Connecting the tubez

Some interesting things going down:

The Canadian industry minister recently introduced a bill that is essentially replicating the US DMCA (allegedly even worse). First, staffers of the minister tried to whitewash the wikipedia article on the topic, removing all discussion of copyright. However,  this was reported. Now the Wikipedia article, the source of great authority and high search rank for the topic, documents that the industry minister was involved in a controversy over whitewashing the wikipedia article. How reflexive! Check out the wikipedia article. Now the industry minister has actually introduced the bill, which has a number of people flying off the handle, in particular, electrifying younger people. There is now apparently an anti-canadian DMCA facebook group with over 50,000 canadians.

In other news, the British House of Lords has apparently started a YouTube campaign to make connections with youth.

Tags: civic_engagement, democracy, facebook, social_media, wikipedia, youth // Add Comment »

In an earlier post, I wrote about collaborative approaches to public input, in opposition to proliferation models. This distinction has become important in my thinking about this space. I want to expand upon this idea, particularly by responding to the incisive comments that Seth, Lance, and Irene left. Seth kicked it off by asking:

“How this different from the classic pluralistic model of political participation in which individuals form groups, groups have grievances, groups present grievances to officials, groups compete with other groups for power and outcomes, and public policy is produced? In other words, under what conditions will this model of deliberative democracy avoid the problems of pluralism?”

While I don’t really know what the problems of pluralism are, I think that there are a couple of potential ways that this is a different model of group action:

• There is a shared space for collaboration, even when dissenting groups are organizing in separate parts of the site. This means that, at least internal to the site, there are no back rooms.
• The shared space might allow for more emphasis on collaboration and compromise between groups that are usually competing with one another, especially if ad hoc coalitions are empowered.
• There is a trail of actions that allow others to find out what successful organization might entail.
• An advertising strategy that invites people to the site itself might be employed, rather than recruitment of members to specific advocacy groups

The second part of Seth’s question was “Looking at it from the other side, it would be more constructive if I asked: under what conditions will the production of summative documents succeed in helping to construct a space for deliberative democracy? What lessons have we learned from the successes and failures of the pluralism model to help construct such a space?”

Lance then followed by stating “This is a key issue — unless something like power becomes part of the deliberative process, it is unlikely to catch on — even if power follows deliberation, where does the training in collaborative politics occur?”

In a longer comment, Irene asked about emergent power differentials: “social hierarchies emerge in online networks and collaborations. people who act authoritatively like they have more knowledge could control or dominate the creation of the documents.” She also questioned the ability for contributors to maintain an authentic voice in a collaborative environment.

And then Lance capped it off by stating that “Politicians need to participate in these discussions — and at the least the emerging consensus (or lines of conflict) need to feed policy decisions.”

Ok, so this did refocus my attention in a different way. Again, while I don’t really know what the successes and failures of pluralism are, I can say a couple things about what conditions I think are necessary (though not sufficient) for the construction of a space for deliberative democracy, responding also to Lance and Irene. I’ll look at it from two angles, conditions internal to the functioning of the deliberative space and conditions external to it.

Internal. As Irene pointed out, power differentials are a major issue here. In a previous paper, we looked at the power relations that emerge through discourse in Wikipedia; we will definitely need to address:

• How to help engender a normative structure conducive to encouraging a deliberative atmosphere (in that paper, and this one, we looked at how Wikipedia’s evolving body of policies helps to structure collaboration in a way conducive to civil encyclopedia authoring);
• Address the stratification of rational discursive skills between elite and marginalized groups; this might be partially helped by volunteer or paid mediators as well as tools to help make as easy as possible transformations in participation;
• As Lance pointed out (and Coleman and Blumler emphasize), politicians need to participate and address the results of deliberation; ideally, gov’t officials would acknowledge the impact of input on decision making processes (as with USPTO’s Peer to Patent project).
• The maintenance of an authentic voice can be maintained, as the underlying technology need not be only summative; it will always be critical to have spaces for discussion and collaboration (just see any discussion page on Wikipedia).

