ICTlogy

Nous Horitzons — the review of the Fundació Nous Horitzons — has released issue #204 with the quite explicit title of Democratizing communication, communicating democracy (original title: Democratitzar la comunicació, comunicar la democràcia).

I was asked to write a piece where to reflect about what can be done and what cannot be done on the Internet, in the sense of what is allowed, what is not, where are the boundaries of our civic rights, where do different rights collide (e.g. freedom of expression vs. intellectual property rights), etc.

My article, The conquest of Internet: new maps for new territories, is originally written in Catalan (La conquesta d’Internet: nous mapes per als nous territoris — Spanish translation also available) and takes its title from William Gibson’s documentary No Maps for These Territories!.

I ended writing what it looks like a slightly different thing: that there is not an actual collision of rights, but the dawn of a totally new model of society. And what looks like a collision of rights is, indeed, the fight to set up new institutions, appoint new leaders and shape up this new model according to each one’s own views. Thus, the apparent collision of rights is but the symptom of a higher level matter: what is the “global order” going to look like in the next decades after the actual order, based on the industrial paradigm, has become obsolete by Information and Communication Technologies.

I want to heartily thank Marc Rius for the invitation to write this piece, for his patience on my repeated delays and, most especially, for not changing a single comma on what I acknowledge is a dense text that goes way beyond the simple answer to what can and cannot be done on the Internet.

Downloads

Peña-López, I. (2012)
La conquesta d’Internet: nous mapes per als nous territoris

Peña-López, I. (2012)
La conquista de Internet: nuevos mapas para los nuevos territorios

Nous Horitzons (nº204)
Democratitzar la comunicació, comunicar la democràcia

(crossposted from Debates sobre tendencias de la Sociedad de la Información y el Conocimiento).

With the goal to analyse and propose a debate on the nature and depth of this new framework of social relationships, the challenges it entails, for example, from the point of view of social inclusion, or opportunities from the perspective of health systems, social participation and education a series of conferences has been planned in Seville (Spain): [sic]*: Conference series on trends in the Information and Knowledge Society

The conferences are made up by six debates, and I am taking part in two of them:

1. Introductory session. 18 april 2012.

• Topics: information society, network society and technological revolution, how ICTs have penetrated into European, Spanish and Andalousian societies, and what are or what should be the public policies in this area.
• Participants: Eva Piñar, General Director of Technological and Information Society services at the Andalousian government; Ramón Compañó, programme coordinator at IPTS-JCR; Josep Lladós, director of the PhD on Information and Knowledge Society at UOC.

2. Progressing towards the Information Society. 2 may 2012.

• Topics: present of the implementation of ICT at different levels: infrastructure, knowledge economy, legal framework, content and services. And delving into the economic dimension of the information society: business, resources, innovation, etc..
• Participants: Ismael Peña-López, professor a the School of Law and Political Science at UOC; Marc Bogdanowic, leader of the Information Society Unit at IPTS-JCR.

3. Technological prospective. 16 may 2012.

• Topics: what will be the future technologies, usage standards, protocols, etc..
• Participants: César Córcoles, professor at the School of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication at UOC; a TBC representative from IPTS.

4. ICT and Education. 6 june 2012.

• Topics: aspects of the relationship between training and ICT, how educational technology is already helping to change the way it delivers training, how can ICT help in shaping tomorrow’s education.
• Participants: Magí Almirall, director of the Office of Learning Technologies at UOC; Yves Punie, senior scientist at the Information Society Unit at IPTS-JCR.

5. ICT for Health. 20 june 2012.

• Topics: use of ICT in healthcare: telemedicine, diagnostics, digital files, etc.
• Participants: Eulàlia Hernádez, director of the MSc. in Psychology, Health and Quality of Life in the Information Society at UOC; Francisco Lupiáñez, researcher at IPTS-JCR; José Antonio Valverde, executive advisor to the General Secretary of the Andalousian Health Service.

6. ICT and citizen participation. 4 july 2012.

• Topics: how ICT have changed the relationship between citizens and the government, what are the new forms of participation based on the use of ICT, Transparency, e-government, etc.
• Participants: Ismael Peña-López, professor a the School of Law and Political Science at UOC; Gianluca Misuraca, researcher at the IPTS-JCR.

The [sic]*: Conference series on trends in the Information and Knowledge Society is organized by the General directorate of Technological and Information Society services of the Andalousian Government, the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission, and the office in Seville of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC).

I want to thank Eva Piñar and Alfredo Charques both for the initiative to organize the conference — when reflecting on what kind of Information Society we want is so necessary — and, of course, for inviting me to take part in it.

