Internet in the 2005 UK election

The ESRC eSociety and the Hansard Society have organised an event for the launch of their report ‘Spinning the Web online campaigning in the 2005 general election’.

The report, to be launched in Parliament on the evening of July 5th, will examine innovations and strategies the internet has brought into party and citizen-led election campaigns.

The panel for this event is:

Stephen Coleman, Professor of eDemocracy – Oxford Internet Institute
Steve Ward, ESRC Project leader – Representative Politics in the Age of the Internet
Lynne Featherstone MP – offering an insight into the online campaign as a new MP

Short presentations will be followed by an open-floor discussion. [read more from the Hansard website]

Steve and I have a paper in the report, about:

• who used the internet during the 2005 election campaign


• what the technology was used for


• why some used it while others did not


• patterns of change from the 2001 general election


• the wider implications of these patterns of adoption and use for online campaigning

I will upload the paper to the site following the event. For now, you can read the abstract of report and paper.

journal article: Political Candidate Campaign Web sites

Interesting article, althouhg I am unconvinced by the definisiton of text-based interactivity. Surely a text which indirectly invites a response, via first-second person and toungue-in-cheek images is _not_ interactivity, is it?

"Authors who write on Web style emphasize the importance of closely integrating the verbal and visual text in ways that are said to engage and hold readers' attention and keep them on the site"

Sounds more like 'engaging' to me, but alas, I'm no native speaker.

Decide for yourselves:

Effects of Campaign-to-User and Text-Based Interactivity in Political Candidate Campaign Web sites

Barbara Warnick
Michael Xenos
Danielle Endres
John Gastil

Department of Communication
University of Washington

Abstract

This study examined the effects on users of two forms of interactivity commonly found on political candidate campaign Web sites in the 2002 U.S. House election cycle. The first form, campaign-to-user interactivity, focuses on features or mechanisms used to enable or facilitate communication between site users and the campaign. The second form, text-based interactivity, focuses on how site content is verbally and visually expressed. Study participants viewed one of four versions of either a Democratic or Republican campaign website. Both text-based and campaign-to-user interactivity increased the amount of time users spent on the site and their accurate recall of candidates' issue stances. The co-occurrence of both forms of interactivity, however, showed a noticeably lower level of issue recall, confirming earlier findings that too much interactivity can interfere with user recall of site content.

Yale Information Society Project

An interesting panel on politics and information, including full-text papers from Mosco, Drezned and Noveck. Must read.

The Global Flow of Information Conference
1-3 April 2005, Yale Law School

Yale Information Society Project

Panel 4: Politics and Information Flow

Daniel Drezner, University of Chicago
'Weighing the Scales: The Internet's Effect on State-Society Relations'

Vincent Mosco, Queens University
'Politics and Policies in a Networked World: A Perspective from Canada'

Beth Noveck and David Johnson, New York Law School
'Society's Software'

Saturday, April 2, 2005, 4:00 - 6:00pm

Politics shapes information flows, but is also shaped by them. Information flows can change the political dynamics both within countries, and internationally. Information flows can also reinforce or destabilize governmental and nongovernmental power structures. The flow of information made possible by digital networks can support new political coalitions, new virtual communities, and, perhaps, new public spheres. At the same time, traditional politics, through governments and international organizations, often defines how information, and what kinds of information, will be permitted to flow across borders. In addition, governments establish regulatory frameworks for information flow, control the various layers of networks and communications systems, and impose filtering strategies to control information flow. Some of these strategies work well, while others fail. Some help their societies, while others help oppress them.

Using the Internet, individuals and groups have created international communities that try to convince governments to ban landmines, stop genocide in the Sudan, influence the WTO and the World Bank, and to deliberate globally on U.S. and other elections. Conversely, governments have tried to modify or restrict what people can do on the Internet, and what information they can find, as well as imposing detailed regulations on mass media existing largely within their borders.

This panel will discuss how global information flows affect national and international politics, and how politics in turn affects information flows.

