ICTlogy

By Ismael Peña-López
ICTlogy (ISSN 1886-5208). Issue #77, February 2010

Keywords: Meetings | Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism | e-Government, e-Administration, Politics

Yesterday I spoke at the Jornadas sobre redes y cultura compartida: De la cultura distribuida a la transformación del conocimiento (Conference on networks and shared culture: from distributed culture to the transformation of knowledge).

I had been asked to answer this question: could we, thanks to the Internet, forget about political parties and let people express their own opinions, debate and vote their representatives directly?

An initial answer to the question would be: well, yes, why not? But, should we?

Instead of providing such an answer — or any answer at all — I tried instead to:

1. explain that some dire (socioeconomic) changes were taking place,
2. focus on why these socioeconomic changes were taking place and
3. infer, from this, what conditions shall take place in the future for
4. another wave of changes to happen.

In other words:

1. we have shifted from an Industrial Society to an Information Society (and what each concept means),
2. that this has been because of digitization and Information and Communication Technologies (and other aspects, all of which led to second order factors, etc.) and
3. that we should really be aware of digital competences, the digital divide and the unbalances of power
4. for full e-Democracy to happen.

As can be seen in the presentation, I showed and explained almost 20 cases which I consider either successful or revolutionary or both, cases that have been replicated and will inspire many others.

But I also devoted plenty of time at showing, with real data, that these initiatives are mostly piloted by a tiny minority, my caveat being that we should try and bring more people in — by fighting the aforementioned barriers — instead of keeping on exploring new territories. The reason being that we could find ourselves having replaced a democracy by a digital aristocracy.

I admit that (One of) the bad point(s) in my approach is that it is very economy-focussed, instead of being politics/government based and thus leaving aside many aspects tied to the nature of the subject. On the other hand, I think that the good point is that it makes it easy to go back to the reasons, the whys, and not just the hows. Indeed, the approach is equally useful (as I did yesterday) to explain some changes in education or media.

During the questions & answers session, I really got clever feedback from the audience, while also giving me a second chance to clarify some aspects. Here they go:

• The main aspect to address to achieve good e-Democracy is not the “e-” part, but the “Democracy” part. Difference, for instance, in the USA and European e-politics are more related with the political system rather than the different rates of Internet adoption or digital literacy (which are not that significantly different, by the way)
• Information overload is a problem, which has to be addressed (among other things) with information literacy. Urgently.
• New media literacies will be required too as we learnt to tell true from false when watching TV or FX-intensive movies.
• Editors should be, in my opinion, a keystone in the new Information Society. The problem is that journalists/editors are more concerned about selling audiences to their advertisers or paper to their readers, rather than creating/editing good information and finding out how to get paid for it.

More information

• Blocs&ClubsII: Conferencia de Ismael Peña, by Lize De Clercq
• See presentation online in English
• Download presentation in English ( 14.3 MB)
• See presentation online in Spanish
• Download presentation in Spanish ( 14.4 MB)
• Download video in Catalan ( 149.64 MB)

By Ismael Peña-López
ICTlogy (ISSN 1886-5208). Issue #76, January 2010

Keywords: Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism | e-Government, e-Administration, Politics

Andrea DiMaio has recently published two posts — Apple’s iPad Could Do For Governments More than the One-Laptop-Per-Child, Could the iPad Redefine Public Service Delivery? — about the hypothetical impact that the new device by Apple, the iPad, will have on e-Government and citizen participation in general. My point is not to show disagreement — I agree more than disagree with DiMaio’s statements — but to (a) put a grain of salt and, especially, (b) to move the focus from the device towards the concepts.

And I’ll begin with a strong agreement: the iPad is very likely to do more than the One-Laptop-Per-Child, just because the OLPC is doing very little for education, as I think is clearly explained in the Framing the Digital Divide in Higher Education monograph. But it is also possible that the iPad will do as little as the OLPC, just because it’s not about devices.

