Things kicked into high gear on the second day of the OII doctoral programme. Those of us in the “internet and everyday life” subgroup had an enjoyable session mapping out our research projects and identifying common threads – there appear to be two very strong shared interests: firstly social (i.e. human) networks, and secondly non- or un-professional practices involving digital technologies (genealogy, blogs, digital storytelling, mobile phone use. David Berry has set up a wiki which should be a useful resource beyond the course once populated with content. David (as WARD) is playing a gig at Birmingham next weekend – my feeling is that we should form an OII posse and go along.

Here’s a cut and pasted (or, as Ted Nelson would say, a hidden and plugged) version of my notes from the formal seminars. Everything is more or less paraphrased, with comments marked by square brackets.

Robin Mansell: Enabling Internet Participation: A Global Challenge

Background: UK Office of Science and Technology Foresight Project www.foresight.gov.uk ?implications of ICTs in areas such as identity, system dependability, security and information assurance and the basis for effective interactions between people and machines.?

Alternatives to the ?digital divide? model of critical approaches to participation important because ?digital divide? is dualistic. Participation: beyond infrastructure, access, skill levels [?computer literacy?]

Areas in which action or interventions could enable/disable internet participation eg. Technology->values->identity->regulation
Relationships between trust/risk and access/participation
[trust–>social capital]
[authority–>>cultural capital]

Trust builds more slowly than access–> ?trust? as a possible link to cultural value as well – the medium as transparent/opaque; substantial/ephemeral???

Is a broader base of participation in digital culture hampered by perceptions, not necessarily of criminal risk, but of the proliferation of spam, porn, and other ?low quality? content?

e.g. see Knowledge Technologies and the Semantic Web ? more ?reliable? search engine results, for example, might enable people to ascribe cultural authority to particular sources: Leaving us to ask: who should pay?

Ed Steinmueller
Open Source Software: A New Paradigm for the Division of Labour

Key concepts: collaboration, contribution

Can public participation in the creation and improvement of information goods create substantial [economic?] value (i.e. broader value for society, not just for themselves)

Information goods as expansible [proliferation, not protection (i.e. copyright) as a goal], because reproduction does not exhaust the original] and non-rivalrous (one person?s use of an information good does not diminish the value to others)

Protection to prevent hijacking and the erosion of the value represented by expansibility and non-rivalry
Distinction between free/libre and open source movements. Open source communities are project focused, self-organizing. BUT: tension between ?self-organizing? paradigm and the very principles of ?openness?

Social structure of open source communities: examining the constitution of authority; analysing advantages and limitations in the method of voluntary collaboration

Two paradigms for collaborative ?information assemblage?
Cumulative dependency (vertical)
Complementary dependency (horizontal)

Last but not least: Ted Nelson’s “What Every Intelligent Person should Know about the Internet” – i.e. TCP/IP, the history of the world and everything in it, and the evils of the Windows clipboard and one-way hyperlinks. Which was a wonderful way to end the day. Ted has promised to teach me how to use zigzag as well.
Off down to London for a friend’s birthday – catch you on the B-side