External. As Lance pointed out, the deliberation space will itself necessarily need to be invested with some amount of power and legitimacy. A number of factors will need to be addressed that exist outside the deliberative space, but will be critical to its success.

• Prevent subversions of the deliberative space to an extent that its power is not wholly undermined by behind the scenes pluralist strategies (which will undoubtedly always continue).
• Call out, as Coleman and Blumler term it, “forum shopping”, where deliberations are cherry-picked for politically expedient input.
• Recruit participants from a wide range of backgrounds, lest the legitimacy of the whole process may be lost (see this post on Push vs. pull public participation).

Each of these conditions is very challenging, situationally contingent and dependent on the establishment of new institutions, and years worth of study. Feasibility feeling quite low, especially of the external ones. The only thoughts I have are rather weak: putting summative documents (e.g. positions) on referendums; establishing routines where staff comment on documents.

Tags: collaboration, democracy, pluralism // Add Comment »

Understanding the incentives of participants to contribute to commons-based peer production is an important question; Benkler, in The Wealth of Networks, posits this question as one of the three primary economic questions posed by the “networked information economy” (pg 91).

However, I consider this to be a mostly answered question: there has been a wide range of research on the motives of participants in both open source projects and Wikipedia. The upshot is that there are many reasons, but people want to find some larger meaning for their actions and participating in these communities seems to satisfy such a desire. What has not been studied however, to my knowledge, is why do people stop contributing? This is the obvious opposite question to motivation to participate. An answer would greatly expand our ability to design for member retention in these communities, and balance our theoretical understanding of participation in commons-based peer production.

Update (5/27/08): Ok, after our discussion today, perhaps it would be prudent to relax the assertion that participant motivation is “mostly answered”. There is definitely room for theoretical work on these motivations. But I stick to the larger theme — to really develop a theoretical model of participation, we can’t just look at why people contribute, but why they might stop.

Tags: open_source, social_media, wikipedia // 2 Comments »

(caution: half-baked and of questionable intelligence)

One of the major issues with deliberative democracy is to elicit a representative sample of stakeholders; current methods of public participation — such as public hearings, reviews, and comments — tend to draw extremists, representatives of interest groups, and “diehard board watchers”, due to the level of voluntary commitment required, knowledge of a decision to be made and/or the opportunity to comment, and the adversarial structure of the proceedings themselves (Innes & Booher). This situation is undesirable if one considers fairness and justice to be major goals of public participation and deliberative democracy.

One way to analytically break-up the space is to look at public input as operating on either a push or pull model of participation. A pull architecture is one in which initiative is taken by some individual to obtain a piece of information. A push architecture is one in which an individual subscribes to some information source, and appropriate content is then provided by the system as it becomes available. The metaphor might not be completely appropriate for public participation and there are probably many better ways to conceptualize it, but here’s how I’m seeing it applying:

Current practice operates on a pull model, where individuals self-select; as described earlier, resulting participants reflect the self-selection bias. Participants may be the most knowledgeable or affected, or, perhaps more likely, most emotionally invested. Diverse stakeholders, particularly of marginalized groups, are unlikely to be present. It seems like it would be easy to skew input by simply drumming up a few like-minded individuals. Some promising cutting-edge techniques in urban planning (futures or visioning workshops such as those held by EnvisionUtah) tend to be implemented through a pull model.

A second model might be to use a “push” model, where, in a sense, individuals “subscribe” to participation in the same way they do to jury duty — through being a citizen. Relevant opportunities to comment are then “pushed” out to select individuals, depending on current residence and demographic information. Some existing techniques employ this push model, including jury duty and Danish Consensus Conferences. Deliberative polling, if ever becomes institutionally embedded, would also fall into this category. (although orthogonal to the method by which participation is elicited, note that each of these methods require dialogue and the production of some sort of summative document).

