Internet, Politics and Policy 2014 – review from the conference
I was lucky enough to attend Oxford Internet Institute’s conference on Internet, Politics and Policy, this year focusing on crowdsourcing. I was rather surprised on the overall coolness of this conference – collecting people interested on the Internet and society around Europe to one place.
There were several papers around the topic of design and linking design to user experience and outcomes of the participation. As I’m also working in this overall thing, these sessions were super interesting for me. However, there are way too several perspectives this can be looked from: comparing different kind of crowds for policy analysis and what challenges it may have, examining how Facebook can be used to reach citizens and then just plain old online deliberation systems can be used [1, 2, 3]. There are plenty of problems, plenty of approaches and therefore scattered outcomes. This is sad and I feel a major challenge for the overall research project.
However, the super-cool session focusing on deliberation took steps towards fixing this. Friess & Eilders suggest an model to understand online deliberation: there are institutional settings, which influence the act of deliberation and finally influence the outcomes of deliberation. For example, the moderation strategy is what they call an institutional setting and may influence the deliberation, like civility or constructiveness – which in the end may influence the final outcomes, like participants’ change of opinion or consensus reached. Super-cool! And what more, this allows some level of experimental studies also, just vary the institutional settings and see what happens. The major challenge I see with this is listing all the institutional settings properly, including social context and the properties of the online tool. But, still – super-cool work to take steps towards experimentation.
There were two sessions examining large-scale data-analysis and using that to Internet politics. Social network analysis was a big thing, maybe one of the more interesting ones for me was comparison of different types of networks politicians create online (that is, their like-network vs. network on based on their comments. Big data analysis can also be used to predict elections, the interesting twist here to look information seeking activities compared to more traditional social media activity research.
I wasn't able to attend, but it seems that geolocation technology and democracy are meeting again, this time by MIT. This is my puppy-topic: I really like the idea of using context aware technology for democracy and have tossed some ideas around that a long time ago.
So to conclude: the conference will hopefully be one of my main venues in the future; it’s interesting to see how computational methods get mixed with traditional social science research – the trend clearly is in that direction, lead by the highly prestigious universities. Second, what I’m missing in Finland is research on online politics. Well, we’re just five million people, so we can’t focus on all fields. The four sessions (which I attended) that focused on online participation nicely provided an overview of the current trends of research trends.
