Technologies of Governance

Nine hours of presentations and discussion can be an awful lot of time. So if a day like this flies by, something special must have happened. We had exactly this experience last Thursday when 15 junior scholars from around the world met in Oxford to share their research and ideas about “Modes of Governance in Digitally Networked Environments” – an informal and interdisciplinary workshop I had organized with Christian Pentzold.

The idea behind the workshop was to explore what we called modes of governance (see the call for participation). Rather than assuming that digitally networked environments magically govern themselves and resorting to vague summary labels like “self-regulation,” “decentralization,” or “peer production”, we were curious about the many ways in which governance is actually done in practice. Participants came from places as diverse as Germany, Poland, France, Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. and disciplines ranging from political science, law, public policy, and sociology to anthropology, media studies, economics, and linguistics.

A brief overview:

We started early in the morning with a session on topics related to local governance and government. Mike Jensen from UC Irvine kicked off with a study of the communications environment of elected local government officials in Orange County, testing and developing Rein Taagepera’s “cube root law” of the ratio between assembly size and represented population. Nicolas Desquinabo from Cemagref, University of Montpellier took us to Southern France reporting on a case study of official and actual modes of governance in the “Camargue plan” e-consultation. John Postill from Sheffield Hallam University introduced the notion of a “field of residential affairs,” which he developed from his ethnography of a Kuala Lumpur suburb.

In the second session, Patryk Galuszka from the Academy of Humanities and Economics in Lodz, Poland presented his research on the netlabel music scene, drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus. Kostas Gemenis from Keele University shared his experience with the governance processes of the Civil Wars Study Group (CWSG).

Next, the analyses became a bit more Foucauldian. Asma Vranaki from the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies in Oxford talked about the role socio-cyber ties as a modality of power in social networking sites. Theo Roehle from the University of Hamburg had a closer look at predictive consumer modeling as a mode of governance, using the example of search engines.

After a short lunch break, we moved on to Max Loubser from the Oxford Internet Institute, who shared his insights from some large-scale quantitative analysis of Wikipedia administrators. Matthijs den Besten from the Oxford e-Research Centre presented his research on modes of interactions between core and periphery in Mozilla’s Bugzilla bug tracking system.

Mathieu O’Neil from the Australian National University reported on the relationship between authority and sovereignty in “online tribal bureaucracies,” using case work on Linux, Wikipedia, and Daily Kos. Also Aaron Shaw from the Berkman Center had worked on Daily Kos and used his experience to sketch an ideal-typical description of “networked heterarchy.”

In the final session, Han-Teng Liao from the Oxford Internet Institute introduced the concept of “inalienable possessions” to describe a mode of governance in Wikipedia that goes beyond traditional rule-based understandings of governance. Tarek Cheniti from the Oxford Institute for Science, Innovation and Society reminded us that governance may be better understood as a verb than as a noun and demonstrated how “governancing” is done in the Internet Governance Forum and Second Life.

As I said, time flew. Our job is now to make sense of the day from a broader theoretical perspective and compile a more extensive workshop report. At any rate, thanks to everyone who made the workshop happen – especially the EPSRC (EP/FO/3701/1), who generously supported the event.

If you are a PhD student or Post-Doc, have an interest in governance, technology, and society, and wonder what Oxford is like in springtime, this call for participation is for you [pdf]:

MODES OF GOVERNANCE IN DIGITALLY NETWORKED ENVIRONMENTS

Interdisciplinary Workshop
Oxford Internet Institute – Oxford University
Thursday, March 26, 2009 – 9am-6pm

Over the past decades, a variety of new technologies have reconfigured the ways in which we initiate and maintain social and economic relations. Today, millions of people around the globe buy goods from people they have never met in person, edit the online encyclopedia Wikipedia without monetary rewards, use e-mail and SMS to organize political protest, stay in contact with friends via social networking sites, or look for a new partner via online dating services. In short, an increasing part of our lives is taking place in digitally networked environments. Powered by information and communication technologies built on cheap and interconnected processors with considerable computing capacity, these environments are characterized by novel forms of interaction.

Digitally networked environments are often assumed to magically govern themselves. Especially when traditional modes of governance like law and centralized regulations fail, researchers tend to resort to rather vague ideas like “self-regulation,” “decentralization,” “liberalization,” or “peer production” to describe the complex interactions and mechanisms that take place in large-scale, loose-knit socio-technical networks. Moreover, the network itself is often contrasted with markets or hierarchies as a new mode of governance in its own right.

