OII Editor's Blog

The ninth OII Summer Doctoral Programme will kick off next week, with 29 talented doctoral students arriving at the OII from top universities all over the world. As usual it’ll be a packed fortnight of seminars, presentations, tutorials and social events, designed to provide the students with valuable (and practical) input into their thesis research, and introduce them to an international peer group of excellent young Internet researchers.

The seminar topics planned for this year include political engagement, public opinion formation, news and social media, privacy and data protection, industrial organisation, the Internet of Things and ethical consumption, Internet countercultures, Facebook and identity, citizens and government, and a reflection on what we mean today by ‘Internet Studies’. Three sessions will address research methods and tools, covering Internet ethnographies, social media data, and research ethics. Time will be set aside for students to present their thesis work to the group, and to meet with course tutors individually. Tutors will include OII teaching faculty, and visiting tutors including Jonathan Zittrain, Marc Smith, Lisa Nakamura, and Stephen Coleman.

Due to their past popularity, we will be organising sessions that address some of the more practical (but rarely taught) aspects of working, and getting ahead, in academia: Monica Bulger will share advice on academic presentation skills, and Jeremy Hunsinger will talk about starting out in ‘Jobs, Books and Journals’. We are excited that Jonathan Zittrain will once again be able to help contextualise the many academic and practical inputs and discussions in a ‘big picture’ conversation with students.

It isn’t all lectures and research seminars though: the entertainment will include various dinners, a picnic and punting, a theatre outing, an Oxford ghost tour, and the ever-popular ‘BBQ at Bill’s House’. We are delighted that Dame Stephanie Shirley – key OII supporter, software entrepreneur and philanthropist – will be hosting an afternoon tea for the students: a great opportunity to hear the stories behind the OII’s founding ten years ago, and her long professional interest in the social impacts of technology. It promises to be a very interesting discussion – but then the SDP has always been a great environment in which to learn and share, with lots of different people, viewpoints, backgrounds, and experiences, all crammed into a single amazing fortnight.

In short: we look forward to welcoming the SDP2011 participants to Oxford and the OII next week!

We have recently gone live with a second webcam, commanding sweeping(ish) views of the northern end of St Giles. Our webcam fans noticed almost immediately:

“I have died and gone to heaven! Not one, but two of your wonderful cams are now available for me when my longing to see Oxford becomes overwhelming. You have the best webcams anywhere. A webcam is streaming video, NOT something that updates every 5 minutes (that is a slide show). Am really looking forward to seeing more of the St. Giles fair this September. Many, many thanks from Northampton, MA, USA for your wonderful and impressive efforts.”

“I think that the addition of a 2nd web cam is an excellent idea. I often check this web cam site so that I can see the actual weather in Oxford. My daughter goes to school there and it is always a pleasure to see what she is experiencing. The addition of the 2nd camera just allows me to see more of St Giles Street, which I have walked upon several times, in my various trips to Oxford.” (Ontario, Canada)

Thanks to everyone for the feedback! Comments / queries should be sent to: webhelp@oii.ox.ac.uk

Our two-day conference is just about to come to an end with an evening reception at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum (you can have a live view through OII’s very own webcam…). Its aim was to try to make an assessment of the Internet’s impact on politics and policy. The presentations approached this challenge from a number of different angles and we would like to encourage everyone to browse the archive of papers on the conference website to get a comprehensive overview about much of the cutting-edge research that is currently taking place in many different parts of the world.

The submissions to this conference allowed setting up very topical panels in which the different papers fitted together rather well. Helen Margetts, the convenor, highlighted in her summary just how much discussion and informed exchange has been going on within these panels. But a conference is more than the collection of papers delivered. It is just as much about the social gathering of people who share similar interests and the conference schedule tried to accommodate for this by offering many coffee breaks to encourage more informal exchange. It is a testimony to the success of this strategy that the majority of people have very much welcomed the idea to have a similar conference in two years time, details of which are yet to be confirmed.

Great thanks to everybody who helped to make this conference happen, in particular OII’s dedicated support staff such as journal editor David Sutcliffe and events manager Tim Davies.

Our two-day conference is coming to a close with a keynote by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger who is soon to be joining the faculty of the Oxford Internet Institute as Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation.

Viktor talked about the theme of his recent book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” (a webcast of this keynote will be available soon on the OII website but you can also listen to a previous talk here). It touches on many of the recent debates about information that has been published on the web in some context and which might suddenly come back to us in a completely different context, e.g. when applying for a job and being confronted with some drunken picture of us obtained from Facebook.

Viktor puts that into a broad perspective, contrasting the two themes of “forgetting” and “remembering”. He convincingly argues how for most of human history, forgetting has been the default. This state of affairs has experienced quite a dramatic change with the advances of the computer technology, data storage and information retrieval technologies available on a global information infrastructure.  Now remembering is the default as most of the information stored digitally is available forever and in multiple places.