A host of questions are raised for this “push” model: what media is the pushing done through (probably mail), how is quality participation incentivised (tax exemptions?), and how are participants educated about the issue at hand (for example, are event organizers responsible for putting together a comprehensive guide to the issue, with pointers to a range of stakeholders’ perspectives?)? These questions have probably been addressed to some extent by the existing techniques mentioned above, but I wanted to write about this before I delved to far into them .

Mutz critiqued deliberative polling a bit, but mostly with respect to deliberative polling not being set up in an experimental fashion where different conditions of deliberation may be tested (as well as being highly artificial examples of deliberation, as she is more concerned with everyday political discourse) (pg 58-9). I’m looking forward to checking out how the authors of Stealth Democracy problematize “push” methods of participation.

Note that the push/pull model is only relevant for (self-)selection of participants; any structure for public participation might operate under the push or the pull model. There is no reason that both cannot be employed for the same event, although extreme care would have to be taken to include those “summoned” to participate, else alienation from the political process will be the likely effect.

Hmmmm, after writing this, I feel hopelessly naive.

Innes, J. and Booher, D. Reframing public participation: strategies for the 21st century. Planning theory & practice. V. 5 (4). 2004.

Tags: civic_engagement, democracy // Add Comment »

My research interests are in collaborative public participation for urban planning; I’m considering two studies for the class that might inform this line of research. The two studies overlap, but differ in their emphases — the first is a review of relevant literature in political science & democratic theory, urban planning & public policy, management science & group decision support, and computer-supported cooperative-work (CSCW) & computer-mediated communication; the second is a survey and empirical investigation of political discourse in social media.

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Literature review. The literature review would be highly useful for me, as I would have a chance to identify and specify the big questions, and possible approaches, to the computer support of collaborative public participation. The literature is wide and a bit overwhelming, so a chance to digest some fraction of it would be welcome (I’ve listed some of the most relevant related work here).

My goal would be to first produce a simple typology of working definitions of the different forms of democracy (and their strengths and weaknesses). The typology wouldn’t be exhaustive, but I’ve never read democratic theory, and we’ve already covered a number of distinctions of which I was not previously aware (pluralist, participatory, deliberative, critical…). Working definitions of deliberation and the different conceptions of citizenship would also be useful.

Second, the urban planning discipline is undergoing what appears to be a paradigm shift toward collaborative dialog in planning processes. I would like to examine and critique the arguments and empirical evidence in the urban planning literature with respect to the different conceptions of democracy.

Finally, I’d like to explicate design considerations for software aimed at supporting collaborative public participation, as well as discuss the affordances of different technical systems to handle these design considerations, with respect to the urban planning literature and the working definitions of democracy set forth earlier. A number of my blog posts have made initial steps toward articulating these design decisions based on our readings on civic engagement and democratic theory (see here, here, and here). I’d like to develop these further, in particular the one on discussion proliferation vs. summarization. Seth kicked off some great comments about summarization’s relationship to pluralist democracy — the relationship is an example of the type of analysis I’d like to explore.

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Empirical investigation. A related study might be an empirical study of political discourse in social media.

The first part of the study would survey existing social media systems to identify interesting design dimensions that might support (or discourage) public participation. Further analysis might perform grounded analysis on conversations in a few select forums to identify salient social characteristics, such as whether there is evidence of institutional connections, conversational norms and whether they seem to lead to richer discussions, and the role that dominant participants and moderators play. The seed of a survey can be found here.

Amelia suggested that to narrow the study, a case study approach might be appropriate. A particularly attractive option would be to perform a content analysis of the Seattle-are new-mediascape surrounding the Alaskan Way Viaduct debate. This case study would serve a few purposes — get an interesting view of the “public sphere” in the new media world, identify coherency between different forums (are all these forums isolated from one another? are there coalitions or communities that have formed in some fashion?), whether there are transitions from online discourse to offline participation in public meetings, flesh out (for me) the specifics of the viaduct debate, and get me familiar with local stakeholders whom we can connect with later as the DecisionCommons develops.