This workshop will adopt a different approach and take a closer look at new and non-obvious modes of governance in digitally networked environments. Specifically, we would like to explore what these modes are, how they work, and who or what controls them. Questions might be, but are not limited to: What is the role of calculation, measurement, classification, trust, accountability, or reputation? How can we understand leadership and authority under these conditions? Which role does the technical infrastructure play? Is there evidence for a new form of network governance? Overall, the goal of the workshop is to generate a deeper conceptual, empirical, and normative understanding of these modes of governance through open and creative discussion.

FORMAT

We are planning on having a one-day workshop with several sessions, focusing on one mode of governance each. A session will be kicked off by a presenter and a respondent, preferably grounding their arguments in empirical analysis. At the end of the day, we hope to wrap up the workshop and summarize the findings in a brief report.

PARTICIPATION

The workshop is open to a maximum of 16 postgraduates and post-docs from all departments and universities. If you would like to participate, please send a brief abstract (300 words) including your name, affiliation, and contact details to malte.ziewitz@oii.ox.ac.uk by Feb. 20, 2009. Priority will be given to those who commit to introducing a mode of governance of their choice for discussion. Refreshments, lunch, and lively debate will be provided. A limited amount of travel funding is available.

CONTACT

Christian Pentzold (christian.pentzold.AT.oii.ox.ac.uk)
Malte Ziewitz (malte.ziewitz.AT.oii.ox.ac.uk)
Oxford Internet Institute – Oxford University
1 St. Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS, United Kingdom

The workshop is generously supported by the ‘Networks for Web Science’ grant from the EPSRC (EP/FO/3701/1).

At first sight, the jobs of policy-makers and game designers could not be more different. On the one hand, a world of law and regulation, trying to stabilize financial markets, tackle global warming, fight crime, regulate traffic, and make network industries work. On the other hand, a world of board games, sports, and ego shooters, ranging from Monopoly, Quake, and Baseball to Poker, UNO, and Tic-Tac-Toe. A closer look, however, reveals some striking parallels between the two. As regulators slowly move from direct to indirect modes of regulation, they face a challenge that has long bothered game developers around the world: how to design environments for beneficial human interaction?

I made this non-obvious connection the topic of a workshop I taught this weekend to a group of 21 students from law, economics, philosophy, and neuroscience. The workshop was titled “Just a Game? What Regulators Can Learn from Game Designers” and was part of the Annual Meeting of the German National Academic Foundation in the UK.

The idea for the workshop was inspired by a number of people I had met over the summer. In August, I had the opportunity to attend a session on “Game Design as a Value-Conscious Practice” at the “Values in Computer and Information System Design” workshop at Santa Clara University. In this session, Mary Flanagan and Tracy Fullerton presented a “playcentric approach” to game design, focusing on how social values are embedded in different kinds of games. Similar issues are tackled by the NSF-funded Values at Play project, which aims “to harness the power of video games in the service of humanistic principles.” The research group led by Helen Nissenbaum and Mary Flanagan has not only produced substantial research but also a number of fascinating games.

Building on these insights and linking them to public policy, I divided the workshop in two parts:

• In Part I, I introduced a conceptual framework for analyzing games. Building on students’ own experiences and memories of different games, we (a) identified the formal and dramatic elements of games, (b) discussed the mechanisms and dynamics that emerge from them, and (c) had a closer look at how values are embedded in this process. The framework was largely adopted from Tracy Fullerton’s terrific “Game Design Workshop“. Tracy is a game designer and professor at the USC School of Cinematics – and if you’re remotely interested in the field, I strongly recommend you have a look at her work.

• In Part II, we put theory into practice. Students split up into groups of three to five, picked a game, and familiarized themselves with it. The groups were then supposed to redesign the game according to a randomly assigned human value and a social issue. For example, one group had chosen Yahtzee and was assigned the human value of “humility” and the social issue of “discrimination.” After some trial-and-error and discussion, they came up with a new game called Ultimate Yahtzee by adding – among other things – the interesting twist that players did not know until the very last round for whom they were actually playing. Another group had picked the game of Draughts (also known as Checkers in the U.S.) and tailored it to “food policy” and “community.” They developed Fight for Food, a board-based strategy game, in which players compete by building food supply chains into chartered territory.

