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.