Pieter Verdegem co-authored two interesting articles — User-centered E-Government in practice: A comprehensive model for measuring user satisfaction, Profiling the non-user: Rethinking policy initiatives stimulating ICT acceptance — that, along with the aforementioned monograph, can help to centre the debate.

Just for the sake of clarity let us look at some points raised by the monograph authors, Verdegem and DiMaio about access to e-Government (including the “e-” part), keeping in mind that I fully share DiMaio’s vision on what e-Government should be and the conviction that, somehow, we’ll get to that point.

Affordability

This still is a key issue for many people not to go online, hence not to use e-Government services. It is decreasing in importance and becoming almost marginal in higher income countries. But. While a desktop/laptop + broadband connectivity might be affordable, the addition of a second device + the addition of a second broadband service (3G or whatever) is definitely not affordable for many many people.

Yes, I am assuming having both devices and duplication of Internet access services. But I think this will be the scenario in the short and middle run, for the simple reason that the iPad is not a typing-aimed device or a hard-computing-power device, besides the fact that I do not believe in quantum leaps in computer adoption (i.e. in the short run, iPad users will be computer users, not late-adopters).

Skills

Claire from liberTIC recently commented about lack of skills playing havoc on e-Democracy and Democracy at large.

I think the iPad — as its i-predecessors — will make computer usage simple, much simpler than before. But e-Government is not only about computer usage, but much more. As I introduced in Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills and Goverati: New competencies for politics, government and participation, there is much field in the area of digital competences that the iPad just won’t and cannot address. And, as time goes by, technological literacy is less of an issue, which is were the iPad could make a major contribution.

Availability

Which leads to where the Gordian knot is: existence and access to content and services. I fully agree that the iPad can contribute to ease access to online public services through its applications, and I am already looking forward this to happen. But the prerequisite is either open data or open application programming interfaces (APIs). There already exist devices and applications to access online public services. And their successes and failures have mostly depended (a) on the richness of the data they could access and (b) the degree in which they could make an impact or contribute to a change. We take for granted that iPad applications will play magic, but the magic is in the data, not the device (though magic wands always help, let’s admit it).

Awareness and peopleware

But things can exist, be accessible, be affordable and people know how to use them, and still don’t make any use of them. This is, indeed, the tragedy of e-Government (and Internet adoption at large) today in higher income countries: I either don’t know what’s out there or frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. The iPad can raise awareness, and the more friendly user interface will help, but I haven’t seen much success in iPhone educational or e-Government applications being used massively.

I honestly doubt that the problem of e-Government (lack of) pervasiveness is a matter of the device, but of peopleware. If Obama succeeded it was not because of the Internet, but because of “hope”. And the Internet was there to deliver it, of course, and to channel people’s hope back. If Ushahidi succeeded in Kenya it was not because of SMSs and mashups, but because of the basic substrate upon which these were erected. I find AppsForDemocracy not only an amazing initiative, but amazing things in themselves and I look forward the day they will be used massively. But, so far, I have the sense it’s just for us the usual e-Government suspects.

By Ismael Peña-López
ICTlogy (ISSN 1886-5208). Issue #76, January 2010

Keywords: Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism | e-Government, e-Administration, Politics

Together with other people, I am working in a project that includes a sort of catalogue of online participation tools. In three senses:

• What different tools are out there (e.g. blogs)
• Which and how have they been used (e.g. Howard Dean’s blog)
• How can we depict and/or categorize them (e.g. top-down communication, possibility to gather feedback through comments, text-based, Internet based, etc.)

What I am here presenting is the alfa-über-draft version of the preliminary and potential taxonomy that we might be using to categorize online participation tools. And I am openly (and sincerely and earnestly and humbly) asking for comments and examples:

1. Comments on the taxonomy
2. Examples of kinds of online participation tools (e.g. maps)
3. Examples of actual cases of usage of online participation tools (e.g. Ushahidi in Kenya)

Needless to say that the final taxonomy, and list of tools and collection of practices will be shared here. Thank you very much.

