Crowdsourcing ideas as an emerging form of multistakeholder participation in Internet governance

by Roxana Radu 21/10/2015

Assessing the extent to which crowdsourcing represents an emerging opportunity of participation in global public policymaking.

by Roxana Radu 21/10/2015

What are the linkages between multistakeholder governance and crowdsourcing? Both are new—trendy, if you will—approaches to governance premised on the potential of collective wisdom, bringing together diverse groups in policy-shaping processes. Their interlinkage has remained under explored so far. Our article recently published in Policy and Internet sought to investigate this in the context of Internet governance, in order to assess the extent to which crowdsourcing represents an emerging opportunity of participation in global public policymaking. We examined two recent Internet governance initiatives which incorporated crowdsourcing with mixed results: the first one, the ICANN Strategy Panel on Multistakeholder Innovation, received only limited support from the online community; the second, NETmundial, had a significant number of online inputs from global stakeholders who had the opportunity to engage using a platform for political participation specifically set up for the drafting of the outcome document. The study builds on these two cases to evaluate how crowdsourcing was used as a form of public consultation aimed at bringing the online voice of the “undefined many” (as opposed to the “elected few”) into Internet governance processes. From the two cases, it emerged that the design of the consultation processes conducted via crowdsourcing platforms is key in overcoming barriers of participation. For instance, in the NETmundial process, the ability to submit comments and participate remotely via www.netmundial.br attracted inputs from all over the world very early on, since the preparatory phase of the meeting. In addition, substantial public engagement was obtained from the local community in the drafting of the outcome document, through a platform for political participation—www.participa.br—that gathered comments in Portuguese. In contrast, the outreach efforts of the ICANN Strategy Panel on Multistakeholder Innovation remained limited; the crowdsourcing platform they used only gathered input (exclusively in English) from a small group of people, insufficient to attribute to online public input a significant role in the reform of ICANN’s multistakeholder processes. Second, questions around how crowdsourcing should…

Economics, Governance & Security

Uber and Airbnb make the rules now — but to whose benefit?

by admin 27/07/2015

Outlining a more nuanced theory of institutional change that suggests that platforms’ effects on society will be complex and influence different people in different ways.

by admin 27/07/2015

The "Airbnb Law" was signed by Mayor Ed Lee in October 2014 at San Francisco City Hall, legalising short-term rentals in SF with many conditions. Image of protesters by Kevin Krejci (Flickr).

Ride-hailing app Uber is close to replacing government-licensed taxis in some cities, while Airbnb’s accommodation rental platform has become a serious competitor to government-regulated hotel markets. Many other apps and platforms are trying to do the same in other sectors of the economy. In my previous post, I argued that platforms can be viewed in social science terms as economic institutions that provide infrastructures necessary for markets to thrive. I explained how the natural selection theory of institutional change suggests that people are migrating from state institutions to these new code-based institutions because they provide a more efficient environment for doing business. In this article, I will discuss some of the problems with this theory, and outline a more nuanced theory of institutional change that suggests that platforms’ effects on society will be complex and influence different people in different ways. Economic sociologists like Neil Fligstein have pointed out that not everyone is as free to choose the means through which they conduct their trade. For example, if buyers in a market switch to new institutions, sellers may have little choice but to follow, even if the new institutions leave them worse off than the old ones did. Even if taxi drivers don’t like Uber’s rules, they may find that there is little business to be had outside the platform, and switch anyway. In the end, the choice of institutions can boil down to power. Economists have shown that even a small group of participants with enough market power—like corporate buyers—may be able to force a whole market to tip in favour of particular institutions. Uber offers a special solution for corporate clients, though I don’t know if this has played any part in the platform’s success. Even when everyone participates in an institutional arrangement willingly, we still can’t assume that it will contribute to the social good. Cambridge economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie has pointed out that an institution that…

Economics, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Why are citizens migrating to Uber and Airbnb, and what should governments do about it?

by admin 27/07/2015

What if we dug into existing social science theory to see what it has to say about economic transformation and the emergence of markets?

by admin 27/07/2015

Protest for fair taxi laws in Portland; organisers want city leaders to make ride-sharing companies play by the same rules as cabs and Town cars. Image: Aaron Parecki (Flickr).

