Stop the PIA

My own sense is that this sounds good, parallel to an ‘environmental impact assessment’ (EIA). But the history of EIA should clearly alert us to the risk that impact assessments are unlikely to prevent risks to privacy and data protection. To the contrary, they are likely to cover the backside of actors who can say they submitted a risk assessment, be limited to primarily a symbolic victory for privacy, and clearly raise the costs of all software and systems developments, creating a new set of businesses employed to write PIAs for organizations.

The concept of a privacy impact assessment is one of those initiatives that sounds good, and rings all the right bells to be politically popular, but that will not accomplish its intended aims and undoubtedly have negative, unintended consequences. I hope the privacy community takes a more critical look at the rhetoric in support of this bureaucratic silver bullet that carries its own risks.

Happy to receive comments, as I am sure my view is a minority opinion, but every discussion of the issue convinces me all the more that the PIA is a mistake. I hope some bright students begin to evaluate the actual impact of the PIA.

His passing led me to immediately recall the famous 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial. The beautiful female athlete that hurls the hammer into the screen that was displaying Big Brother, speaking to the masses, is certainly the anti-thesis of the computer nerd, Steve Jobs. But surely she represented his ambition to liberate the individual computer user. The innovations he has been associated with have done much to enable more individuals to use technologies in ways that provided them with more communicative power and the ability to hold institutions across society more accountable. He is often criticised for moving towards an appliance-based, walled-garden approach, but his smart phone and tablets have not become a substitute for the personal computer, but more of a complement that extends and embeds the Internet in everyday life and work (Dutton and Blank 2011).

Barack Obama has been quoted as saying that Jobs ‘… changed the way each of us sees the world’. Indeed, and he enabled each of us to have more personal control over how we see the world.

References

Dutton, W. H., and Blank, G. (2011), Next Generation Users: The Oxford Internet Survey 2011. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

Summer Palace 2011

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 the 20th of May, discussing what I am calling ‘The New Internet World‘, and was joined by a number of other academics from abroad, primarily from the US, including Pamela Shoemaker (Newhouse School at Syracuse), Professors James Katz (Rutgers), Stephen Reese (University of Texas at Austin), S. Shyam Sundar (Penn State, but also visiting Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul), and from Europe, Richard Ling (IT University of Copenhagen). We were joined by many professors from Peking University, Renmin, Wuhan, and other universities in China, plus some outstanding representatives from industry, including WANG Liang (President of Radio Beijing Corp), LI Fang (Deputy Editor of Tencent Inc), and GUAN Jianwen (VP of People’s Daily Online).

No Name Lake at Peking Un

My presentation is on slideshare at: http://www.slideshare.net/WHDutton/the-new-internet-world

‘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 Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles Oxford OX1 3JS

The slides are posted on Slideshare at: http://www.slideshare.net/WHDutton/information-sharing-and-protection and an audio recording of his talk should be posted in due course in the OII’s Webcasting archive.

Speakers

• Dr David Bray, Information Sharing Environment (ISE)

Abstract

In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States began a historic transformation aimed at preventing future attacks and improving its ability to protect institutions at home and abroad. As a result, the US is now better informed of terrorist intentions and plans, and better prepared to detect, prevent, and respond to their actions. Enhanced information sharing has provided a greater capacity for coordinated and integrated action.

The Information Sharing Environment (ISE, www.ise.gov) was established by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. The ISE provides analysts, operators and investigators with integrated and synthesized information on terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and homeland security. This talk will describe what the ISE is and by doing so will explore post-9/11 information sharing in the United States, and the efforts being made towards information sharing and protection. David will also give a brief outline of on-going ISE development efforts.

In essence, this talk highlights that when examining the full scope of information sharing and protection, there are many widespread and complex challenges that must be addressed and solved by multiple agencies together. Policies and solutions should be framed to address all types of protected information, classified and unclassified, as critical national and homeland security issues cut across security domains. Protection also includes privacy and civil liberties protections. Without privacy and civil liberties protections, sharing is not possible; and without sharing, protection loses its relevance.

