]]> http://www.celina.uti.at/?feed=rss2&p=1110 0 http://www.celina.uti.at/?p=803 http://www.celina.uti.at/?p=803#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:17:18 +0000 celina http://www.celina.uti.at/?p=803 “Networking Democracy – New Media Innovations in Participatory Politics” was the title of the conference that brought together international scholars in the respective field to Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The symposium took place from June 25 until 27, 2010 and was hosted by the Babeş-Bolyai University. Organized by the University of York, UK, and the Journal for Information, Communication & Society (iCS), this conference brought together a variety of contributions on different topics related to ICTs and democracy. The student protests that originated in Austria and spread via Germany all over Europe was covered, too (see for example Alexander Banfield-Mumb, Christina Neumayer, and Axel Maireder). International scholars such as William H. Dutton, Lance Bennett, Bruce Bimber, Donatella Della Porta, and Brian Loader, were keynote speakers; Frank Webster also gave a talk at this symposium. Congratulations to Brian Loader’s team at the University of York, in particular Dan Mercea, for organizing such a great event.

Discarded phones assembled for a giant mobile phone sculpture in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

OSS2010 took place from May 29 until June 02, 2010 and was hosted by the University of Notre Dame, one of the top US universities – a very consecrated place, some may call it spiritual.

As in 2009 I attended the Doctoral Consortium to present my dissertation project and to get feedback from internationally recognized Open Source researchers and PhD students facing similar challenges and advantages of the research area. It was a pleasure (and also fun) to meet people from last year’s conference again and getting to know new ones.

Besides various interesting presentations of ongoing and recently completed research projects and plenary discussions this year’s conference organized keynote speeches during the lunch breaks, using the afternoon/jet-lag slump. The keynote presentations by Nate Oostendorp and Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, however, were interesting and intriguing and made us easily overcome post-lunch drowsiness.

Photo: Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier at his lunch keynote (centre, illuminated)

Additionally, this year’s conference included a track on H-FOSS – Open Source Software/Systems in Humanitarian Applications, introducing projects like Sahana, CrisisCommons, H-FOSS, OpenMRS, or the recently founded OilReporter, supporting people working against the actual Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Please support the projects if you can – at least: spread the word!

Photo: Mark Prutsalis (Sahana), Allen Tucker (H-FOSS), Darius Jazayeri (OpenMRS), Deborah Shaddon (CrisisCommons, OilReporter) [from the left]

I would like to thank the reviewers of my contribution for the extensive helpful, constructive – though critical – feedback, as well as the participants who shared their thoughts, knowledge, and ideas with me.

And as mentioned in the introduction of this year’s proceedings: I would also like to thank the whole free software and open source developer (and user) community for providing us with such an interesting research topic!

The proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium (including my contribution) are available here: OSS2010 DC Proceedings.

My contribution: Raffl, Celina (2010). Open Source – Open Community? A Critical Analysis of Stakeholder Integration in Free and Open Source Communities. In: Scacchi, Walt/Ven, Kris/Verelst, Jan (Edts.).  Proceedings of the OSS 2010 Doctoral Consortium. May 30, 2010 Notre Dame, Indiana [65 – 77]. Download the Proceedings.

Twitter: #oss2010
FlickR: oss2010
LiveStream

Please submit an abstract of your proposal (about 500 words) to Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt at pille.vengerfeldt@ut.ee and Celina Raffl at celina.raffl@sbg.ac.at.

The abstract should give a brief overview of your potential paper, its main questions and problems, key theories, methods and empirical material used (if any). You will be notified about acceptance within two weeks. After that we expected you to submit a full paper of up to 4000 words (not including references) by June 15, 2010.

Further information about the PhD consortium including the schedule is available at http://www.icts-and-society.net/meeting/phd-consortium. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have further questions.

Following several requests we decided to extend the deadline for contributions to the 3rd ICTs-and-Society network meeting.

We welcome your suggestions until May 06, 2010.

You are encouraged to suggest panels or round tables, presentations or other formats around ICTs-and-Society related work.

The deadline for abstracts for the PhD consortium is also on May 06, 2010.

Please contact us if you have questions, suggestions, or need assistance.

Alexander Banfield-Mumb (Alexander.Banfield-Mumb@uti.at) and
Celina Raffl (Celina.Raffl@sbg.ac.at)

The preparation for the 3rd annual meeting of the ICTs-and-Society Network are up and running. After the meeting in Salzburg (Austria) 2008 and Trento (Italy) 2009, this year’s meeting will be hosted by the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) at the Open University of Catalonia, Spain and take place from June 29 until July 2, 2010.