What he sees at stake is power because of the permanent threat of our activities are being watched by others – not necessarily now but possibly even in the future – can result in altering our behaviour today. What is more, he says that without forgetting it is hard for us to forgive as we deny us and others the possibility to change.

No matter to what degree you are prepared to follow the argument, the most intriguing question is how the current state of remembering could be changed to forgetting. Viktor discusses a number of ideas that pose no real solution:

1. privacy rights – don’t go very far in changing actual behaviour
2. information ecology – the idea to store only as much as necessary
3. digital abstinence – just not using these digital tools but this is not very practical
4. full contextualization – store as much information as possible in order to provide necessary context for evaluating the informations from the past
5. cognitive adjustments – humans have to change in order to learn how to discard the information but this is very difficult
6. privacy digital rights management – requires the need to create a global infrastructure that would create more threats than solutions

Instead Viktor wants to establish mechanisms that ease forgetting, primarily by making it a little bit more difficult to remember. Ideas include

• expiration date for information, less in order to technically force deletion but to socially force thinking about forgetting
• making older information a bit more difficult to retrieve

Whatever the actual tool, the default should be forgetting and to prompt its users to reflect and choose about just how long a certain piece of information should be valid.

Nice closing statement: “Let us remember to forget!”

The first day of the conference found an end in style with a well-received reception at Oxford’s fine Divinity Schools.

Day Two of the conference kicked off with panels on “Mobilisation and Agenda Setting”, “Virtual Goods” and “Comparative Campaigning”.  ICTlogy has been busy summarising some of the panels at the conference including this morning one’s with some interesting contributions on comparative campaigning.

The second round of panels included a number of scientific approaches to the role of the Internet for the recent UK election:

Gibson, Cantijoch and Ward in their analysis of the UK Elections drew attention to the fact that the 2010 UK General Election was dominated not by the Internet but by a very traditional media instead, namely the TV debates of party leaders. Importantly, they suggest to treat eParticipation as a multi-dimensional concept, ie. distinguish different forms of eParticipation with differing degrees of involvement, in fact in much the same way as we have come to treat traditional forms of participation.

Anstead and Jensen aimed to trace distinctions in election campaigning between the national and the local level. They have found evidence that online campaigns are both decentralized (little mention of national campaigns) and localised (emphasizing horizontal links with the community).

Lilleker and Jackson looked at how much party websites did encourage participation. They found that first and foremost, parties are about promoting their personnel and are rather cautious in engaging in any interactive communication. Most efforts were aimed at the campaign and not about getting input into policy. Even though there were more Web 2.0 features in use than in previous years, participation was low.

Sudulich and Wall were interested in the uptake of online campaigning (campaign website, Facebook profile) by election candidates. They take into account a range of factors including bookmakers odds for candidates but found little explanatory effects overall.

This panel was one of three in the first round of panels and has been focusing on ePetitions. Two contributions from Germany and two contributions from the UK brought a useful comparative perspective to the debate. ePetitions are an interesting research object because not only is petitioning a rather popular political participation activity offline but also online. It is also one of the few eParticipation activities quite a number of governments have been implemented by now, namely the UK, Germany and Scotland.

Andreas Jungherr was providing a largely quantitative analysis of co-signature dynamics on the ePetitions website of the German Bundestag, providing some background on how many petitions attract a lot of signatures (only a few) and how many petitions a user signs (usually only one).

This provided a background for the summary of a comprehensive study on ePetitioning in the German parliament by Ralf Linder. He offered a somewhat downbeat assessment in that the online system has failed to engage traditionally underrepresented groups of society to petitioning even though it has had impacted on the public debate.

Giovanni Navarria was much harsher in his criticism of ePetitioning on the Downing Street site based on his analysis of the petition against the road tax. He concluded that the government was actually wrong in putting such a service onto its website as it had created unrealistic expectations a representative government could not meet.

In contrast Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos in his evaluation of local ePetitioning in the Royal Borough of Kingston made a case for petitions on the local level to have the potential to really enhance local government democracy. This is a finding that is particularly important in the light of the UK government mandating online petitioning for all local authorities in the UK.

Arthur Lupia has just been delivering the opening keynote on our very own conference “Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: An Impact Assessment” here in Oxford. He started by turning on the audience:

• What is our impact on the Internet?
• Have we been as effective as we could have been in changing people’s beliefs and behaviours?

However, this wasn’t about benchmarking success of researchers into Internet and Politics but about the question why many well-intentioned projects – be it making people participate in politics, be getting across the relevance of your ground-breaking research or whatever – ultimately fail.