About David Bray

Dr. David A. Bray is Executive for Innovation, Integration, and Interoperability, Office of the Program Manager, Information Sharing Environment. He  joined the Office of the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE) in October 2010 as a Senior National Intelligence Service Executive. The Program Manager has government-wide authority to plan, oversee the build-out, and manage use of the ISE to implement the President’s information sharing priorities. Dr. Bray’s work focuses on empowering the ISE partnerships of five communities – Defense, Intelligence, Homeland Security, Foreign Affairs, and Law Enforcement – in support of whole-of-government solutions for assured information sharing, protection, and access. Prior to joining ISE, Dr. Bray served as a strategist at the Institute for Defense Analyses and the Science and Technology Policy Institute. Dr. Bray holds a PhD in information systems, a MSPH in public health informatics, and a BSCI in computer science and biology from Emory University, alongside two post-doctoral associateships with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Collective Intelligence and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Leadership for a Networked World Program. He also serves as a Visiting Associate with the National Defense University.

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 Peace.

There was a launch event in Paris on 30 May, with a press release providing details on the launch and access to the online and print versions of the manuscript at: http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31418&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Networking Public Expertise

Abstract

The potential of crowd sourcing has captured the imagination of many managers and professionals across all sectors of society, but left many others quite skeptical. This is not only because conceptions of the wisdom of crowds appear counter-intuitive, but also, if taken literally, these concepts can be misleading and therefore dysfunctional for governments seeking to adopt innovations in distributed collaboration. This paper challenges conventional notions of the wisdom of crowds, arguing that distributed intelligence must be well structured by technical platforms and management strategies. After clarifying these conceptual issues, the paper explains how collaborative networking can be used to harness the distributed expertise of citizens, as distinguished from citizen consultation, which seeks to engage citizens – each on an equal footing. Networking the public as advisors aims to involve experts on particular public issues and problems distributed anywhere in the world. The paper then describes the lessons learned from previous efforts to citizen source advice, and why governments should again pursue this strategy as a means to inform policy and decision-making. This is followed by a set of nine strategies for fostering the bottom-up development of governmental initiatives aimed at harnessing distributed public expertise.

If there is any difficulty obtaining this paper, a copy is available on SSRN at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1767870

Freedom of Connection - Freedom of Expression (cover)

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 of Journalists’. I am hopeful that our manuscript for UNESCO, entitled ‘Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression’ will be launched at the event. The penultimate draft is available online at: <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1654464>

Tech weekly:  WikiLeaks, Anonymous and cyber war
Guardian Online, 14/12/10
Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute joins a panel on a podcast hosted by Jemima Kiss to discuss WikiLeaks and the news that major internet companies and services have been taken offline in a battle between hackers and government.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/audio/2010/dec/14/tech-weekly-wikileaks-cables-cyberwar-audio

Who rules the web?
Al Jazeera net, 14/12/10
Professor Bill Dutton, professor of internet studies at Oxford University, is on Inside Story, which asks: ‘Who controls the flow of information on the internet? Who sets the rules and under what terms?’
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/insidestory/2010/12/201012151234554295.html

Rationale

The Internet has become a motor of change in the relationships of consumers with business and industry. Internet users have new opportunities to enhance their power as consumers. They may obtain information regarding an immense range of relevant goods and services and benefit from the enormous possibilities available to participate in social networks, express their opinions on brand names, access independent sources of expertise, and interact and dialogue with firms and other service providers. They can play an active role in marketing communication processes and participate much more in the development and consumption of products. For their part, the Internet – including the processing systems used to manage great masses of consumer data – allow businesses to define and develop marketing proposals that are more precise and more closely matched to their customers. In sum, the new possibilities offered by the Internet make possible advanced forms of exchanges and interactions within which consumers, businesses and other service providers collaborate in the creation and reproduction of the market.