A taxonomy of online participation tools

General Description

Name of tool

General category (do we accept more than one category per tool? e.g. Is Twitter nanoblogging and a social networking site? Should we speak about Twitter or about nanoblogging (which would include Yammer, Wordpress’s P2, etc.)?

• Forum, Blog, Wiki, Map, Social Networking Site, Photo, Video, Documents, etc.

Kind of Content

• Text
• Multimedia (Photo, Video, Audio…)
• Application/database (e.g. Ushahidi, FixMyStreet)

Examples of tools

Examples of usage / cases

Field of participation

Directionality: qualitative

• Unidirectional (e.g. web page)
• Asymmetric Bidirectional (e.g. blog+comments)
• Symmetric Bidirectional (e.g. forum)

Directionality: quantitative

• One to one
• One to many
• Many to many
• Hybrid (some of the above in the same tool, e.g. Facebook)

Direction (will depend on specific case?)

• Top-down
• Bottom-up
• Both

Participation: level (inspired in, among others, Arnstein, 1969)

• Information: unidirectional exchange of information (Arnstein 1-3)
• Management / consultation / debate: bidirectional exchange of information (Arnstein 4-5)
• Relationship: the exchange of information ends up in specific results (Arnstein 6)
• Desicion: results are binding or have a direct impact (Arnstein 7-8)

Participation: scope

• Government
• Citizenry / grassroots
• Parties / political organizations

Participation: goal

• Accountability, transparency, monitoring
• Propaganda, political message
• Report, complaint, petition

Field of technology

Cost

• Free
• Freemium
• Paid service
• Own development

Hosting

• Online Service (e.g. Google applications)
• (self-)hosted application (e.g. LimeSurvey)
• Both (e.g. Wordpress)

Difficulty / skills (too subjective?)

• Basic
• Advanced
• Expert

Platform

• Internet
• Mobile phone
• Other (e.g. digital TV)
• Crossmedia

By Ismael Peña-López
ICTlogy (ISSN 1886-5208). Issue #76, January 2010

Keywords: Meetings | Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism | e-Government, e-Administration, Politics

Notes from the the research seminar Organizations and Political Participation in the Age of Digital Media held at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, on January 18th, 2010.

Collective Action within Organizations in the Age of Digital Media
Bruce Bimber

This seminar is based on a project by Bruce Bimber, Cynthia Stohl and Andrew Flanagin.

We find new ways to organize people around causes, like Immigration Reform on Facebook. The question is: under what circumstances do we need these new ways of organization, and under which do we need traditional ways of organization (i.e. around institutions and gathering in brick and mortar buildings). What does it mean to be a traditional organization? What does it mean to be a member of a traditional organization in a digital environment?

What does organization-based collective action look like today in the US? People in the US belong to 1.98 organizations on average (twice the average in Europe, 5 times the average in Spain). Thus, we cannot (only) look at memberships, as “everyone” is a member of an organization.

Literature on participation tells who is more likely — depending on personal attributes — to participate in an organization, but not which organization is more likely to be more popular or have more members. So, we should focus on organization-specific attributes:

• Goal agreement: people will participate more in organizations whose goals are more in line with theirs
• Value agreement: people will participate more in organizations whose values are more in line with theirs
• Civic & social motivation: reasons why you join a community (complaint, meet kindred souls, etc.)

On the other hand, we can also find literature on the impact of digital media on participation. But, again, over time the Internet will be less likely to discriminate behaviour as time and frequency of being online, or digital skills become generalized across socio-economic statuses.

Last, traditionally organizations have been classified in discrete categories: civic associations vs. interest groups, centralized/bureaucratic vs. decentralised/horizontal vs. networks, online vs. not-online. Our perspective is different: interaction is impersonal vs. personal, engagement with goals and activities of the organization is institutional vs. entrepreneurial. Combination of these:

• Entrepreneurial + Impersonal
• Entrepreneurial + Personal: e.g. support group, where members decide what to do and on a very personal basis
• Institutional + Personal: e.g. institutions that open chat groups, send personal mail
• Institutional + Impersonal: e.g. World Wildlife Fund, where the institution mainly tells their members what to do

Amnesty International spreads over all categories (skewed towards Institutional + Impersonal), like Greenpeace (more centred than Amnesty International).