Arthur Lupia’s main argument that many of these well-meant enterprises do not take into account sufficiently how people are. How they are is – according to Lupia – mainly defined by three broad influences:

1. biology
2. social behaviour (e.g. how we learn etc)
3. political contexts

So in order to successfully persuade others (in any benign meaning of course) he posits three necessary conditions (implying that they might not be sufficient):

1. attention: as people have a limited capacity to pay attention, your message will only get through if they feel its urgency and relevance for them
2. elaboration: relate your message to the audience. People will only listen if it is unique and highly relevant to them. Ways to achieve this is by making it local, concrete and immediate but also by making the desired change possible, making clear that the desired effect is within reach
3. credibility:  Finally, credibility is key but this is not an absolute value but it is domain-specific. Credibility is bestowed on someone by the audience and depends on whether the audience believes (not matter if correctly) that you are knowledgeable and share their interests

See the summary by ICTlogy about the talk and the Q&A session. To follow the conference on Twitter on all over the Internet, look for the IPP2010 tag.

A few months ago we unveiled (after some poking around with servers and cameras) the Revamped Oxford Webcam.

Our webcam has had a rather bumpy ride since it first went live in 2006, ie it had the annoying / endearing habit of crashing if more than a few people accessed it at once, so it seemed to spend most of its life, well, dead.

So we spent a lot of time sending emails like ‘er webcam’s dead?’ to IT, who would then poke it back to life. We’ve received lots of really nice emails about the webcam over the years, many of them hinting wistfully at the up-time issues:

I confess I’m an addict to your great webcam that looks out onto the Taylorian.  I’m suffering from withdrawl!  When will the webcam be back up and running, and is there any chance of increasing its server load? (February 2008)

Can you please tell me when you expect your webcam to be operating again?  I miss being able to view a street in Oxford! (October 2008)

Some time ago I accessed your excellent webcam (which looks across at the Taylorian building), but now find I can’t access it. Is there a fault? (May 2009)

Lost the webcam again today (November 2007)

I have been unable to access your webcam for about a week now. (November 2007)

will it return? (November 2010)

some offering helpful suggestions:

Your camera is not level, it is at a slope angle (March 2007)

I started this blog post in January with the line: “For a long time we were one of the few people in Oxford to have a public webcam (now it seems simply everyone has one).”

So, having come back to this post in er June with a view to pressing ‘Publish’, I have just done some searching for other webcams in Oxford (apart from our own webcam overlooking St Giles in central Oxford), and: pretty depressing, actually. So I’m just going to link to the two I found which seem to be worth looking at.

There is, of course, the famous Swifts in the Tower Webcam (pointing at the swift nests in the tower of the University Museum). Unfortunately, I only ever seem to remember its existence in winter,* when the swifts have long since departed to eg Egypt, just leaving their (presumably) cold nests heaving with whatever lives in swift nests after the birds have gone. The webcam has been been running for a few years now. The site says: “The Oxford Swift Research Project was started by David and Elizabeth Lack in 1947: it is one of the longest running studies of any species of bird, and has contributed greatly to our knowledge.”

University Museum swifts looking impossibly cute in July 2005, around teatime

And, slightly more randomly, there is the St Catz Duckling Cam (the ducklings seem to have departed, unfortunately, so it now seems to be showing us a shady patch of earth in St Catherine’s College gardens, but the idea is nice).

So, it seems to be: Birds 2, All Other Species 0, as far as Oxford webcams go.

[ *evidence of the glacial pace of some of these blog posts: originally drafted in empty-nested winter, but published in summer, when tiny swift babies actually appear to be sitting in their nests, looking all strange and dinosaur-like. The swift diary explains their timetable: April to August seems to be the time to watch. ]

On current Social Networks every user has a limited view of his social graph: the provider, however, has a complete view of the network, access to all data, and often keeps ownership of it too. People who wish to link up with friends on different social networks need to convince them to join their own one.

Open Distributed Social Networks, that allow participants to link across networks and control their data and relationships, do currently exist (using Semantic Web standards and vocabularies such as Friend of a Friend, FOAF) but until recently the information in this network was completely public. So, what to do? How do we link across different social networks, while keeping control of our privacy?

In this short interview, Social Network Architect Henry Story describes a global distributed authentication system (‘FOAF+SSL‘) that gives the data owner the privacy that people think they are enjoying on the current centralized social networks, whilst allowing them to connect to anyone else in the world.

and now! Henry Story has just produced another video on ‘The Social Network Mess’, which extends on the ideas introduced above. He says that: “The current Social Networking space is a mess. We describe the problems both technical, pragmatic and philosophical of current social networks, and present a solution deployable immediately that works in current browsers: an open global secure network – The Social Web.”

He starts off with Robert Scoble getting thrown of Facebook, describes how this lead to the Data Portability movement, its failings, and the practical solution: the Social Web.