This potential of the Internet to transform the marketing and commercial environment could spawn a field of research within the larger arena of Internet Studies. Early research related to the Internet-based consumer focused on obtaining user profiles and on the segmentation of online consumers. However, as use of the Internet as a marketing channel increased, resulting in its wider use as a purchasing medium, subsequent research became centred on a plethora of questions directly related to the consumer, such as the factors influencing the consumer’s involvement in purchasing behaviours; online consumer satisfaction and loyalty; trust in purchase decisions on the Internet; consumer affairs and protection; as well as the adaptation of classic theories and models to explain online consumer behaviour. In addition, with the emergence of the applications of social networking and the thrust of recent proposals in business sciences – such as, for example, new service-dominant logic and Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM), a new wave of studies has emerged. New studies examine the forms in which the Internet empowers the consumer; exploring the new routes for co-creation of value and for participation on the part of the consumer in processes of innovation and in the generation of content; evaluating the impact of personalization practices tied to CRM programmes and to the new forms of interaction; and, finally, examining the relationship with the brand in virtual communities. A closely related area of research is focused on analyzing the institutional framework of online consumer protection.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Critical perspectives on the growing body of research into the Internet and the Consumer, which help to define the state of this field, its dynamism, and the critical areas in need of clarification and further research.
• Insights into the main contributions made in the research on the online consumer to the larger domain of ‘Internet Studies’, in terms of new theories, data and methods.
• Comprehensive overviews of key issues in Internet Studies on the Consumer -such as, for example flow, trust, eCRM, brand communities, co-creation and empowerment, which include major findings and directions for further research.

For more on the workshop, see the Web site.

Online Petitions

This initiative has already led to concerns being raised over ‘frivolous’ petitions and the gaming of this system by organized pressure groups. This ignores the degree that bad ideas are raised, from time to time, by parliamentarians, and dismisses the ability of parliament to assess the merits of a petition drive. This should be an all party initiative given the role that the Labour Party played in introducing e-Petitions in the UK, but in opposition, the Labour Party might not follow through on this innovation.

Of course, a valid concern is over the potential for a large segment of the public to support measures that are unwise. For example, many referenda supported in California have been judged unconstitutional by the courts. However, this is not a referendum, but only an opportunity to put an issue on the table. What better way is there for politicians to explain and debate issues of concern to the public. They need not be tied by a petition to discuss the issue.

Hopefully, the government will sense public support for this initiative so that it moves ahead as soon as practical.

For press coverage, see:

eWeek Government Moves Towards Bills By Crowdsourcing, December 28, 2010 by Eric Doyle

MPs, the class apart by Daily Mail Comment, 29th December 2010

Petitions and Democracy

UNESCO

UNESCO is holding an ‘International Symposium on Freedom of Expression‘ on 26 January 2011, with the support of the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO. One panel session will focus on freedom of expression on the Internet, and we also expect that our UNESCO publication, entitled ‘Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression‘, will be launched. A penultimate draft of the manuscript is online at SSRN, but a print version will be available by the date of the symposium.

There has hardly been a more critical time to focus on freedom of expression. It is not simply WikiLeaks that makes this a timely topic, but also worldwide trends in policy and practice that could undermine expression online unless the larger ecology of policies shaping expression are more fully understood.

Symposium site at: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/events/international-symposium-on-freedom-of-expression/

A Perspectives Workshop supported by Dagstuhl

[27.09.09 - 02.10.09, Seminar 09402]

Organized by:

David Chaum (K.U. Leuven, BE)
William H. Dutton (University of Oxford, GB)
Miroslaw Kutylowski (Wroclaw University of Technology, PL)
Tracy Westen (Center for Governmental Studies – Los Angeles, US)

Three Organizers Finding Their Way Near Dagstuhl

Summary

The workshop was a meeting forum for experts in the area of computer security and social sciences. The main idea of the seminar was to discuss new challenges for democracy during the transition from traditional society into a society where network communication influences so much social and political life.

The workshop participants discussed the key issues behind success or failure of electronic systems in e-democracy. While advances of technology play a central role in evolution of e-democracy, the main threats and failures are due to insufficient cooperation and lack of understanding between IT specialists and those from political and social sciences. In the past, major failures can be attributed to a narrow view of the systems supporting e-democracy. For this reason many fundamental mistakes have been made.

Some major problems arise when technical sciences and social sciences meet. On the one hand, computer specialists are often unaware of real requirements for the emerging systems, on the other hand the specialists from social sciences might be unaware of technical limitations due to hermetic language of computer security professionals. Nevertheless, the workshop participants succeeded immediately in building up a working group focused on identifying the most crucial issues for development of future e-democracy systems.

The result of the workshop is a set of recommendations for decision-makers regarding e-democracy systems. The list does not consider all problems that may arise, but brings focus to those that in our opinion have the biggest impact.