Questions before this panel may include:

- How do international institutions and governments attempt to control information flows in networked environments? How successful have these attempts been, and what are their unexpected side effects?
- Will digitally networked environments help undermine, or, in some cases, actually reinforce, authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes?
- How will the flow of information affect the power of relatively disempowered groups in existing national and global decision-making spheres?
- Will new information technologies produce a global public sphere? If so, who will be able to participate and how is most likely to be excluded? Will the global public sphere be coherent or will it be fragmented and separated by differences of language, culture and access to technology?

I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society

New journal about the Internet, law and policy; much needed, I wonder how international this will be

I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society is an interdisciplinary journal of research and commentary concentrating on the intersection of law, policy, and information technology. I/S represents a one-of-a-kind partnership between one of America's leading law schools, the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University, and the nation's foremost public policy school focused on information technology, Carnegie Mellon University's H.J. Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management.

* eRulemaking issue is now available on-line: I/S is proud to announce that the eRulemaking issue is now available on-line. Thank you and congratulations to everyone who helped made this premiere issue a reality.

Lead Editors


Peter Shane
Joseph S. Platt/Porter Wright Morris & Arthur Professor of Law
Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies

Peter Swire
Professor of Law
John Glenn Scholar in Public Policy Research

Ronald Gdovic
Executive Director, Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society (InSITes)

Asish Arora
Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy

Managing Editor

Sol Bermann
Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies, Moritz College of Law

Editorial Board

Stephen Acker The Ohio State University
Allesandro Acquisti Carnegie Mellon University
Jonathan Band Morrison and Foerster
Kenneth Bass Sterne Kessler Goldstein Fox
Jamie Callan Carnegie Mellon University
Jon Caulkins Carnegie Mellon University
Julie Cohen Georgetown University
Jennifer Evans-Cowley The Ohio State University
Lorrie Cranor Carnegie Mellon University
Susan Crawford Yeshiva University
George Duncan Carnegie Mellon University
Matt Eastin The Ohio State University
Dave Farber Carnegie Mellon University
A. Michael Froomkin University of Miami
Michael Geist University of Ottawa
Sheldon Halpern The Ohio State University
Rob Heverly University of East Anglia
Reed Hundt McKinsey
David Johnson New York Law School
Michael Johnson Carnegie Mellon University
Ethan Katsh University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Neal Katyal Georgetown University
Ramayya Krishnan Carnegie Mellon University
David Landsbergen The Ohio State University
David Lee The Ohio State University
Ed Lee The Ohio State University
Harry Litman Phillips and Cohen
Jessica Litman Wayne State University
Peter Madsen Carnegie Mellon University
April Major Villanova University
Edward Malecki The Ohio State University
Eben Moglen Columbia University
Benoit Morel Carnegie Mellon University
Lisa Nelson University of Pittsburgh
Beth Noveck New York Law School
Maureen O'Rourke Boston University
Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker McGeorge Univesity
Jon Peha Carnegie Mellon University
Rajiv Ramnath The Ohio State University
Joel Reidenberg Fordham University
Jeffrey Ritter Kirkpatrick and Lockhart
Norman Sadeh Carnegie Mellon University
Pam Samuelson University of California at Berkeley
William Scherlis Carnegie Mellon University
Marvin Sirbu Carnegie Mellon University
Michael Smith Carnegie Mellon University
Latanya Sweeney Carnegie Mellon University
Rahul Telang Carnegie Mellon University
Lewis Ulman The Ohio State University
Jonathan Weinberg Wayne State University
Philip Weiser University of Colorado
Jane Winn University of Washington
Alfred Yen Boston University
Jonathan Zittrain Harvard University
Marc Zwillinger Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal

Remixing Citizenship: E-Participation Research

I snatched this from Roman's website, a hothouse of ideas (and film reviews for that matter).

