William H. Dutton

I’ve run across the promotional material for a new book by David Wright and Paul De Hert, Privacy Impact Assessment, Springer, Dordrecht, 2012. They argue that the book ‘is timely as the European Commission’s proposal for a new Data Protection Regulation would make privacy impact assessments mandatory for any organisation processing “personal data where those [...]

The Advisory Committees to Ofcom have created a blog site to provide useful information of relevance to anyone with a serious interest in communication issues across the communities and nations of the UK and Northern Ireland. It is designed to inform members of the various advisory committees to Ofcom. It will accomplish this by using [...]

The outpouring of tributes to Steve Jobs speaks to his enormous global impact. So many have rightly described him as a design and marketing genius, but he will and should be credited with a far greater role in literally – to paraphrase Alan Kay – inventing the future. He is among the key individuals who [...]

I have been attending a conference, entitled ‘Interne and Society: Challenge, Transition, and Development’. It has been organized by XIE Xinzhou (Director) for the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University as one activity associated with the 10th Anniversary of the School, when communication joined the former school focused on journalism. I spoke on [...]

This was an important talk about information sharing in the public sector, given by one of the key people seeking to create an information sharing environment for the US government.  It was entitled: ‘The Need for Achieving Appropriate Information Sharing and Information Protection’ I was held on Friday, 8 April 2011 at 16.00-17.30 at the [...]

Our manuscript has been published by UNESCO in a print edition, also available online.  The citation is: William H. Dutton, Anna Dopatka, Michael Hills, Ginette Law, and Victoria Nash (2011), Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression: The Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet. Paris: UNESCO, Division for Freedom of Expression, Democracy and [...]

My paper on ‘Networking Distributed Public Expertise: Strategies for Citizen Sourcing Advice to Government’ is one of a series of Occasional Papers in Science and Technology Policy, Science and Technology Policy Institute (TPI), Institute for Defense Analyses, Washington DC. I will post the abstract below and would welcome comments, directly or to this blog. Abstract [...]

An ‘International Symposium on Freedom of Expression’, organized by UNESCO with the support of the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO, will be held on 26 January 2011 at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. Key topics for panels include ‘The Status of Press Freedom Worldwide’, ‘Freedom of Expression on the Internet’, and ‘Press Freedom and the Safety [...]

The WikiLeaks story continues to develop in ways that promise to keep this on the agenda for some time. Here are two online panel discussions I participated in, one on the Guardian blog, and the other on Al Jazerra, which might be of interest to those following the debate: Tech weekly:  WikiLeaks, Anonymous and cyber [...]

The OII is collaborating with IN3 on a promising workshop on Internet Studies that will focus on studies of the consumer. Called Consumer and Internet Studies, the workshop is part of a series of workshops designed to inform our understanding of the scope and methods of this emerging field. I am working with Inma Rodriguez-Ardura, [...]