Dagstuhl Castle

Recommendations

1. Encourage Interdisciplinary Collaboration. Severe design errors may result from making decisions based on partial expertise, or from separate groups working in isolation. As design processes for technologies used in democratic systems should include a wide range of competencies, it is vital that lawyers, public officials and social scientists are engaged as well as computer scientists and engineers. Unfortunately, the workshop participants observe that this is not a common practice today and many fundamental errors in the past resulted from partial expertise.

2. Ensure Effective Take-up of E-democracy Solutions. At present, government-driven processes (like elections, disclosure of information) are often so conservative that they fail to take full advantage of new technologies and approaches, despite that they have proved effective elsewhere. The reason for this phenomenon is a discrepancy between available solutions that are ready to use and specific requirements of e-democracy. Substantial amount of research is necessary to adapt emerging technologies to meet the diverse requirements of e-democracy.

3. Deploy Appropriate Design Models. The lesson we have learnt during the last decades is that the really successful systems are in practice the flexible ones that were not designed by a single organization but have instead developed through collaborative efforts of many participants driven by their interests and needs. Therefore we feel that new technical systems supporting e-democracy should be small, flexible, modular and based on proven off-the-shelf technical components, rather than be large, centralized special-purpose systems.

4. Promote Best Practice. There are examples of excellent solutions which are implemented and used in practice. However, dissemination of such best practices is limited. A survey should be conducted of best practices. This is particularly important for making government information accessible online inexpensively, efficiently and in forms that are easy to use by the public. Today, inefficient access to information is one of the major weaknesses of democracies, despite many efforts. Pilot projects should then be funded to implement these best practices in a number of different jurisdictions. Information on best practices and pilot projects should be made available to the public in easily accessible formats.

5. Support Open-Audit Systems. Research on electronic voting systems has shown that our approach to security assurance should be redefined. Traditional certification by trusted bodies should be continued, however in order to provide undeniable evidence open-audit concepts should be developed. In particular, current field trials of open-audit voting systems should be carefully assessed and documented. When they are successful, larger-scale trials should be encouraged.

6. Learn from Web 2.0 Innovations. Public officials and system designers should draw on the experience of Web-based social networks. There are substantial technical and social challenges related to Web 2.0, but there are opportunities as well. This should be taken into account when planning online systems for democratic decision making.

7. Address Conflicting Requirements. Quite often, requirements for e-democracy systems are in conflict. A prominent example are e-voting systems, which have to provide strong privacy of vote casting and voters’ identification at the same time. Since according to the present state-of-the-art the answers for many fundamental questions are still missing, more research should be directed towards new technologies that have the potential to reconcile between such conflicting requirements. This concerns in particular privacy enhancing technologies, identity management and cryptographic protocols.

8. Gain Public Acceptance. One of preconditions for introducing technical systems supporting democratic processes is gaining understanding, acceptance and confidence by the lay, non-scientific public. A failure to do so would immediately undermine the citizens’ will to engage in the process. Therefore technical solutions for e-democracy that support democratic processes should be made simple enough, or must be so widely endorsed by the scientific community and other trusted societal leaders. Democratic technologies should be designed with widespread public acceptance as a key design parameter.

9. Fund Civic Engagement Experiments. Since in the field of e-democracy we are entering unknown grounds, a lot can be learned from examples. For this reason, governments should be encouraged to fund experimentations with technologies that support greater online civic engagement in democratic processes (voting, information acquisition, collaborative participation in government decisions). On the one hand, such government funding will encourage technological research as well as provide computer scientists with the priorities they require. On the other hand, these experimentations will allow the citizens to influence design evolution so that it goes in the right direction.

10. Share Knowledge Between Disciplines. Lack of interaction and sometimes even barriers for interdisciplinary work is one of the main risk factors for development of e-systems supporting democracy. Therefore, various contributions made by different disciplines to e-democracy development can be strengthened through forums that encourage (not only verbally) dialogue between multidisciplinary groups of computer and social scientists, legal scholars, practitioners and policy experts.

For more about results of the seminar see the article in Social Sciences Research Network Machiavelli Confronts 21st Century Digital Technology: Democracy in a Network Society published by the workshop participants.