The call for participation/contribution is open. We are looking forward to various presentations, workshops, plenary discussions and networking activities.

There will be a PhD consortium organized by Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt on June 30, 2010.

I am planning to set up a session on ICTs-and-Society: A new Transdiscipline? to discuss and critically assess challenges, problems, and the potential of an emerging transdisciplinary research field. There is also a call for papers on this issue (see http://www.triple-c.at for further information).

If you have an questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at celina.raffl@sbg.ac.at.

New deadline: March 21st, 2010

To be published in tripleC - the Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society (peer-reviewed).

We are looking for contributions that discuss whether or not ICTs-and-Society research can be considered a cross-, inter-, or transdiscipline and what impact this has on research, methods, theories, practice, and teaching; for the education of early stage researchers and the future of the field.

Further info on the call:
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/announcement/view/6

For inquires on this CfP, please do not hestitate to contact me: celina.raffl@sbg.ac.at

The objective of the workshop was to discuss current developments in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Sustainable Development (SD) by providing a forum for Austrian and Asian researchers interested in broadening and deepening their understanding of the sustainability concept with the goal to achieve social meaningfulness.

The workshop was funded by the Austrian South-East Asian University Partnership Network (ASEA-UNINET), OEAD and organized by Robert M. Bichler, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, and Soraj Hongladarom from the Center for Ethics of Science and Technology at the Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok.

Presentation at the Workshop

We visited many local media organizations, for example: The ORF Landesstudio Salzburg, the local branch of the Austria’s public broadcasting institution; the Salzburger Nachrichten, where we waited until the printing machines started to operate; subnet, Salzburg’s net culture organization, the Civilmedia (Un-)Conference; and the Bavaria Filmstudios in Munich.

I liked the discussion with the students from China about the different media systems and the intercultural exchange. After the course was over I got a present from the Chinese students; I was really honored.

MCM Students 2009: Waiting for the bus on our way to the Bavaria Filmstudios on a very cold day in December 2009.

Networking Democracy – New Media Innovations in Participatory Politics
25-27 June 2010, Cluj | Romania

Abstract:

The Revolution won’t be Televised!
Austrian Student Protests 2009 and the Role of Online Media

On October 22nd 2009, the Audimax, Austria’s largest lecture hall, has been occupied by hundreds of students to demonstrate for better study conditions. Further occupations in Austrian and German university cities followed shortly after, most of them lasting for weeks. Traditionally, student protests in Austria are organized and carried out by the Austrian Students’ Union (ÖH), a legal body that represents the interests of over 290.000 students throughout Austria. For the last decade students have been rather passive and were less enthusiastic to express and represent their interests.

This time the ÖH was barely involved in that protest mobilization. Instead, the demonstration and subsequent occupation of the Audimax was organized primarily by students who were disappointed and frustrated by the current university and education system and who informed each other via Internet and SMS. Several online platforms (mainly twitter and facebook), as well as text messaging, were used to coordinate and mobilize students, to inform them when and where demonstrations or other protest activities took place. Within few hours hundreds of students in Vienna self-organized and occupied the major lecture hall of the University of Vienna. Twitter and facebook were the first services used, other platforms like websites including blogs and wikis, live video streams, and chats etc. emerged shortly after. The participants of the demonstration and occupation were informed via online social networks or text messages, as there was no information provided in other media such as TV or newspapers. It took some time until traditional media coverage announced the student protests. Only after gaining broad public awareness, the national public service broadcaster ORF started with some minor reports on the protests in the late night news, other TV and radio announcements and newspaper articles followed. Meanwhile the media coverage entitles the student protest as “Student Protests 2.0″, “The Revolution is twittered”, or “Revolution 2.0″, which lets assume that there is an increasing awareness about the use of online social media in the protest activities from a broader audience.

In our paper we describe and analyze the use of online media during the Austrian student protests from October to December 2009 and their contribution for a participatory culture. The aim of our paper is to find out about the correlation and mutual influence of offline and online activities regarding the current student protests and how the support of online media contributes to the livability and sustainability of a student protest culture and to new forms of participation in a democratic society.

Based on literature review and theoretical concepts on political participation, cyberprotest, student protest etc., we discuss the democratic potential of online media exemplified on the Austrian student protests in fall 2009. We will evaluate how online media and social networking services influenced the Austrian student protest culture. A comprehensive dataset, including quantitative data and qualitative material such as newspaper coverage, chat logs, video material, facebook wall posts and tweets are available to analyze the potential and limits of online supported political activism in this “Student Revolution 2.0″.