Carnegie Young People Initiative - Remixing Citizenship: E-Participation Research
May 24, 2005

Carnegie Young People Initiative has invited Professor Stephen Coleman of the Oxford Internet Institute to write a research report on the relationship between young people, the Internet and democratic citizenship.

Remixing Citizenship sheds new light on how young people access democracy via new media. It argues that the nature of civic and political participation is changing and young people are the first to recognise it.

Remixing Citizenship draws on existing evidence as well as new research about how young people use the internet to gather information, express themselves and exercise power as pre-voting citizens. Its starting hypothesis is that much of what is offered to young people in the name of ‘active citizenship’ lacks appeal because it seems to be remote from their everyday experience and disconnected from the levers of power.
The research

The research was conducted online as well as face-to-face. A dedicated website: www.eparticipation.org.uk was set up and a group of 100 13-18 year-olds were recruited who agreed to visit various web sites and respond to questions about them in a web forum. Approximately 800 comments were contributed by these participants. Face-to-face discussions with groups of 13-18 year-olds year-olds were run in eight schools.

We are grateful to Chris Rowe for co-ordinating the research and for keeping the young people involved motivated.

Why was this report commissioned?

It has been three years since the Carnegie Young People Initiative commissioned Demos to produce Logged Off? How ICT can connect young people and politics. The report was a response to emerging policy and practice around young people’s participation at local and national level. It focussed on the opportunities of and barriers to of online participation .

Logged Off concluded that new technologies could only encourage greater participation if they were used to engage and empower young people. It argued that examples of good practice needed to be scaled up and repeated extensively across the UK, and offered practical solutions for taking the agenda forward.

This new report was commissioned to find out what has changed since then.

We are pleased to announce that the report will be launched on the 8th June 2005 at Channel 4. The event will be chaired by Millie Banerjee of Ofcom and Vice Chair of the Carnegie UK Trust. Speakers are:

* Stephen Coleman, Cisco Professor of eDemocracy, Oxford Internet Institute
* Adam Gee, Commissioning Editor-Interactive, Channel 4
* Louise MacDonald, Vice Chief Executive, Young Scot

information technologies for development

A few resources on ICTs for development. First two journal articles:

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT VOL 11,2 (2004)
pp. 101-104
E-Government and IT Policy: Choices for Government Outreach and Policy Making
Qureshi, S.

pp. 141-160
Good Governance, Development Theory, and Aid Policy: Risks and Challenges of E-Government in Jordan
Ciborra, C.; Navarra, D. D.

Then a number of reports from UNECA, the Economic Commission for Africa.

UK election 2005 results

A date for your diaries if you can make it to London on 5 July. All omens are good that it will be an interesting event: organized by the Hansard Society, convened by Stephen Coleman, it carries content form the OII and ESRC-funded research.

Hansard Society - Online Campaigning report launch
Wednesday, April 27, 2005

What role has online campaigning played at this general election ?

The Hansard Society has kept a continuous monitor on all forms of online campaigning. Following on from a previous Hansard Society report on the internet during the 2001 general election, and a joint All Party Parliamentary Group meeting looking at what the UK can learn from the US elections, the e-Democracy programme will shortly launch a new report focussing on the experience of the 2005 general election.

The report, to be launched in Parliament on the evening of July 5th, will examine innovations and strategies the internet has brought into party and citizen-led election campaigns.

new journal in the field of e-democracy and e-government

If you are looking for a place to publish your e-democracy and e-government research look no further. I have not examined it properly, but it appears to encourage submissions from practitioners and academics alike.

The European Review of Political Technologies (ERPT) is a unique pan-european periodical bridging the converging domains of e-Politics, e-Democracy, e-Partcipation, e-Diplomacy, e-Citizenship, e-Governance and e-Government.

ERPT offers stakeholders and end-users from public, academic, civil and private sectors an exclusive forum to debate, exchange, inform, demonstrate, share best practices on current issues relating to research and development, policy shaping, novel concepts, applications, advanced technologies, technological innovations and successful experiences.