At the risk of being immodest, in my opinion our very own Oxford Internet Institute is currently the only other institution with any claim to really focus explicitly on the social aspects of the Internet and does so with a strong academic track record. In short, there is certainly still a lot of space for institutions with a comparable focus and now just last week Google’s Eric Schmidt has announced that Google is founding and more importantly funding the “Institute for Internet & Society” in Berlin. Its still early stages and details are scarce but Google promises to take a substantial amount of money in their hands to create an independent research institute that focuses on

1. innovation and online economy
2. Internet governance and policy
3. legal aspects of Internet and society

Rumours are that they have a number of strong academic partners lined up (including Berlin universities and research centres) so if this turns out to be a real and long-term effort it could be really exciting. In particular it could provide Germany with a high-profile research base where people who are interested in these issues can come together, such as the OII provides for the UK and beyond. While in Germany there is a lot of research on the social and legal implications of the Internet going on (see my list here), such a central gathering place for  information and exchange as well as research is still very much lacking.

PS: Some more information is available in an article by Eric Schmidt for German newspaper “Berliner Morgenpost” (in German)

UPDATE: I have been criticised for being overly dismissive about other research centres on the Internet and Society and rightly so. There are of course a significant number of others institutions with a similar focus. A first overview (though a bit dated) offers a list by OII director Bill Dutton here. However, to provide some perspective to my statement, I was referring to i) independent departments or institutes (not a research group within one) who ii) focus exclusively on the Internet and Society (and not more generally into Information or Technology or else), have iii) a strong academic track record and iv) achieved some status of being known. I would still maintain that not many other institutions have a claim to all that but this was of course not to imply that no brilliant and even better research is being done elsewhere

There will be a specialised track focusing on Politics 2.0 and political publics online to which I will contribute some of the findings of my recent work on WriteToThem.com. Among the variety of activists presenting for example insights from the Obama campaign it will be my role to provide some empirical data from a large and successful eDemocracy project, serving as a reminder of the fact that the problems of political participation are not easily solved by technology.

Last year doctoral students of the OII went to the conference as part of our student trip to Berlin. This year again a delegation of the Oxford Internet Institute will be in Berlin as co-located with re:publica there will be the PrivacyOS conference of the European Privacy Open Space project that is promoted by the Oxford Internet Institute.

So what are we up to? It’s both a trip dedicated to work as well as, ahem, cultural exchange. We have been presenting at re:publica08, a conference that brings together about 800 (mostly German-speaking) bloggers, Net-activists and academics. It has been an exciting event so far and Alejandro has some more coverage on the conference.

Today we’ve also met with the people in charge of studiVZ, the largest social network in Germany with more than 5 million (mostly student) very active members (if you don’t know it, just think Facebook). It was a meeting between the ivory tower and the real-world business of running a large social network which has certainly inspired us greatly and we hope we could give something back. Oh, and they organised great breakfast

Speaking of food – we invest great energy into sampling as much food and drink as possible, certainly helped by the fact that being used to Oxford prices makes this place a cheap option. The weather hasn’t always been kind to us but it hasn’t dampened our spirits. See some more pictures on Ribo’s Flickr page.

PS: I managed to convince Christian Heise to re-use his nice logo created for the e-participation event Berlin in August.

Still, the success has been quite astonishing so there was enough reason to celebrate. I managed to share some of the vibe at the Berlin party. Aptly located at c-base (Berlin’s hacker venue) the party saw the announcement of Markus Beckedahl as the now offical Creative Commons public project lead for Germany (different from the legal project lead) together with the first draft of CC version 3.0 in German. What is more, as a special birthday present the domains “creativecommons.de” and “creative-commons.de” were officially transferred to the project.

Well, and the major highlight of course, the birthday cake (picture by Frank Patzig)

The participants did discuss a stunning array of eDemocracy projects that have already made a mark in their countries although maybe not all being as widely successful as they would deserve. It definitely helped to open my eyes to a world beyond some of the more commonly known projects such as theyworkforyou.com in the UK or abgeordnetenwatch.de in Germany and to learn about a variety of other efforts. For example, who would have thought that Romania has taken such a lead in holding government and parliament accountable to the extent that they sue their politicians every time information is not made available? Or the kind of interesting results you get if you can cross-reference the voting behaviour of an MP with data on its travels (seems like some politicians can be at multiple places at once). There is a good (and still growing) list of interesting sites available on our Wiki.

You can meet some of the participants in brief video interviews (the web site is in German but they interviews are in English) that hopefully convey some of the buzz of these two days. As this was an (un)conference it was difficult to say what the outcomes would be. This actually did work quite well: We came up with a long list of good practice for transparency sites that should be the first point of call for people thinking about setting up similar sites. Furthermore the collected wisdom of the experts did identify a number of projects that a crying out to be done by someone! Most importantly, however, it was an opportunity for all to network and to learn what is going on in Europe and also beyond as Andrea Thompson and Gilberto Buffara from democracia in Brazil joined us for a session via video call.

You will find some information at berlininaugust.politik-digital.de. Note however that this is (un)organised as an ‘unconference’, meaning that this is an informal event whose outcomes are very open. So it is what the participants make of it … we will see!