The workshop was not only great fun, but also an excellent learning experience. While people were cautious not to take the analogy too far, a number of interesting insights emerged. For example:

• Like regulation, game design can get messy very quickly. Some groups observed that when they changed one element and were not satisfied with the outcome, they changed another one in response – up to a point where the flow of the game was just right and balanced, but the rules and procedures too complex for a human being to remember. Such trade-offs and processes of juridification are more than familiar to policy designers and legal theorists. Just think about tax law, and you will get the idea.
• Some mentioned that it was only through the games that they had realized how crucial dramatic elements like stories and characters were for engaging people in a game. Since there was no way of forcing people into playing, most groups experimented with different premises and story lines to capture the players’ imagination. The situation is actually not too different in an increasing number of policy contexts: when centralized enforcement is not possible or just too costly, motivation becomes a key factor.
• Generally, the boundaries between games and actual policy problems turned out to be much less clear than initially assumed. Especially in infrastructure-based environments, the analogy seemed to have some force. Examples mentioned were forms of cooperation in digitally networked environments like eBay and Wikipedia, but also international financial markets and traffic regulation.

Overall, playing with games turned out to be a fun and useful exercise for understanding public policy and generating new ideas. It would be interesting to see what other groups and audiences could take away from such a workshop.

Yesterday was an exciting day in Oxford: OneWebDay. For the first time in the short history of OneWebDay, we joined the celebrations all around the world. Overall a big success: a lot of new faces at the OII, thought-provoking conversations, and lots of tea and cookies.

So what exactly happened?

At noon, we opened OneWebday with the works of two young Iranian artists, Amir M. Javadi and Arash Ashoorinia. Both are in Tehran at the moment and could not attend themselves. Luckily, we managed to set up and display some of their works: a tailor-made installation and a wall with portraits of Iranian bloggers. The installation basically blocked the main door of the OII library for one day – an interesting experiment in “offline” filtering, which left some puzzled faces and provoked interesting conversations.

At the core of the exhibition, however, was a wall of portraits of Iranian bloggers and their stories. Journalists, women’s rights activists, poets – while their backgrounds differed considerably, they had one thing in common: all of them had been filtered without notice. Mahmood Enayat, an expert on Internet filtering and collaborator of the Open Net Initiative, introduced the exhibition, telling us about the life stories of Iranian bloggers and what it means to express oneself online under different cultural and political conditions.

Finally, Alejandro Ribo-Labastida gave a terrific blogging tutorial. The hands-on session was intended for people who want to start a blog – or are at least thinking about it. Consequently, the motivations and projects of participants were wonderfully diverse. While some had just started a blog to discuss politics and current affairs, others were planning on keeping a personal diary of gardening, staying in touch with distant family, connecting with researchers across the world, sharing art and home-made music, or coordinating a reading group by having an “open-ended list of book reviews.” It seems that after the session, participants did not only know a bit more about the pros and cons of different blogging platforms, styles, approaches, privacy, and security, but also understood why cats are actually better bloggers than dogs.

In case you missed OneWebDay @ Oxford, take a look at the photos here and here or listen to the coverage on BBC Radio Oxford, who featured OneWebDay in their morning show. We will update the Oxford wiki with more material when it comes up. For those who had asked us about recording the blogging tutorial (Hello Australia!), we have good news: webcast and slides will be available soon.

Thanks to all those who made this possible with their hard work and creativity, especially Mahmood Enayat, Amir Javadi, Arash Ashoorinia, Alejandro Ribo-Labastida, Sara Tindall, Tobias Escher, and, of course, the OII.

On September 22, it’s time again for OneWebDay – the Earth Day for the Internet. All around the globe, people will gather for community-organized events and focus attention on local Internet concerns. This year’s theme is “Online Participation in Democracy.” And for the first time, also Oxford will join the celebrations with two free and open events: a blogging tutorial and a photo exhibition.

1. Tutorial on “How to Start a Blog – and Why?”

This tutorial is for anyone in Oxford who wants to start a blog – or is thinking about it. Community organizers, activists, businesspeople, local politicians, students, and anyone else curious about blogging is invited to get together for an afternoon and explore what it takes to engage in online conversations via blogs.

Conducted by experts from the Oxford Internet Institute, the tutorial will be a hands-on session that helps participants get started with their own blogs. You will learn basic technical skills and explore the many issues novice bloggers face, such as developing a focus, finding a voice, or targeting your audience. The all-important issues of privacy and security will also be addressed.

When: 4-6pm on Monday, September 22, 2008
Where: Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS (enter the blue door)
Register: e-mail Alejandro Ribo-Labastida at aribo@oii.ox.ac.uk. Space is limited, so sign up early!

