Krems.
The next EDEM 2010 session starts with Francesco Molinari, who reflects on the outcomes of a component of the IDEAL-EU project: a multilingual social networking project involving Spain, France, and Italy which connected citizens and regional governments in order to discuss issues around climate change. Part of the question here was whether online interaction could be a valid extension of conventional face-to-face interaction; whether it could be of use to politicians and policymakers; and whether there were differences between the well-examined US approach to online participation, and more specific European approaches.

Krems.
The final speaker in this EDEM 2010 session is Marko Skoric, who shifts our focus to Singapore and away from explicitly political spaces: rather, his interest is in investigating emerging platforms for online sociability and entertainment - like Facebook and (online) games. Such spaces constitute a third place for their users to gather.

Facebook has a substantial civic potential, and several studies have documented that potential, focussing both on everyday generic use of Facebook and on specific political pages within it. Similarly, various civic activities are happening in online games and immersive 3D environments; such games can also act as labs for practicing civic skills - through deliberately serious games but also through others.

Krems.
The next speaker at EDEM 2010 is Jakob Svensson from Karlstad University, who notes that the Net is considered to be the new arena for digital citizenship, of course - citizenship is membership in a political community which confers particular rights and duties; but what does the political consist of? What should be considered to be political?

The political, Jakob suggests, concerns the organisation and structure of society, and power relations within it; it is discursive and relational. This also relates to questions of what we mean by community - and community is now more often a community of interest than a geographically or otherwise determined community. Overall, then, a political community is an ensemble of people who are concerned witb the organisation of society and make sense of these concerns in a similar way. When such political communities address these concerns, they engage in active citizenship.

Krems.
My own presentation (of a paper co-authored with my colleague Adam Swift) was up next at EDEM 2010, and I've already posted up the slides and full paper - audio to follow some time soon, hopefully! now added as well. Bit rushed, but I hope it made sense...

Krems.
The second keynote speaker at EDEM 2010 is Ismail Peña-López, who begins from an economic perspective: he notes that in the orthodox view, the basic structure of the production system is that inputs (resources) are acted upon by labour and capital in the production process, generating outputs (products). Democratic processes are traditionally based and built upon this production process, too - scarcity of resources, transaction costs, and processes of intermediation are its fundamental delimiting elements,which democracy attempts to coordinate.

Krems.
I've now arrived at the 2010 Conference on e-Democracy (EDEM 2010) in Krems, Austria. I'll present my paper on the g4c2c concept with Adam Swift later this afternoon, but we start today with a keynote by Andy Williamson. He begins by pointing to the relative youth of e-democracy projects, and says that there's a lot to learn from the interesting failures of many such projects to date. Indeed, there's a problem with the academic language of many of these projects (democracy is a disputable enough term as it is - sticking 'e' in front only makes it worse).

In a few days' time, I'll head off to Europe again, to present at this year's Conference on e-Democracy (EDEM 2010). I really enjoyed the 2009 edition (see the coverage in this blog), and it's hard to believe a whole year has passed already - probably because it hasn't: EDEM 2009 was held in September...

Still, that's not stopped us from developing some new ideas on how to further the 'government 2.0' push which aims to utilise Web 2.0 technologies, social media models, and produsage processes in order to create better engagement and participation between governments and citizens. This year, I'm building on my observations with Jason Wilson about top-down and bottom-up forms of engagement, presented at EDEM 2009, to suggest (in a paper co-authored with Adam Swift) that neither the common government-to-citizen (g2c) nor citizen-to-citizen (c2c) initiatives in the government 2.0 space quite manage to find the right balance, and that we may need to explore the possibility for new, hybrid models in between these poles: we outline what we've called a g4c2c model in which government provides explicit support for, and gets involved in, citizen-to-citizen activities.

There's a fair amount of travelling coming up for me over the next few months - and as always, where I'm attending conferences I'll endeavour to cover them on snurb.info (though a good part of my travels in May is for personal reasons, so don't expect too much - a few tweets here and there, perhaps).

First, though, I'm off to Perth and Adelaide next week to speak at the State Libraries of Western Australia (on 28 April) and South Australia (on 30 April) . In a talk I'm calling "Outreach and Co-Curation: Engaging with Library Users", I'll explore how libraries and librarians may use social media to connect and collaborate with library users - this updates my keynote at the ARLIS conference a couple of years ago and also builds on the social media reports I've written for the Smart Services CRC. Ultimately, what this points to is the significant potential for librarians and library users to engage in a shared practice of co-curating information and knowledge: importing and adapting produsage approaches into library practice, and in the process perhaps opening up new user communities for our libraries. I've already posted the Powerpoint here - and all going well, I'll add the audio from the presentation later on as well. UPDATE: The audio from the SLSA talk is now online as well. Thanks again to the SLSA and SLWA folks for organising the event!

With my colleague Jan Schmidt from the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, I'm delighted to have been approached by the editors of the Taylor & Francis journal New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia to edit a special issue on produsage. Below is the Call for Papers - we welcome any enquiries and submissions. Please spread the word!

Exploring Produsage

A Special Issue of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

Call for papers

The concept of produsage points to the shift away from conventional producer/consumer relationships, and highlights the more fluid roles of users and contributors within social media environments. Participants in open source projects, in Wikipedia, in YouTube and Second Life are no longer merely consuming or using preproduced material, but neither are they at all times acting as fully self-determined producers of fully formed new works; rather, they occupy a hybrid position as produsers of content.

I'm afraid I've been a very slack blogger over the summer - a range of existing and emerging research projects, and various other have got in the way. More on many of these soon; for now, I wanted to point to the latest report released by the Pew Internet research centre, "The Future of the Internet IV". In this series of reports, Pew presents the responses of high-profile experts from industry and academia to a series of controversial questions about the future of the Net. To stimulate responses on each question, Pew offered two relatively extreme scenarios of what the future may look like.

There's coverage of the report in a number of leading technology and culture publications, including ReadWriteWeb and Fast Company. For the latest edition, I was asked to contribute my thoughts, and I'm happy for some of those responses to have made their way into the report itself. For completeness's sake (and perhaps to see in ten years' time how far off the mark I was), here are my answers in full:

Will Google make us smart or stupid?

By 2020, people's use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information, they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google).

By 2020, people's use of the internet has not enhanced human intelligence and it could even be lowering the IQs of most people who use it a lot. Nicholas Carr was right: Google makes us stupid.