Related Seminars

• 07311: “Frontiers of Electronic Voting “ (2007)

2010 Uehiro/Carnegie/Oxford Conference

Wednesday 8^th and Thursday 9^th December 2010

Information Ethics: Future of Humanities

WEDNESDAY 8 DECEMBER

8.30 a.m. Registration opens.  Coffee, tea and muffins provided

OPENING REMARKS

9.00 a.m. Professor Julian Savulescu (Director, Oxford Uehiro Centre)

KEYNOTE SPEECH

9.30 a.m. Is the Society of Cohabitation with Robots Possible?

Professor Toru Nishigaki (The University of Tokyo)

10.15 a.m. Short break

FIRST SPEAKER SESSION

10.30 a.m. Beyond Humanisms

Professor Rafael Capurro (Steinbeis University Berlin)

11.15 a.m. Discussion

11.30 a.m. The Virtual Other: Thinking about virtuality and the future of ethics

Professor Lucas Introna (Lancaster University)

12.15 p.m. Discussion

12.30 p.m. Lunch

SECOND SPEAKER SESSION

1.30 p.m. Ethical challenges of information poverty

Professor Johannes Britz (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

2.15 p.m. Discussion

2.30 p.m. Sustainability and self-organization: sustainability seen in the perspective of complexity and systems science and ethical considerations

Professor Wolfgang Hofkirchner (Vienna University of Technology)

3.15 p.m. Discussion

3.30 p.m. Refreshments

THIRD SPEAKER SESSION

3.45 p.m.   The fuzzy brain: extended minds, neural interfaces and collective intelligence

Dr Anders Sandberg (Research Fellow, Oxford Uehiro Centre)

4.15 p.m. Discussion

4.30 p.m. Life-Log and Privacy

Dr. Fumio Shimpo (Keio University)

5.30 p.m. Discussion

6.30 p.m. Reception and Dinner to follow at St. Cross College hosted by
The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Andrew Hamilton

Speeches:

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Andrew Hamilton (opening speech)

Dr. Maruyama, Secretary General, The Uehiro Foundation

Dr. Rosenthal, President, The Carnegie Council

(Dress code: Business dress)

THURSDAY 9 DECEMBER

9.30 a.m. Registration opens.  Coffee, tea and muffins provided

FOURTH SPEAKER SESSION

10.00 a.m. Data Protection: An Appropriate Framework for Personal Information Ethics?

Dr. David Erdos (University of Oxford)

10.45 a.m. Discussion

11.00 a.m. Moral Panics Over the Internet

Dr. William H. Dutton (University of Oxford)

11.45 a.m. Discussion

12.00 p.m. Lunch

FIFTH SPEAKER SESSION

1.00 p.m. Humanity and Freedom from the Viewpoint of Information

Dr. Tadashi Takenouchi (The University of Tokyo)

1.45 p.m. Discussion

2.00 p.m. Does Privacy in Context endorse Moral Relativism?

Professor Helen Nissenbaum (New York University)

2:45 p.m. Discussion

3.00 p.m. CLOSING ADDRESS
Mr. Hisateru Onozuka (Director, Uehiro Foundation)

Presentations ranged from sweeping historical treatments on coping with the complexity of evolving social and technical systems (Sander Van der Leeuw) and the rise of an information age (Luciano Floridi) to conceptually focused discussions of such issues as trust (Gloria Origgi). My presentation was more empirically grounded (almost out of place), as I focused on trends over the last decade with respect to the Internet that raised issues for the future, such as closing digital divides and responding to a rising push for greater regulation of the Internet in ways that will not undermine its vitality and openness. I of course noted some emerging developments of central importance to my own work, such as collaborative network organizations and the Fifth Estate. Most discussion was around issues of futures studies and visions, while everyone seemed equally skeptical of any ‘futurology’, which seems to be the catch-all term for undisciplined future gazing.

Albert Borschette Conference Center

I found it especially useful in reinforcing my sense that the study of the Internet and related ICTs is reaching a new stage. It is moving from work that focused on whether the Internet or other ICTs will improve on old ways of doing things, to accepting the increasing centrality of the Internet and related ICTs, and focusing more attention on how the Internet and related ICTs should be designed, implemented and used. What kind of Internet will support pro-social and other societal agendas, whether privacy, freedom of expression, green technology or sustainability.