To test the hypothesis, surveys run on three organizations, different amongst them in their typology: American Legion, People’s Lobby and The Voters.

Dependent variables: participation in pursuit of group goals via writing, volunteering, donating; identification with the group.
Independent variables: standard predictors of participation, controls for level of participation in other activities, interaction and engagement, organization-specific attributes, technology use.

A first result, though very week, is that being on an entrepreneurial+personal organization makes you more participative in comparison with being in other organizations. Civic and social motivation is also a good explanation for people being more participative. But, in general, results are not very strong (R² below 0.4 for participation, below 0.5. for identification).

Regarding the relationship between engagement and interaction, the extent of within-group variation in interaction and engagement is comparable to that of across-group variation.

The predictors of participation in collective action vary by quadrant across collective action space.

• Entrepreneurial + Impersonal organizations have individualists: people hard to predict, motivated people but with no specific profile
• Entrepreneurial + Personal organizations hold embeddeds, people with high motivation and faithful to the organization, and with high(er) levels of education
• Institutional + Personal organizations have traditionalists, people with high motivation and that are faithful to the organization
• Institutional + Impersonal collect instrumentalists, lowest level of trust with the organization and the values, and the members are involved in many activities for several and different reasons

Summary

• The four quadrants of collective action space are associated with four reasonably distinct collective action types
• Civic and social motivation is the most important predictor
• People’s involvement in other civic activities translates into contributions to collective action mainly for individualists
• Technology use is associated consistently with participation for all four types
• Technology use matters chiefly when it is tied to the organization itself, rather than in the form of general computer skills or time online
• Membership looks somewhat different for different people, as a function of interaction and engagement
• What matters about organiztions is how hey facilitate interaction and engagement, not just their objective structure
• People are less similar than commonly assumed, while organizations are more similar, but to see this we need to look at both together.

Discussion

Q: Can people have different profiles depending on the organization they’re in? Bimber: (we don’t have time series but, so we don’t know, but) it is probable that this happens and, indeed, that people change profile over time. Nevertheless, we do not know and it can be true that what really happens is that people have a specific way of doing things.

Ana Sofía Cardenal: how is motivation measured? Isn’t it “suspicious” that motivation always comes so strong? Bimber: motivation is measured in different ways so to avoid cheating. But there might be some degree of endogenous relationships between variables. But people have different reasons for joining in and these reasons matter.

Michael Jensen: How do we cope with people being that different and nevertheless joining “similar” organizations? Bimber: More dynamic organizations engage in conversations with their members and adapt to their needs/requirements, so there is a feedback that redefines the organization. But still, technology is only a context, there is no core technology.

Derrick de Kerckhove: how are the four categories related with people’s lifestyles? Bimber: It would be interesting to know how an individual evolves through categories as his own personal lifestyle varies.

See also

By Ismael Peña-López
ICTlogy (ISSN 1886-5208). Issue #75, December 2009

Keywords: Cyberlaw, governance, rights | Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism | Writings | e-Government, e-Administration, Politics

For a paper I am preparing about Politics 2.0 in Spain — and that has already produced a definition of Politics 2.0 — I had to gather quite a good bunch of literature. There is quite some information about online politics, some about politics 2.0, but very few about Politics 2.0, especially academic literature about Politics 2.0 in Spain, which is scarce. Thus, writing that paper has required some interesting academic juggling.

Below I’ve listed the bibliography that so far I’m using to structure and back my paper. Beyond the bibliography that follows, three events helped much in collecting insights, ideas and find many interesting references. My gratitude to the speakers at these events:

• 5th Internet, Law and Politics Conference: The Pros and Cons of Social Networking Sites
• Citizen Politics: Are the New Media Reshaping Political Engagement?
• 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress: Towards citizenship 2.0?

