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.

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).

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.]

• 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.

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?

“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…

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency’s examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.

As far as I know, this is one of the first cases in which a government makes targeted use of the Internet’s new collaborative technologies. It seems to be a promising approach. For a long time, scholars and policy makers have complained about the increasing knowledge gap on part of government agencies on a rather abstract level. Now there is an active attempt at leveraging the (in many people’s opinion already rather buzzwordy) “wisdom of crowds” for better regulation.

It will be interesting to see how the decentralized review fares in practice: Will a critical mass of people participate? How susceptible is the process to gaming? And in a government context most importantly, will the system meet the normative benchmarks of the legal system, such as due process and accountability?

Beth Noveck, one of the masterminds behind the plan, addressed some of these issues in a recent paper for the U.S. context.

I wonder what other applications of recommendation systems in public policy one can imagine, especially in the European context. One idea would be to think about the problem of how to classify content that is potentially harmful to minors, a big issue in most Western European countries. A collaborative filter that generates community-specific ratings based on the reputation of raters may be just one idea to think about. It would bypass the problem of rather obscure procedures in overworked and understaffed content rating commissions and add transparency as well as – arguably – legitimacy to the process.

What is interesting from the perspective of regulation is that there seem to be quite different mechanisms for coordinating traffic in different parts of the world. Two examples from my own experience: In my home country Germany, the default still seems to be coordination by traffic lights. The state sets rules as to who is allowed to cross the intersection at what time in what direction. Red light, stop. Green light, go. This is regulation by law, and most people abide by it – even if they are the only ones waiting at a deserted intersection in the middle of the night.

In southern Italy, my experience has been different. Traffic lights exist, but people do not seem to pay too much attention to them. Rather, they tend to slowly roll into the intersection and wait for reactions of other drivers. If the other driver slows down, this is taken as permission to cross. If not, people wait. If one driver notes that another driver cannot see her approaching, she honks. This is not regulation by law, but regulation by eye contact and honking.

Does one work better than the other?

I am not aware of any studies, but it would be interesting to know on what conditions each system depends. Isn’t the Italian way of coordinating traffic a real-world example of what others have called “peer production of governance” on the Internet? Under what circumstances does a decentralized social signaling system (eye contact and honking) trump a centralized law-based regime (traffic lights)? May it work particularly well in communications networks? And could the law do anything to foster it?

As to the latter question, Jonathan Zittrain mentioned after one of his recent lectures that Germany is gradually introducing roundabouts. As research (German only) indicates, this promises to be a big success – and an example of the law facilitating regulation by honking.

Sorry for the tohubohu in this space during the past couple of days. A major hardware problem knocked out the entire OII blogosphere. By now, everything should be working again. I re-added the (lost) comments from Google cache with original date stamps and hope that all your contributions are in good shape again. If not, drop me a line and I’ll take care of it. Thanks!

Some Web site operators are complaining that Google is flagging their sites as containing malicious software when they believe their sites are harmless.

At issue is an interstitial page that Google presents when a user clicks on a search result link to a site that Google believes contains malware. The page cautions users with the words “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!” Google does not block access to the site, but a user must manually type in the Web site address to continue.

Website operators, who think they were flagged mistakenly and want the decision to be reviewed, can appeal by sending an e-mail to stopbadware.org*, a central clearinghouse for research on badware.

Browsing through some of the complaints on the stopbadware discussion list gives an (of course merely anecdotal) overview of what people expect from Google in this case: the right to be heard before being flagged, a fast and efficient appeals process, a fair trial for their site, and transparency about the process by which Google arrived at its decision.

This language sounds familiar to lawyers. It is the language of “due process,” a set of mostly procedural safeguards to ensure fundamental fairness whenever the government encroaches on a person’s basic rights to life, liberty, or property. As a constitutional principle, due process only applies to state action. Google, however, is a private company. So what’s the point?

The point is that, under certain circumstances, people seem to have the same normative expectations of private intermediaries as of the state. In this case, it is the perceived adjudicative power of a leading search engine, balancing competing values like freedom of speech and security in its flagging decisions. In other cases, it may be rather the legislative and executive constraints embedded in code that make people suspicious.

So even though it is crystal clear that traditional due process doctrine does not generally apply to private information intermediaries: Is there a need to translate this constitutional value into cyberspace? What would “due process” look like in the networked information economy? If it is true that we all have more of a voice on a read/write Internet, isn’t it all about transparency? Or do we need more restrictive safeguards against concentrations of power in code?

Maybe we can even learn from the law when trying to define a normative benchmark for recommendation systems like the Google badware warnings.

[* Disclaimer: Even though the OII is a co-sponsor of stopbadware.org, I am not personally involved in this project and only speak for myself.]

• The way we text: Tim Grant and other forensic linguists at the University of Leicester work on something called “forensic authorship analysis“. They basically analyze the way people write text messages on their mobile phones. Apparently, these techniques already play an important role in providing evidence in criminal cases (examples here and here).

• The way we click: In a recent working paper, Balaji Padmanabhan and Yinghui Yang ask whether there is something like a “clickprint” – a unique pattern of surfing behavior based on how long you visited what websites at what time of the day and other actions. They conclude that it is in fact possible to distinguish two persons based on clickstream data, given the optimal level of aggregation as computed by their method.

• The way we walk: Researchers at GeorgiaTech work on “Human Identification at a Distance.” Their focus is on gait recognition and the way we move as an “activity-specific biometric.” They propose “a technique that recovers static body and stride parameters of subjects as they walk.” (No, they have nothing to do with these guys.)

Even though privacy advocates are likely to loose some sleep over such possibilities, one could – perhaps a bit sarcastically – argue that there is also a good side to it: it seems to become harder and harder not to be unique.

rare second
and something
without a tenacious soul
hover in secret

Having been plagued by rather annoying attempts like “Re: Hi”, “you happy?”, and “need V#%GR@” for some time, I found this quite edifying.

As always, I am light years behind. Bloggers like Kristin Thomas, Grant Hutchinson, or Morton Hurley had picked up this trend a long time ago and received media coverage from all over the world. There even is a wikipedia entry on Spoetry as a new art form.

Nevertheless, even though these lines seem to be mainly a reaction to increasingly sophisticated spam filters, they are great fun. If you want to take up the challenge, the comment section is yours.

One aspect that strikes me as particularly interesting is the balance between down-to-earth analysis of the past and a more forward-looking (and more obviously normative) design perspective. Of course, I do not have any empirical data on the different approaches to writing a doctoral thesis in different cultures. But when I think about my western European civil-law background, there seems to be a deeply rooted belief that a doctoral thesis is first and foremost a thorough analysis of the past. This is where we get our data from, can interview people about, and do extensive literature reviews on. To qualify as scholarly, a thesis has to meet at least one of these criteria, fill a gap in the existing literature, and eventually culminate in a “big book” (as opposed to a series of papers). There may be a reference to future developments and policy implications, but it is normally well hidden in the last couple of pages before the conclusion.

No doubt, there is a lot of value in this approach. But maybe doing research in dynamic fields like the Internet sometimes requires an even more forward-looking perspective: how much of a design perspective can a thesis shoulder? Is scenario writing a viable research method? As to presentation, how much story telling and anecdotal evidence makes a thesis comprehensible without risking its credibility in traditional academic settings? Where is the line between science and science fiction?

If this sounds too abstract, try to think about the following question: would Lessig’s Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace have been accepted as a doctoral thesis at your university?

Hopefully, some of you will take an interest and comment. So fire up your RSS readers and keep in touch!