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Unless there are major objections, I’d like to do the literature review. A deeper analysis of the literature would make it that much easier to identify interesting dynamics in a later empirical investigation. Moreover, I consider myself to be a CSCW researcher; the literature review may very well serve as a first draft of a paper to a CSCW conference that identifies democratic participation as a domain of study to a field that has largely ignored public participation and governance, as well as setting forth important questions that CSCW researchers might be best positioned to address.

Tags: collaboration, democracy, design, paper, social_media // 2 Comments »

Daily Show: Iraq, the first five years (3/20/08)

This clip is masterful. It plays backwards the statements by the Bush administrative over the years about progress on the Iraq war. It was completely surprising to me just how powerful this narrative is in reverse, how the neoconservative ideology might actually resonate if it lined up with reality. The earnest desire for events to unfold according to their ideological stance positively oozes forth when examined in reverse…

Tags: media, narrative // 1 Comment »

This is an excellent paper by the environmental historian William Cronon. The paper discusses how vastly different narratives are constructed even when there is agreement about the same set of underlying facts and events (a chronology). I think that it may hold some relevance to discussions about political narratives.

A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative
William Cronon
The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Mar., 1992), pp. 1347-1377

Tags: history, narrative // Add Comment »

Mutz identifies a fundamental conflict in the empirical feasibility of two commonly held democratic ideals: participation and deliberation. The vibrant activist (partisan), participatory democracy, with activists and partisans as its manifestation, is not congruent with a deliberative democracy, where cool-headed reasoning amongst diverse individuals about a multitude of issues prevails. “It is doubtful that an extremely activist political culture can also be a heavily deliberative one” (3). (note: she also makes the interesting observation that partisans tend to be the “ideal” citizens given typical descriptions in democratic theory and popular accounts) Is this a conflict between a collaborative (deliberative) and struggle-based (participatory) democratic model?

Her methodological stance is that deliberative settings that satisfy Habermasian (and other deliberative theorists’) ideal conditions are few and far between. Moreover, most studies of deliberation confound multiple factors — there is a dearth of empirical evidence about what conditions deliberation. Instead, she chooses to study a single aspect of deliberation that might actually occur experientially — exposure to oppositional political perspectives. She draws on a few surveys for her data. She notes the important place of weak ties for establishing cross-cutting perspectives, as people are more honest with those they care less about.

She first gives some basic findings about cross-cutting exposure. Some of the interesting ones: (1) political knowledge and interest is inversely related to cross-cutting exposure (32). Greatest exposure is for political moderates. (2) Americans are politically talkative, but not across lines of difference (57). (3) Increased political compartmentalization occurs through the privilege of choice. Minorities and the poor are more likely to engage in cross-cutting political conversations — “The same characteristics that give people more control over their lies also give them more control over whom they associate” (31).

Her major findings are that the diversity of networks is proportional to the understanding of multiple perspectives, but is inversely proportional to political participation. This is the “dark side” of cross-cutting ties. Two possible reasons for the tension between participation and diversity is (1) increased ambivalence in the face of multiple conflicting reasons and (2) relationship maintenance, where people suppress their political identity in order to reduce the chances of discord with people in their network. Both of these apparently play a role. Moreover, the effect of cross-cutting exposure on participation dropout when the two factors are controlled for (119).

She also spends a great deal of time examining the effect of cross-cutting exposure on the likelihood to treat oppositional perspectives as legitimate, stating that “cross-cutting exposure should enable citizens to perceive political controversies as legitimate differences of opinion.” First, she establishes that cross-cutting exposure significantly raises awareness of legitimate rationales for opposing views (74). Second, she makes the observation that establishing a friendship without knowing their political tendencies paves the way for later respect of alternative viewpoints (65) (this may hold some implications for the explicit representation of viewpoints in the DecisionCommons). And lastly, she finds that “closer relationships across lines of difference and greater knowledge of rationales for these differences predicted tolerance, even after controlling for political knowledge, political interests, extremity of opinions, etc.” (77)

Mutz’s study raises the question of how to best balance these conflicting ideals in practice. She suggests that “although exposure to differing views holds the potential for tremendous benefits, to realize them, exposure must occur in a context where the collective project of getting along with one another in society is primary, and the elucidation of differences is secondary” (62). Moreover, she finds that people with a civic orientation to conflict are more likely to benefit (account for oppositional arguments) from exposure to different views (75-6). This motivates greater attention to education of conflictual civic intercourse.