So if your work touches on eVoting, ePetitioning, eDeliberation, eConsultation, eParticipation, eMOREWORDSHERE.. and you haven’t been invited but you feel like you should be there – get in touch with us asap. We might even be able to help you out with some of your travel expenses.

Apart from requests from the community, reasons for this development include

• opportunity for firms to let others develop additional functions for own service
• also good for internal use (e.g. Google uses APIs for internal development between different services)
• would allow users an option for easy import and export of their personal data.

Naturally, there is some resistance within the company but surprisingly the first parties that indicated interest were not so much individual developers but big players like IBM and eBay that wanted to incorporate Xing data into their applications.
get data of your contacts.

Xing’s main problem is that it has personal data of its users and the integrity and security of that data is paramount. Although there was some discussion, apart from enabling users to export and import their private data, I cannot see how a useful API could work that does not immediately raises privacy problems. So not surprisingly Gehret was indicating that the public API could eventually be shelved while it would probably still be available for companies that use Xing to organise their human resources.
There also is a legal difference between making data publicy available via the Xing website and to enable automatic data processing (via API for example). While one could argue the moment I put my stuff on Xing on public view it would not matter whether that data is also easily machine-readable via an API. But, legally, in Germany that seems to be a difference. Interesting: the use of screen-scraping tools breaches the contract of Xing – although I’m not sure what kind of contract someone would have with the company if he/she does not have a profile on Xing.

Also on offer a panel about the social dimension of the information society, focusing on the working conditions of notebook manufacturers in China. Interestingly, there seem to be only 11 companies that produce notebooks that are all Taiwanese and produce the hardware for the companies of Sony and the like. These manufacturers produce their hardware in China where one won’t be surprised to hear that working conditions are usually poor. Andreas Manhart from the Oeko-Institut presented a study on the subject that found dangers arise especially from toxic materials in the production process. There was a bit of discussion on whether import duties should be levied on hardware that is produced under such conditions or how the customers’ awareness to this problem could be raised. However, the main problem is simply that at the moment there are almost no manufacturers that produce ethically correct notebooks.

Not too much news from this discussion but Glaubrecht again highlighted that the use of the Google APIs consitute a contract that can potentially be revoked by Google. This has happened in the past already. One thing he made clear was that Google makes sure it got the IP from every user and will not allow the use of its APIs (at least Google Maps) from within company intranets. The justification for this is that Google has a contract with the map providers that only covers the distribution to individuals, not companies.

Interesting as well: there are plans at Google to develop something like an identity container that bundles all the data a company keeps for a customer. The aim would be to enable people to transfer their whole online identity from one place to another, say for example to migrate all your data with Google (e.g. Calendar, Mail, possibly searches) to another provider like Yahoo. Don’t think this will come true soon but at least this would give some more control over personal data back to the user.

Bernhard Reiter took the probably rather unpopular (but important) stance of questioning the transparency of APIs in general. He rightly argued that these APIs create an dependence from the information provider.

btw: a very cool idea are comments to the presentation via SMS that get subsequently displayed on a big video screen next to the speaker. It’s heavily used but rarely for questions or comments to the ongoing presentation. Still, very entertaining

I already mentioned some people that I’ve met here and that have set up German alternatives to del.ico.us and digg. Funnily enough I also met people here that I wanted to meet in the UK but didn’t manage yet: Hello to Tom Steinberg. As a premature resume after the first day: there is a lot more going on here than I anticipated and there is also more collaboration happening than expected.

One of the interesting presentation here was from Jan Schmidt who is working at Forschungsstelle “Neue Kommunikationsmedien” in Bamberg. His aim was to clarify three big myth about the blogosphere – he is in a good position to do so because he is the author of the biggest German blogger survey to date. He identifies three myth about the blogosphere:

1. bloggers are nerds
2. blogs consitute an alternative (counter) public sphere
3. blogs are irrelevant

myth 1: bloggers are nerds

The main stereotype of bloggers is that they are male, overweight and unsocial. However, Jan argued that most of the studies to date are not representative. His own research has shown that there is rather a balance between male and female bloggers with another important study by Harders/Hesse even arguing for a blogosphere that is to two thirds female.

myth 2: blogs are a counter public sphere

Jan argued that blogs cannot be called counter-cultural because they mainly quote established news media and talk a lot about the personal lives of the bloggers. I don’t fully buy his argument because quoting news media does not mean one just mirrors the mainstream opinion. I’m writing a paper that compares the agenda of the mainstream media with the blogosphere that will hopefully contribute some data to this discussion but more on this another time.

myth 3: blogs are irrelevant

Interestingly an argument that also comes from bloggers themselves in order to distinguish themselves other blogs. Jan rightly argues that this myth is created by applying the relevance criteria of the traditional mass media system. However, for most bloggers it is not important to get a big readership but their blogs serve a different purpose: connecting with like-minded people, keeping in touch with friends etc. If their blogs can achieve that goal, they have a personal relevance for these bloggers regardless of the fact that they are irrelevant to 99% of Internet users.

More is to come so stay tuned …