On a more instrumental level, the meeting provided a valuable perspective on the EC that was helpful and positive. Chaired by Robert Madelin, the Information Society and Media Director-General, we heard briefly on the views from major program heads. It was clear that there is a great deal of potential for synergy across the various programs, many of which are strongly oriented around developments in emerging ICTs and society, and an openness to multidisciplinary dialogue. Everyone appreciated the difficulties of fostering constructive dialogue across disciplines*, but also across those more focused on empirical inquiry and those with a strong orientation to futures research. The need to bring these perspectives together, such as around common boundary spanning objects, such as case studies or particular technical developments, seemed to gain support. The chairman kept reminding all that we need to be modest about our own views, and open to working with others, and this seemed to sit well with the whole tenor of the day. Generally, I came away with a far more optimistic view on the role that the social sciences can play in EC research on the information society.

*Dutton, W. H., Carusi, A., and Peltu, M. (2006), ‘Fostering Multidisciplinary Engagement: Communication Challenges for Social Research on Emerging Digital Technologies’, Prometheus, 24(2): 129-49.

A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society

University of Oxford

21-24 September 2011

Event: Symposium

Location: OxfordUniversity of Oxford with sessions at the Social Sciences Manor Road Building, and Said Business School

Organized by: Oxford Internet Institute and iCS (the journal Information, Communication and Society)

Sponsors include: Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group)

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and the journal, Information, Communication and Society (iCS) are co-organizing a symposium to critically assess the last decade of social research on the Internet and identify directions for research over the next. The symposium will be held in Oxford from the afternoon of 21 September until noon on the 24^th. This event will be punctuated by a celebration of the 10^th anniversary of the founding of the OII, providing an opportunity to relate broader lessons for the field to the case of one of the first departments at a major university focused on the societal implications of the Internet and related information and communication technologies. Ten years is only a moment in the span of social research, but eons in Internet time. Has social research across the disciplines been up to the challenges?

There will be parallel sessions across the days, with late-afternoon plenary sessions, and ample time for informal discussion. One plenary session will focus on the Anniversary of the OII. The parallel sessions will focus on the presentation of papers submitted for review in response to this call.

Invited Keynotes

Manuel Castells is Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), in Barcelona. He also a University Professor and the holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, the Marvin and Joanne Grossman Distinguished Professor of Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford University. He was Professor of Sociology and of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley (1979-2003).

Vint Cerf is a computer scientist who is recognized as one of the ‘fathers of the Internet’. His contributions have been widely acknowledged by many honorary degrees and awards, including the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering. Vint Cerf is currently Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. [Provisional Acceptance]

Andrew Graham is the Master of Balliol College, University of Oxford, and founding Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute. He was the driving force in establishing the OII and was the Acting Director of the OII until July 2002. An Oxford graduate, Andrew Graham became economic adviser to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, 1967–69, before joining Balliol as a Tutorial Fellow in Economics. He returned to 10 Downing Street as a Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister, 1974–76 and later, from 1988–94, became economic advisor to the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and, from 1992, Leader of the Labour Party, John Smith.

Laura DeNardis is a Research Scholar, Lecturer, and the Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. DeNardis is an Internet governance scholar and the author of Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (MIT Press 2009), Information Technology in Theory (Thompson 2007 with Pelin Aksoy), and numerous book chapters and articles. DeNardis received a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Virginia Tech, a Master of Engineering degree from Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College.

Eszter Hargittai is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project. Eszter received a B.A. in Sociology from Smith College and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Wilson Scholar. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2006-07) and a fellow at the Institute for International Integration Studies, Trinity College Dublin (2007). Currently, she is a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is writing a new monograph on social inequality in virtual worlds, tentatively entitled ‘Workers Without Bodies: Towards a Theory of Race and Digital Labor in Virtual Worlds, or, Why World of Warcraft needs a Civil Rights Movement’.

Barry Wellman is the S.D. Clark Professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where he directs NetLab. He is also a cross-appointed member of the university’s Knowledge Media Design Institute, and Faculty of Information. With Lee Rainie, he’s just finished Networked: The New Social Operating System, to be published by MIT Press, January 2012.

Call for Papers and Panel Proposals

Authors are invited to submit abstracts of unpublished, original work for initial review as symposium papers. Abstracts for papers should be limited to approximately 500 words; abstracts for proposed panels or workshops to 1000 words, including information about participants.

