Tobias Escher at the OII

From 1 – 3 April Berlin is again hosting re:publica a social media cum activist conference which is now in its third year and that attracts well over 1,000 people. This year’s line-up includes among others Lawrence Lessig (Code is Law, Creative Commons), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) und Cory Doctorow (boingboing.net). There will be a specialised [...]

Some weeks ago our director Bill Dutton posted on his blog A List of Centers for Research and Teaching Focused on the Internet and Society. There were little mentions of places in Germany that do relevant research which would probably meet most people’s expectations (including my own originally) which is that the country of Weber [...]

A week ago today I arrived in Hamburg to participate in the 3-day conference of the German Society for Online Research (DGOF). My contributions took the form of a presentation and a poster. The presentation was concerned with a comparison between blogs and mainstream media and in particular who sets whose agenda. I have been [...]

In a recent post I blogged about how the German RateMyTeachers Gets Legal Approval. A teacher sued the German teacher rating site spickmich.de because it would would infringe her personal rights but the judges did not follow her argumentation. In the meantime the site operators won another court case against a teacher. While it surely [...]

Monday and Tuesday of this week saw an event happening that I have been looking forward to very much: Berlin in August, an informal summit of European eDemocracy practitioners, which has been organised by politik-digital and MySociety. The gathering took place in the former Staatsratsgebaeude (see picture) which used to house the government of the [...]

Coming up very soon is a nice little project I am very excited about: On 13th and 14th August some of the best European practitioners in the area of eDemocracy will gather in Berlin. The goal is to get together a few people from across Europe who actually want to see real online democracy projects [...]

In a recent post about the legality of rating sites such as RateMyTeachers and PatientOpinion I concluded: “Last but not least, the subject under public scrutiny does matter as professors might well be made to face personal criticism in their role as public figures while teachers and nurses might have to be treated differently.” Well, [...]

Whatever name you prefer for the current state of the Internet (user generated content, Web 2.0, the social web etc.), it clearly seems like a good time for consumers of goods, even of those we still rather reluctantly consider as such like healthcare or education. The opinion of the general public is in high demand [...]

A new website by the British Council in Germany and German political web-zine politik-digital aims to collect websites of e-participation projects in Germany and the UK. It’s available at: http://www.e-participation.net (No worries, the whole site is in English)

For the last months a heated debate has taken place in Germany about the right of security agencies to monitor and spy on computers of unsuspecting citizens. In a country that has one of the most restrictive data protection laws the recent proposal of Home Secretary Wolfgang Schäuble to allow agencies to install trojans or [...]