Cars were smashed and tires burned in France last month in protests against the ride hailing app Uber. Less violent protests have also been staged against Airbnb, a platform for renting short-term accommodation. Despite the protests, neither platform shows any signs of faltering. Uber says it has a million users in France, and is available in 57 countries. Airbnb is available in over 190 countries, and boasts over a million rooms, more than hotel giants like Hilton and Marriott. Policy makers at the highest levels are starting to notice the rise of these and similar platforms. An EU Commission flagship strategy paper notes that “online platforms are playing an ever more central role in social and economic life,” while the Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop on the topic in Washington. Journalists and entrepreneurs have been quick to coin terms that try to capture the essence of the social and economic changes associated with online platforms: the sharing economy; the on-demand economy; the peer-to-peer economy; and so on. Each perhaps captures one aspect of the phenomenon, but doesn’t go very far in helping us make sense of all its potentials and contradictions, including why some people love it and some would like to smash it into pieces. Instead of starting from the assumption that everything we see today is new and unprecedented, what if we dug into existing social science theory to see what it has to say about economic transformation and the emergence of markets? Economic sociologists are adamant that markets don’t just emerge by themselves: they are always based on some kind of an underlying infrastructure that allows people to find out what goods and services are on offer, agree on prices and terms, pay, and have a reasonable expectation that the other party will honour the agreement. The oldest market infrastructure is the personal social network: traders hear what’s on offer through word of mouth and…

Politics & Government, Social Data Science

How big data is breathing new life into the smart cities concept

by Jonathan Bright 23/07/2015

If all the cars have GPS devices, all the people have mobile phones, and all opinions are expressed on social media, then do we really need the city to be smart at all?

by Jonathan Bright 23/07/2015

“Big data” is a growing area of interest for public policy makers: for example, it was highlighted in UK Chancellor George Osborne’s recent budget speech as a major means of improving efficiency in public service delivery. While big data can apply to government at every level, the majority of innovation is currently being driven by local government, especially cities, who perhaps have greater flexibility and room to experiment and who are constantly on a drive to improve service delivery without increasing budgets. Work on big data for cities is increasingly incorporated under the rubric of “smart cities”. The smart city is an old(ish) idea: give urban policymakers real time information on a whole variety of indicators about their city (from traffic and pollution to park usage and waste bin collection) and they will be able to improve decision making and optimise service delivery. But the initial vision, which mostly centred around adding sensors and RFID tags to objects around the city so that they would be able to communicate, has thus far remained unrealised (big up front investment needs and the requirements of IPv6 are perhaps the most obvious reasons for this). The rise of big data—large, heterogeneous datasets generated by the increasing digitisation of social life—has however breathed new life into the smart cities concept. If all the cars have GPS devices, all the people have mobile phones, and all opinions are expressed on social media, then do we really need the city to be smart at all? Instead, policymakers can simply extract what they need from a sea of data which is already around them. And indeed, data from mobile phone operators has already been used for traffic optimisation, Oyster card data has been used to plan London Underground service interruptions, sewage data has been used to estimate population levels, the examples go on. However, at the moment these examples remain largely anecdotal, driven forward by a few…

Health, Social Data Science, Wellbeing

How can big data be used to advance dementia research?

by admin 16/03/2015

As dementia is believed to be influenced by a wide range of social, environmental and lifestyle-related factors, this behavioural data has the potential to improve early diagnosis

by admin 16/03/2015

Image by K. Kendall of "Sights and Scents at the Cloisters: for people with dementia and their care partners"; a program developed in consultation with the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain, Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Columbia University, and the Alzheimer's Association.

Dementia affects about 44 million individuals, a number that is expected to nearly double by 2030 and triple by 2050. With an estimated annual cost of USD 604 billion, dementia represents a major economic burden for both industrial and developing countries, as well as a significant physical and emotional burden on individuals, family members and caregivers. There is currently no cure for dementia or a reliable way to slow its progress, and the G8 health ministers have set the goal of finding a cure or disease-modifying therapy by 2025. However, the underlying mechanisms are complex, and influenced by a range of genetic and environmental influences that may have no immediately apparent connection to brain health. Of course medical research relies on access to large amounts of data, including clinical, genetic and imaging datasets. Making these widely available across research groups helps reduce data collection efforts, increases the statistical power of studies and makes data accessible to more researchers. This is particularly important from a global perspective: Swedish researchers say, for example, that they are sitting on a goldmine of excellent longitudinal and linked data on a variety of medical conditions including dementia, but that they have too few researchers to exploit its potential. Other countries will have many researchers, and less data. ‘Big data’ adds new sources of data and ways of analysing them to the repertoire of traditional medical research data. This can include (non-medical) data from online patient platforms, shop loyalty cards, and mobile phones — made available, for example, through Apple’s ResearchKit, just announced last week. As dementia is believed to be influenced by a wide range of social, environmental and lifestyle-related factors (such as diet, smoking, fitness training, and people’s social networks), and this behavioural data has the potential to improve early diagnosis, as well as allow retrospective insights into events in the years leading up to a diagnosis. For example, data on changes in shopping…

Governance & Security

Monitoring Internet openness and rights: report from the Citizen Lab Summer Institute 2014

by Ben Zevenbergen 12/08/2014

Informing the global discussions on information control research and practice in the fields of censorship, circumvention, surveillance and adherence to human rights.

by Ben Zevenbergen 12/08/2014

Jon Penny presenting on the US experience of Internet-related corporate transparency reporting.