Plan Ceibal is the one-to-one laptop programme that Uruguay is running nation-wide since 2008. It is, in my opinion, a good example of what I would like to see in this kind of programmes. I spoke a little bit more on that programme on From laptops to competences: bridging the digital divide in higher education, but for a brief approach, these are the three main aspects that I like most:

• It is not a one-to-one laptop programme, but an inclusion through education programme. Laptops really come into the programme as a tool.
• The core of the programme is the community, the neighbourhood, the classroom, and not technology. It is social capital — and not technological capital ‐ what is built as a priority.
• They run a honest, thorough, yearly evaluation which highlights the best achievements, identifies the weaknesses and feeds the programme back with rich and useful information.

One of the main commitments of the programme is to create resources for the educators involved in it, including the yearly publication of a book. The latest edition of the “Ceibal book” has already been published as El modelo CEIBAL: Nuevas tendencias para el aprendizaje and I have contributed to the book with a chapter.

My chapter, Educación y Desarrollo en un mundo de redes (Education and development in a world of networks) is a reflection on how ICTs are radically changing what we understand by teachers, educational resources, and infrastructure. It actually is a slight adaptation of the homonymous materials that I had recently prepared for UNDP’s Virtual School.

The resulting chapter is the result of the contributions of some other people with which I am in much debt. Giovanni Guatibonza and Amagoia Salazar more than supervised the first edition for the UNDP, providing very good guidance and suggestions, which I all add to the text. Marion Ikwat is an astonishing editor and proofreader that did not rest until the final text was utterly spotless. Last, I want to thank Graciela Rabajoli not only for inviting me to be part of the book, but for all the information on the programme that she has always fed me with.

Downloads:

Peña-López, I. (2011).
Educación y Desarrollo en un mundo de redes.

Báez, M., García, J. M. & Rabajoli, G. (Comps.) (2011).
El modelo CEIBAL: Nuevas tendencias para el aprendizaje.

Bibliography used in Educación y Desarrollo en un mundo de redes

CEIBAL books

CEIBAL evaluation reports

Innovating Government – Normative, policy and technological dimensions of modern government, the book edited by Simone van der Hof and Marga M. Groothuis, has finally seen the light. Its abstract goes as follows:

The aim of this book is to analyze four dimensions of innovating government and the use of new technologies: legal, ethical, policy and technological dimensions. By joining authors from a diversity of backgrounds (law, ethics, public administration, political science, sociology, communications science, information science, and computer science) in one book, readers (academics, policy makers, legislators and others) are confronted with a variety of disciplinary perspectives on persistent themes, like privacy, biometrics, surveillance, e-democracy, electronic government, and identity management, that are central to today’s evolution of new modes of modern government.

I took part in this book with a chapter called Striving behind the shadow: the dawn of Spanish Politics 2.0 on the wake of Spain to Politics 2.0. Though the chapter was initially drafted in 2009 and then corrected and slightly updated in 2010, I am sad to acknowledge that things have not changed that much in Spain since then. Indeed, despite the recent upheavals in Spain around the so called “15M movement” (aka #spanishrevolution), online politics in general have evolved but very slightly, most of the times only in the field of political marketing rather than towards e-participation or e-democracy.

Following you can download a preprint version of the chapter and also scan through the bibliography I used. I am most grateful and definitely in debt with Simone van der Hof and Marga M. Groothuis for their patient endurance through the whole writing and editing progress. If you can read this lines they undoubtedly deserve much credit for it.

Peña-López, I. (2011)
Striving behind the shadow: the dawn of Spanish Politics 2.0

Bibliography

The eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (JEDEM) has just published its Vol 3, No 1 (2011) featuring an article of mine, The disempowering Goverati: e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy.

This paper is the latest, improved and merged version of two previous lines of work. On the one hand, a reflection on e-Readiness, digital literacy and its role in participation, which I presented at the 4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010 (EDem10) in Krems last year. On the other hand, the reflections on how the distance between governance and empowerment has been increasing due to Information and Communication Technologies (Empowerment and Governance in the Information Society (I): the hourglass of information power, Empowerment and Governance in the Information Society (II): digerati, goverati and the role of ICT4D) and which later became my position paper for the Democracy and the power of the individual conference at the Ditchley Foundation.

Abstract

When disaffection on political parties and politicians is pervasive, most argue whether it could be possible, thanks to the Internet – and Information and Communication Technologies in general – forget the mainstream political system and let the citizenry express their own opinion, debate in virtual agorae and vote their representatives and policy choices directly. In other words, the claim is whether the actual intermediaries can be replaced by citizen networks or, in the limit, just be overridden.

Our aim in the following lines is to (1) explain that some dire (socioeconomic) changes are actually taking place,(2) why these socioeconomic changes are taking place and (3) infer, from this, what conditions shall take place in the future for (4) another wave of changes to happen that could eventually a much acclaimed new (e-)democracy. In a last section, we will discuss that despite lack of data, the trend seems to be just in the direction of the impoverishment of democracy, partly due to the weakening of political institutions.

Citation and Download

Peña-López, I. (2011). “The disempowering Goverati:
e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy”.
In eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 3 (1), 1-21.
Krems: Danube-University Krems.