2. Photo Exhibition on Iranian Bloggers

In addition to the tutorial, we will showcase the work of two young Iranian artists, Arash Ashoorinia and Amir M. Javadi. The small exhibition draws on the artists’ current project “Accessomania” and portrays Iranian bloggers, who struggle with censorship and Internet filtering in their country.

Arash Ashoorinia is a leading photo blogger whose blog, Kosoof, won the Reporters without Borders prize in the “Best of the Blogs” competition of the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. Amir M. Javadi studied medicine and graphic design in Tehran and works as a graphic designer and photographer. His work has been featured in places like the Teheran Modern Arts Gallery or the 10th Photography Biennale in Iran.

The exhibition will open at noon with a brief introduction and last until 4pm. Students and Internet experts will be available to discuss the exhibition and answer questions around global Internet filtering and censorship.

When: noon-4pm on Monday, September 22, 2008
Where: Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS (enter the blue door)
No registration required – just show up!

Many thanks to the OII for its generous support. We hope to see many of you on the 22nd – and don’t forget to tell your neighbors, friends, and family!

I am teaching a tutorial on “Internet Governance & Regulation” at Wadham College this term. For those not familiar with Oxford-speak, a tutorial is an approach to teaching that is based on weekly meetings between a student and a scholar (i.e. 8 hours per term). While the student has to plough through a rather comprehensive reading list and write an essay every week, the tutor challenges the student’s work and gives extensive feedback. What makes this form of teaching special is – in my view – the rather close working relationship between the tutor and the student. Downside for those “tutored”: there’s nowhere to hide if you haven’t done the readings.

Obviously, the reading list is an important part of this process. However, what looked like an easy task in the beginning turned out to be a rather difficult endeavor. While other disciplines can draw upon an established canon of literature, the cross-cutting field of “Internet Governance & Regulation” or “Cyberlaw” lacks such a sound foundation.

I have given it a shot, and that’s the best I could come up with so far. It’s by no means the reading list of my dreams, but one tailored to the needs of a specific audience (non-law students with a focus on U.S. policy) and the requirements of the Oxford tutorial (theory-focused, heavy reading, self study).

You will immediately notice that the list stands on the shoulders of giants. For some sessions, I drew on the syllabi of two courses that I think are among the best at the moment:

• Jonathan Zittrain’s “Cyberlaw – Internet Points of Control“
• Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger’s “Information Technology, Policy, and the Future of Governance“

I also found Paul Schiff Berman’s reader on Law and Society Approaches to Cyberspace very helpful in this context.

Again, the list is just one piece in the didactic puzzle and in many ways a compromise to meet competing demands. But maybe it is helpful for some of you nevertheless. Feedback (and grades) welcome!

Great to see that the Hans Bredow Institute finally has a voice in the blogosphere. The voice belongs to Jan Schmidt, a sociologist with a research focus on social software and blogs. Jan recently joined the institute as a senior researcher and has been covering his own work at “Schmidt mit Dete” for quite a while (see here for English content).

Hopefully, this will (also) become a channel to learn more about the many interesting projects and research activities at the HBI.

[Disclosure: I worked for the HBI in the past and really believe they should let more people know about their great work.]

Hunting for Christmas presents, I noticed an interesting experiment in institutional design on ebay UK. Apparently, a new community court system is being tested to solve disputes over individual feedback ratings. The basic idea is as follows (details here):

• If you think you received an unfair feedback rating, you can start an appeal by posting a statement of up to 100 words and uploading up to three photos as evidence.
• The person who left the negative feedback has 14 days to justify the comment and post a counter-statement and photos, respectively.
• Once the response is in, you have another two days for commenting on the response.
• The case is then randomly allocated to 100 ebay jury members to be voted upon: if at least 70 think the feedback should be removed, it will. Otherwise, it remains in your profile and becomes part of your reputation.

The idea of a community court is not exactly new. Having a group of citizens as “finders of the fact” is at the heart of the jury trial as especially Anglo-Saxon lawyers (and courtroom thrillers) will tell you. What is new, however, is the scaling of the jury in a digitally networked environment. With no deliberation or even knowledge of each other’s identities, 100 experienced ebay members are randomly selected from a pool of volunteers and decide individually by mouse click on the fairness of a given piece of feedback. The result is a large-scale collaborative group judgment based on the evidence provided by the parties. Justice, one could say, is being “peer-produced” from a commons of normativity – thanks to the low-cost, bi-directional architecture of the Internet.

Will it work in practice?