根据相关法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示 could be a warning message we will see displayed more often on the Internet; but likely translations thereof. In Chinese, this means “according to the relevant laws, regulations, and policies, a portion of search results have not been displayed.” The control of information flows on the Internet is becoming more commonplace, in authoritarian regimes as well as in liberal democracies, either via technical or regulatory means. Such information controls can be defined as “[…] actions conducted in or through information and communications technologies (ICTs), which seek to deny (such as web filtering), disrupt (such as denial-of-service attacks), shape (such as throttling), secure (such as through encryption or circumvention) or monitor (such as passive or targeted surveillance) information for political ends. Information controls can also be non-technical and can be implemented through legal and regulatory frameworks, including informal pressures placed on private companies. […]” Information controls are not intrinsically good or bad, but much is to be explored and analysed about their use, for political or commercial purposes. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab organised a one-week summer institute titled “Monitoring Internet Openness and Rights” to inform the global discussions on information control research and practice in the fields of censorship, circumvention, surveillance and adherence to human rights. A week full of presentations and workshops on the intersection of technical tools, social science research, ethical and legal reflections and policy implications was attended by a distinguished group of about 60 community members, amongst whom were two OII DPhil students; Jon Penney and Ben Zevenbergen. Conducting Internet measurements may be considered to be a terra incognita in terms of methodology and data collection, but the relevance and impacts for Internet policy-making, geopolitics or network management are obvious and undisputed. The Citizen Lab prides itself in being a “hacker hothouse”, or an “intelligence agency for civil society” where security expertise, politics, and ethics intersect. Their research adds the much-needed geopolitical angle to…

Social Data Science

Past and Emerging Themes in Policy and Internet Studies

by Vili Lehdonvirta 12/05/2014

It is simply not possible to consider public policy today without some regard for the intertwining of information technologies with everyday life and society.

by Vili Lehdonvirta 12/05/2014

We can't understand, analyse or make public policy without understanding the technological, social and economic shifts associated with the Internet. Image from the (post-PRISM) "Stop Watching Us" Berlin Demonstration (2013) by mw238.

In the journal’s inaugural issue, founding Editor-in-Chief Helen Margetts outlined what are essentially two central premises behind Policy & Internet’s launch. The first is that “we cannot understand, analyse or make public policy without understanding the technological, social and economic shifts associated with the Internet” (Margetts 2009, 1). It is simply not possible to consider public policy today without some regard for the intertwining of information technologies with everyday life and society. The second premise is that the rise of the Internet is associated with shifts in how policy itself is made. In particular, she proposed that impacts of Internet adoption would be felt in the tools through which policies are effected, and the values that policy processes embody. The purpose of the Policy and Internet journal was to take up these two challenges: the public policy implications of Internet-related social change, and Internet-related changes in policy processes themselves. In recognition of the inherently multi-disciplinary nature of policy research, the journal is designed to act as a meeting place for all kinds of disciplinary and methodological approaches. Helen predicted that methodological approaches based on large-scale transactional data, network analysis, and experimentation would turn out to be particularly important for policy and Internet studies. Driving the advancement of these methods was therefore the journal’s third purpose. Today, the journal has reached a significant milestone: over one hundred high-quality peer-reviewed articles published. This seems an opportune moment to take stock of what kind of research we have published in practice, and see how it stacks up against the original vision. At the most general level, the journal’s articles fall into three broad categories: the Internet and public policy (48 articles), the Internet and policy processes (51 articles), and discussion of novel methodologies (10 articles). The first of these categories, “the Internet and public policy,” can be further broken down into a number of subcategories. One of the most prominent of these streams…

Politics & Government

The complicated relationship between Chinese Internet users and their government

by David Herold 01/08/2013

Chinese citizens are being encouraged by the government to engage and complain online. Is the Internet just a space to blow off steam, or is it really capable of ‘changing’ Chinese society, as many have assumed?