A final note on methodology: I understand that she wants to isolate factors — but surveys always rub me wrong, and the nature of her subject seems weird to draw solely on survey data. I would have loved to see more connection to ethnographic work. But such is the choice of a methodology!

Tags: democracy, summary // Add Comment »

In class today, I mentioned that I didn’t see any mention of the two most seminal works in sociology on new institutional in the readings for this week. These articles are very interesting; in particular, they employ the notion of a “myth” as a theoretical lens for understanding the formation and dynamics of an institution, how these myths are perpetuated through ceremony, how myths serve to legitimate the activities of organizations, how organizations come to be more like one another (isomorphism) through the cycle of telling the same myths, etc etc. Its been a long time since I’ve read these, so my understanding may have drifted . Anyway, for those interested, the two article are below:

Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony
John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan
The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 83, No. 2 (Sep., 1977), pp. 340-363

The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields
Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell
American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Apr., 1983), pp. 147-160

Tags: new_institutionalism, sociology // 2 Comments »

The title of this post comes from a very well-done longitudinal study of Wikipedian users that examines how users’ perceptions and activities within Wikipedia changed over time. In short, new users tend to view Wikipedia simply as a somewhat abstract resource where anonymous individuals write articles; as they become core users (if they do), their perceptions change, where they see Wikipedia as a vibrant community comprised of multiple sub-communities that work together in very intricate fashions to produce articles, buttressed by a variety of communication forums to support collaboration. As one might expect, accompanying this transformation in perception is a transformation in tool use, as the user starts to employ more advanced functionality and communicate in a number of different channels.

The study draws on the theoretical lens of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), a central concern for scholars studying “communities of practice”. LPP focuses on how users engage in “peripheral” tasks and, over time, transition into core members of the community. The authors, however, did not study the transformative aspect that I think is one of the most important, if not THE most, characteristic of Wikipedia: transformations in discourse. Here we have this place where tens of thousands of people are coming together to collaborate, despite the plethora of world views that come to the table, despite never seeing one another (in the majority case). Hashin’ things out. Sortin’ through what a “consensus” means. This is not to say that conflict, strategic manipulation, and coercion are absent — indeed, they’re endemic (see this paper that we published about discursive power plays that take place in wikipedia). But there is something important about engagement there which feels novel…

Scholars studying communities of practice have emphasized the core role that learning plays in these communities. Wikipedia is one of the best places people can go to learn about how to interact with, listen to, and collaborate with people outside of your everyday circle — it would appear to be a place where people learn how to communicate with others in order to get something done collectively, an underdeveloped skill given the abysmal state of civics education today. In short, I would expect that Wikipedians experience a transformation in their discursive capital. I would love to see a study of this done. Are the people who experience a transformation merely those that we would expect to have one, given their background? Does the lead-by-example metaphor apply here, where marginalized groups might develop skills by observing other participants? I also wonder how transformations in discourse might tie into the interesting findings that Colin pointed us to about the increase in voting activity that citizens undertook after experiencing certain patterns of interaction during jury duty.

I think that paying attention to transformations in participation is a very important dimension to the design of participatory social media. How can we leave the breadcrumbs to engagement? I don’t think it will be possible to build systems that do not, in some way, cater to the skill sets of those that are already in power. But I think that we can take steps that might be able to draw marginalized groups into it. LPP might give us a theoretical framework for reasoning about designing systems that, on one hand, achieve some concrete goal (e.g. production of position statements on issues of public concern), and on the other, help participants learn how to engage in a “rational” discourse.

Tags: collaboration, community_of_practice, democracy, design, discourse, legitimate_peripheral_participation, social_media, wikipedia // 3 Comments »