Tag cloud of the bibliography

A bibliography on Spanish online politics and Politics 2.0

By Ismael Peña-López
ICTlogy (ISSN 1886-5208). Issue #75, December 2009

Keywords: Information Society | Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism | Writings | e-Government, e-Administration, Politics

In 2005, Tim O’Reilly published a seminal article — What Is Web 2.0 — in which he provided a definition for the term Web 2.0, which had gained a huge momentum during the previous year since the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference in October 2004.

The concept gathered both technological and philosophical (in the sense of behaviours and attitudes) issues. At the technological level, it dealt about the importance of the web as a delivery (of content and services) platform by excellence; data as the core component of all kind of communications and interchanges; software as a service and not a product, then becoming more important access to software than its “physical” purchase; predominance to RSS and associated procedures for the exchange of content; or (while keeping the importance of the web as a platform) the need to create technologies that were portable across devices. At the philosophical level, and both cause and consequence of the technological advances, the spread (and enabling) of a contribution and participation culture by the society at large (and not only by institutions or organized associations); the acknowledgement that anyone could actually contribute with their knowledge and opinion (the “wisdom of crowds”); the raise of a culture of mixing, assembling and aggregating content; and the will to have rich user experiences when interacting online (vs. A passive, unidirectional, monotonous approach which had been common ground in the previous years).

Besides the “formal” definition of the Web 2.0, it has more often been described through some tools and the new and characteristic ways of using them: the blog and the nanoblog, the wiki, social bookmarking, photo and video sharing websites, tagging and “folksonomies”, syndication and aggregation, etc.

After this philosophical approach – boosted by the technological advancements – many have adapted some of the core definitions to many aspects of life. Thus, for instance, Education 2.0 often referred to as a shift from unidirectional lecturing towards a more participatory approach of learning, based in collaboratively creating learning materials, an intensive usage of web 2.0 tools, or openness and sharing of the process of learning, just to name a few. And along with Education, we can find debates around Research 2.0, Culture 2.0, Government 2.0, Journalism 2.0, Enterprise 2.0… and Politics 2.0.

But, quite often, we do not find specific definitions for such concepts, taking for granted that the reader will be able to do the translation from the Web 2.0 to the Whatever 2.0. I here provide my own definition of Politics 2.0, which I needed for a paper I am preparing about Politics 2.0 in Spain:

• Ideas: not closed and packaged propaganda. Ideas that can be spread, shared and transformed by members of the party and partisans, sympathizers and supporter, and the society at large;
• Open data: ideas are backed by incredible amounts of data and information made openly available to the general public, and most time provided with open licenses that allow their reuse and remix;
• Participation: of all and every kind of people and institutions, blurring the edges of the “structures” and permeating the walls of institutions, making communication more horizontal and plural;
• Loss of control of the emission of the message, that now can be transferred outside of mainstream media and diffused on a peer-to-peer and many-to-many basis by means of web 2.0 tools;
• Loss of control of the creation itself of the message: being data and participation available, web 2.0 tools at anyone’s reach, and with minimum digital competences, the message can even be created and spread bottom up;
• Acknowledgement, hence, of the citizen as some who can be trusted (and used) as a one-man think-tank and a one-man communication-media;
• Reversely, possibility to reach each and every opinion, target personal individuals with customized messages, by means of rich data and web 2.0 tools, thus accessing a long tail of voters that are far from the median voter;
• Construction of an ideology, building of a discourse, setting up goals, campaigning and government become a continuum that feedbacks in real time.

I admit that this is neither a usual or a formal description, nor a comprehensive set of characteristics. I believe, though, that it could serve in providing a fair framework to contextualize and explain what’s happening at the intersection of Politics and the Web 2.0.

PS: dedico aquesta entrada al José Antonio Donaire, l’Ernest Benach, el Carlos Guadián, i el Ricard Espelt, en qui no he deixat de pensar mentre l’escrivia.