by David Herold 01/08/2013

David: For our research, we surveyed postgraduate students from all over China who had come to Shanghai to study. We asked them five questions to which they provided mostly rather lengthy answers. Despite them being young university students and being very active online, their answers managed to surprise us. Notably, the young Chinese who took part in our research felt very ambiguous about the Internet and its supposed benefits for individual people in China. They appreciated the greater freedom the Internet offered when compared to offline China, but were very wary of others abusing this freedom to their detriment. Ed: In your paper you note that the opinions of many young people closely mirrored those of the government’s statements about the Internet—in what way? David: In 2010 the government published a White Paper on the Internet in China in which they argued that the main uses of the Internet were for obtaining information, and for communicating with others. In contrast to Euro-American discourses around the Internet as a ‘force for democracy,’ the students’ answers to our questions agreed with the evaluation of the government and did not see the Internet as a place to begin organising politically. The main reason for this—in my opinion—is that young Chinese are not used to discussing ‘politics’, and are mostly focused on pursuing the ‘Chinese dream’: good job, large flat or house, nice car, suitable spouse; usually in that order. Ed: The Chinese Internet has usually been discussed in the West as a ‘force for democracy’—leading to the inevitable relinquishing of control by the Chinese Communist Party. Is this viewpoint hopelessly naive? David: Not naive as such, but both deterministic and limited, as it assumes that the introduction of technology can only have one ‘built-in’ outcome, thus ignoring human agency, and as it pretends that the Chinese Communist Party does not use technology at all. Given the intense involvement of Party and government offices,…

Politics & Government

Chinese Internet users share the same values concerning free speech, privacy, and control as their Western counterparts

by Gillian Bolsover 17/07/2013

Many people—even in China—see the Internet as a tool for free speech and as a place where you can expect a certain degree of privacy and anonymity.

by Gillian Bolsover 17/07/2013

There are now over half a billion Internet users in China, part of a shift in the centre of gravity of Internet use away from the US and Europe. Image of Pudong International Airport, Shanghai, by ToGa Wanderings.

Ed: You recently presented your results at the OII’s China and the New Internet World ICA preconference. What were people most interested in? Gillian: A lot of people were interested in our finding that China was such a big online shopping market compared to other countries, with 60% of our survey respondents reporting that they make an online purchase at least weekly. That’s twice the world’s average. A lot of people who study the Chinese Internet talk about governance issues rather than commerce, but the fact that there is this massive investment in ecommerce in China and a rapid transition to a middle class lifestyle for such a large number of Chinese means that Chinese consumer behaviours will have a significant impact on global issues such as resource scarcity, global warming, and the global economy. Others were interested in our findings concerning Internet use in ’emerging’ Internet countries like China. The Internet’s development in Western Europe and the US was driven by people who saw the technology as a platform for freedom of expression and peer-to-peer applications. In China, you see this optimism but you also see that a lot of people coming online move straight to smart phones and other locked-down technologies like the iPad, which you can only interact with in a certain way. Eighty-six percent of our Chinese respondents reported that they owned a smart phone, which was the highest percentage of all of the 24 countries we examined individually. A lot of these people are using those devices to play games and watch movies, which is a very different initial exposure to the Internet than we saw in early adopting Western countries. Ed: So, a lot of significant differences between usages in emerging versus established Internet nations. Any similarities? Gillian: In general, we find that uses are different but values are similar. People in emerging nations share the same values concerning free speech, privacy, and control…

Politics & Government

Is China changing the Internet, or is the Internet changing China?

by Bill Dutton 12/07/2013

By 2015, the proportion of Chinese language Internet users is expected to exceed the proportion of English language users.

by Bill Dutton 12/07/2013

The rising prominence of China is one of the most important developments shaping the Internet. Once typified primarily by Internet users in the US, there are now more Internet users in China than there are Americans on the planet. By 2015, the proportion of Chinese language Internet users is expected to exceed the proportion of English language users. These are just two aspects of a larger shift in the centre of gravity of Internet use, in which the major growth is increasingly taking place in Asia and the rapidly developing economies of the Global South, and the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India—and China. The 2013 ICA Preconference “China and the New Internet World” (14 July 2013), organised by the OII in collaboration with many partners at collaborating universities, explored the issues raised by these developments, focusing on two main interrelated questions: how is the rise of China reshaping the global use and societal implications of the Internet? And in turn, how is China itself being reshaped by these regional and global developments? As China has become more powerful, much attention has been focused on the number of Internet users: China now represents the largest group of Internet users in the world, with over half a billion people online. But how the Internet is used is also important; this group doesn’t just include passive ‘users’, it also includes authors, bloggers, designers and architects—that is, people who shape and design values into the Internet. This input will undoubtedly affect the Internet going forward, as Chinese institutions take on a greater role in shaping the Internet, in terms of policy, such as around freedom of expression and privacy, and practice, such as social and commercial uses, like shopping online. Most discussion of the Internet tends to emphasise technological change and ignore many aspects of the social changes that accompany the Internet’s evolution, such as this dramatic global shift in the concentration of…