Abstracts for papers or panels should be submitted by 8 December 2010 to events@oii.ox.ac.uk and have ‘iCS Symposium’ in the subject. Authors for whom abstracts are accepted will be asked to provide a completed paper by 12 September 2011.

Abstracts and papers may address any topic concerning social research on the Internet and related technologies. Proposals can be made for individual papers or for a panel. They will be evaluated on the basis of their originality and promise for shaping theoretical, methodological or empirical advances in the study of the Internet. Work that has a promise to shape research, policy or practice in this emerging field would be especially welcomed.

Themes of parallel and plenary sessions are likely to focus on change over time, including, but not limited, to such themes as:

• The diffusion of the Internet: shifts and plateaus in digital inclusion and divides across geography, generations, and society;
• Sizing the Internet economy and its growth over time and space;
• Changing patterns and requirements for digital literacy and skills;
• Trust over time and across areas of Internet use, from commerce to public services and news and information;
• Emerging roles of networking in the public domain, government, and democratic institutions and processes, such as in election campaigns, democratic accountability and the rise of a Fifth Estate;
• The role of the Internet in major societal crises and natural disasters;
• Evolution of digital academe, including digital collections, formal and informal learning, e-research and academic publishing;
• The quality and changing sources of information – from news to research – and their consequences;
• Collaboration – myths and realities of new forms of collaborative network organizations and technologies;
• The developing role of the Internet in social networking, whether in the workplace, everyday life, or in shaping major life chances;
• The dark side of the Internet: growth of cyber-crime, cyber-terrorism, malicious computing, and approaches to addressing these problems;
• Collective action – the evolving role of the Internet in social and political movements;
• Privacy and surveillance trends and research;
• Localism – the new Internet frontier;
• Closing of the Internet through appliances, aps, and regulations;
• The rise of Internet governance and regulation in areas ranging across policy arenas, from standards to freedom of expression?
• The development of Internet research and digital research methods.

Key Dates:

Submission of Abstracts for Papers or Panels: 8 December 2010

Notification of Acceptance of Papers and Panels: 21 December 2010

Papers due: 12 September 2011

Organization

Programme Chairs

Bill Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Brian Loader, Science and Technology Studies Unit, University of York

Victoria Nash, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Barry Wellman, Netlab, University of Toronto

Programme Committee

Members of the iCS Editorial Board

Faculty of the OII

Registration

Information about registration procedures and fees are to follow. Questions may be addressed to events@oii.ox.ac.uk

Thursday 30 September 2010  12:30-14:00

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles’ Oxford OX1 3JS

Registration: Free but please e-mail your name and affiliation, if any, to events@oii.ox.ac.uk or telephone +44 (0)1865 287 209

Speakers:

• Heather Blanchard, Co-Founder of CrisisCommons
• Andrew Turner, Co-Founder of CrisisCommons

Overview

Founded in March 2009, CrisisCommons is a global network of volunteers who help people in times and places of crisis. Its vision is to create and sustain ‘a culture of information sharing, improving emergency management and humanitarian activities’. See: http://crisiscommons.org/about-us/ For example, during the response to the Haiti Earthquake, CrisisCamp emerged as one of many vehicles where the public could participate in the response to help search for information. For instance, the network created new maps of Port au Prince and developed prototype tools such as Tradui, the first Kreyol mobile translator, and provided surge capacity for existing organizations such as Ushahidi and OpenStreetMap. During this time CrisisCamp volunteers worked with many agencies such as UN OCHA, USAID and the World Bank.

Granlund Haiti

Is such an activity sustainable? How can such a network link with the larger crisis response community, the privacy sector, philanthropists, and academia?

The founders of CrisisCommons and the barcamp series, CrisisCamp, will present their findings at the Oxford Internet Institute regarding how ad hoc volunteer networks can provide assistance and discuss future directions for innovation in crisis response activities at local and global levels. During this roundtable CrisisCommons will present their findings and request feedback on their market assessment, sustainability model, infrastructure model and the case for inclusion of ad hoc networks to the global response efforts.

About the Speakers

Heather Blanchard is a advocate and a communications professional. Heather is working on helping government be more collaborative, participatory and transparent through the adoption of Web 2.0 technology. Her driving passion centers around helping people be better connected during times (and places) of crisis.