It seems that the success of the ebay community courts will hinge on whether the designers manage to strike a balance between efficiency and (perceived) fairness. To judge from the outside, efficiency seems to be taken good care of: an automated procedure with clearly defined time frames and responsibilities for parties and jurors, immediate enforcement of the judgment through technology, and no options for further appeal (at least within the ebay community).

As far as fairness is concerned, time will show whether the courts meet the normative expectations of the community. Some speculation: active ebay members seem to be well suited to judge the fairness of a comment as they have first-hand experience of what is considered “good” and “bad” in their community (which may well differ from what is considered “good” or “bad” in other contexts). They also know about the consequences of negative ratings for a seller’s reputation. Apart from this “practical knowledge,” ebay’s designers seem to have tried to tackle the problem of bias. Not only are cases assigned randomly to members, who volunteered for jury service. The rather large number of “jurors” also suggests that potential outliers and extreme views are likely to be buried in the mainstream of the crowd. By design, individual judgments are made independently from one another, which may help the community courts avoid the well-known pitfalls of group decision-making like informational cascades, herding, or groupthink. This looks very much like the Condorcet Jury Theorem in action. Still, the procedure remains a very crude one and is likely to be criticized.

It will be interesting to see how these large-scale collaborative group judgments fare in the community – and what we may learn from this new kind of digital institution for other contexts.

Browsing through the Oxford Times the other day, I came across an interesting development in our very own town that touches upon my recent post about regulation by honking. Apparently, Oxford is considering introducing so-called “shared spaces” to deal with traffic congestion:

Oxford University and Oxford City Council both signalled their support this week for the controversial approach to gridlocked roads, which involves getting rid of traffic lights and allowing vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians to mix together, sharing road space.

Widely used in Holland and Denmark, shared space is said to produce safer, smooth-flowing, low-speed traffic movement.

With roads no longer segregated, the whole approach depends on motorists, cyclists and pedestrians having to behave courteously towards each other.

This seems to be exactly the kind of policy Yorick mentioned in his comment. At any rate, I like the notion of a “shared space.” It sounds good and intuitively seems to fit a lot of situations, in which people engage in risky behavior and almost magically coordinate their actions to avoid some harm.

From a regulatory perspective, it would be interesting to know under what conditions such shared spaces work. Thinking briefly about it, at least two aspects come to mind:

1. Participants must have a strong self-interest in behaving considerately. In the case of road traffic, for instance, any accident is likely to adversely affect the other person as much as oneself. And even if an armored car hits a pedestrian without being damaged itself, there will normally be (legal) safeguards that allow the community to identify the wrongdoer by her license plate. Economists, I guess, would call this internalizing the negative externalities of one’s behavior.
2. The space must be designed in a way that allows people to communicate effectively and base their decisions on that communication. This seems to be the difference between a crowded injunction and a deserted highway. For instance, it will be very hard for a pedestrian to keep eye contact with a driver, who flies by with 170 km/h.

These are just two ideas, and there are probably some more conditions that must hold before a space is truly “shared.” Knowing what they are would give us a better idea of (a) in which situations we’d rather NOT regulate by imposing and enforcing rules and (b) how the law may help create the conditions, under which shared spaces work.

Couldn’t this be a model for some spaces on the Internet, where people engage in risky behavior and would coordinate their actions better if we managed to make the spaces shared ones?

As the day started off so well with a fascinating talk by Hal Abelson, who will spend the next couple of months as a visitor at the OII, I thought I could as well engage in an act of shameless self-promotion: A paper I co-authored with my former teacher and friend Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has just been published in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review.

“Jefferson Rebuffed: The United States and The Future of Internet Governance” is basically a historical footnote to the 2005 WSIS negotiations. It focuses on the ill-fated European proposal to internationalize Internet governance and to curtail the policy-making power of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the corporation currently in charge of Internet naming and numbering. It is the story of a missed opportunity for what could have become a “constitutional moment” in international Internet governance. With its Constitution arguably being the oldest and most enduring worldwide, the United States traditionally has been at the forefront of fostering and advancing constitutional governance structures, at times even through the use of force. Why then, has the United States vigorously opposed the European proposal, with its concept of self-constrained governance in the important context of global information flows?

If you’re curious, have a look at the paper. We examine four sets of potential reasons: federalism, individual rights, public choice, and international governance.

Besides substance, it was a great experience to go through the whole process of publishing in a U.S. law review. If you think your supervisor or professor is picky with footnotes and citations, you haven’t experienced yet the sharp minds and relentless eyes of student editors, detecting all the tiny little flaws and inconsistencies that normally go unnoticed. That was impressive. Would actually be great to have such a free service for one’s DPhil thesis…