enjoy seeing the ‘trailer’ for a debate that was held at Balliol College and recorded and produced by Voices from Oxford. The short trailer gives you a sense of the speakers and the range of issues over two days. An edited Webcast of the debate will be available soon.

HM Treasury recently organized a consultation on the ‘implementation of the new Landline Duty to help fund the roll-out of Next Generation Access to 90 per cent of Britain by 2017.’ I’ve been critical of this proposal, which arose from the Government’s June 2009 Digital Britain White Paper. The idea was to impose a tax [...]

The Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania has teamed up with the IE University to hold an international forum on political communication that will bring together scholars and practitioners. This is orchestrated by Professor Monroe Price at the Annenberg School’s Global Communication Studies Centre, Magdalena Wojcieszak at IE and others, including colleagues at from [...]

The OII has posted a new Policy Briefing written by our Visiting Associate Tony Wales, former General Counsel of AOL International, responsible for the company’s worldwide legal affairs outside the US. He offers his insights on issues arising from the UK Government’s Digital Britain report (June 2009) and Digital Economy Bill, focusing in particular on [...]

Turing Lectures have been important agenda-setting events in the computer sciences and engineering. This year, Professor Chris Bishop, Chief Research Scientist at Microsoft Research Cambridge will be speaking on ‘Embracing Uncertainty: The New Machine Intelligence’. He’ll be doing a series of lectures in February and March. You can find dates and register online at www.theiet.org/turing [...]

The ESRC has just published a revised ‘Framework for Research Ethics (FRE)’, which is available in full on the Web. I would just like to draw from the  report here to highlight six key principles of ethical research — principles that the ‘ESRC expects to be addressed whenever applicable — are:
1. Research should be designed, [...]

A colleague of mine from my USC days, Guillermo Asper y Valdés, was in Oxford last week for a visit – but asking about UK research on personal health records. He and colleagues in Brazil and the US are undertaking research in this area. If anyone has suggestions of individuals he should contact, please let [...]