Andrew Turner is a neogeographer involved in helping to build the geospatial web. He is the CTO of FortiusOne, where he and his colleagues are building GeoCommons, a platform that makes it easy for people to build and share collaborative maps and customize their slice of the GeoWeb. He is also developing a number of other open-source tools such as GeoPress and Mapstraction.

Slides that will support the presentation are available at: http://www.slideshare.net/poplifegirl/08-31-10-berkman-presentation

Wireless on 9/11

Abstract:
This article describes the use of wireless telecommunication media within the different locations directly affected by the hijackings on September 11. Comparisons across these different contexts provides an empirical anchor to more general themes concerning the social dynamics of wireless in the unfolding events of this day. An indication is given of how the important social role of wireless phones in this crisis could redefine public views on wireless media and thereby shape policy and regulation in the years ahead.

Abstract

The Local Frontier of the Global Internet: Networked Individuals and Communities of Digital Britain

William Dutton

Worldwide diffusion and use of the Internet is changing how we communicate, but also reconfiguring patterns of local and global communication — shaping what we know, and whom we know. Rather than undermining social networks and local communities in the ways feared by many critics of new media, use of the Internet is empowering ‘networked individuals’ and their communities – local and global. This general theme is based on a synthesis of empirical research, and analysis of data gathered on the use of the Internet by people living in Britain and around the world. Longer-term outcomes will depend on how networked individuals and institutions will use the Internet in a rapidly evolving regulatory context that could enrich or undermine digital Britain.

The paper is posted and available on SSRN at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1673426 Comments would be valued, as I expect to have an opportunity to revise this following a meeting at the Rowntree Foundation.

Comments on the report would be greatly appreciated, as the authors plan to revise in light of discussion at Vilnius.

A summary of the full report follows:

Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression: The Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet*

by William H. Dutton, Anna Dopatka, Michael Hills, Ginette Law, and Victoria Nash, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

*The authors thank UNESCO’s Division for Freedom of Expression, Democracy and Peace for supporting the drafting of this report. We received additional support of the Fifth Estate Project at the OII, through gifts from June Klein, Electronic-Boardroom TMV^®. We owe special thanks to UNESCO’s Xianhong Hu, for her comments and guidance.

Executive Summary

Over the first decade of the 21^st Century, the Internet and its convergence with mobile communications has enabled greater access to information and communication resources. In 2010, nearly 2 billion people worldwide – over one-quarter of the world’s population – use the Internet. However, during the same period, defenders of digital rights have raised growing concerns over how legal and regulatory trends might be constraining online freedom of expression. Anecdotal accounts of the arrests of bloggers, the filtering of content, and the disconnection of users have sparked these concerns. However, they are reinforced by more systematic studies that provide empirical evidence of encroachments on freedom of expression, such as through the increased use of content filtering.

This report provides a new perspective on the social and political dynamics behind these threats to expression. It develops a conceptual framework on the ‘ecology of freedom of expression’ for discussing the broad context of policy and practice that should be taken into consideration in discussions of this issue. This framework structures an original synthesis of empirical research and case studies of selected technical, legal and regulatory trends. These include developments in six inter-related arenas that focus on:

1. technical initiatives, related to connection and disconnection, such as content filtering;
2. digital rights, including those tied directly to freedom of expression and  censorship, but also indirectly, through freedom of information, and privacy and data protection;
3. industrial policy and regulation, including copyright and intellectual property, industrial strategies, and ICTs for development;
4. users, such as focused on fraud, child protection, decency, libel and control of hate speech;
5. network policy and practices, including standards, such as around identity, and regulation of Internet Service Providers; and
6. security, ranging from controlling spam and viruses to protecting national security.

By placing developments in these arenas into a broad ecology of choices, it is more apparent how freedom can be eroded unintentionally as various actors strategically pursue a more diverse array of objectives. The findings reinforce the significance of concerns over freedom of expression and connection, while acknowledging countervailing trends and the open future of technology, policy and practice. Freedom of expression is not an inevitable outcome of technological innovation. It can be diminished or reinforced by the design of technologies, policies and practices – sometimes far removed from freedom of expression. This synthesis points out the need to focus systematic research on this wider ecology shaping the future