The CdC has launched a new prototype tool called PolicyCommons — http://policycommons.leeds.ac.uk/.

There is a need to help users make sense of the range of publicly-expressed opinions about government policies. We are developing PolicyCommons to address this need.

PolicyCommons will generate visual summaries of public statements about policies being proposed by governments. In particular, the tool will display arguments for and against policy-proposals as browsable debate maps.

Users will be able to browse these debate maps and follow links from the visual summaries of the arguments back to the original policy documents.

Ultimately, the aim of PolicyCommons is to support greater participation in the democratic process, as well as to improve the openness and accountability of the democratic process.

PolicyCommons is being developed as a tool in the EU-funded IMPACT project, where the University of Leeds, represented by the CdC, is a work-package leader.

The IMPACT project is researching and developing a set of tools for facilitating online, public deliberation of policies.  These tools include:

• a tool for reconstructing arguments from sources distributed on the Internet
• a tool for modelling the legal effects of policies
• a tool for soliciting public opinion about policies
• a tool for visualising and tracking the arguments for and against policies (PolicyCommons)

PolicyCommons is based on the open source Cohere project being developed by the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University. The PolicyCommons application itself is a “fork” of the Cohere code and is available on the Github code repository — https://github.com/cdc-leeds/PolicyCommons.

Over the next months of the project, we will extend the basic functionality of the Cohere platform to create the PolicyCommons tool that meets the particular requirements of the IMPACT project.

So…watch this space!

The CdC was represented at the Third International Conference on eParticipation (ePart2011) held in Delft, the Netherlands.

Neil Benn and Ann Macintosh presented their paper entitled “Argument Visualization for eParticipation: Towards a Research Agenda and Prototype Tool”. The paper describes CdC’s ongoing research on the EU-funded IMPACT project.

Click here to download the paper from the conference proceedings website.

Click here to view the presentation on Slideshare.

Seminar Room (1.17), Clothworkers’ Building North

Organized by the Centre for Digital Citizenship (CdC), the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds

The web offers a fertile source for social and political enquiry, giving researchers access to large amounts of naturally occurring data in digital form. However, making sense and good use of this data poses considerable methodological challenges for researchers. This seminar will explore different ways of conducting research online, including some of the latest digital methods and tools being used for social and political research.

Speakers: Professor Rachel Gibson (University of Manchester), Professor Mike Thelwall (University of Wolverhampton), and Dr Neil Benn (University of Leeds)

Chair: Dr Giles Moss (University of Leeds)

Attendance is free of charge, but please register in advance.

Profesor Mike Thelwall
The Web as Data for Social Research: MySpace, YouTube, and the Social Web

Although online media companies routinely have access to massive amounts of electronic information about their consumers’ actions, social researchers can also access and exploit huge amounts of free information about web users. This is mainly due to the explosion of Web 2.0 sites that are populated by a mass of casual participants. For instance, researchers concerned with viewer reactions to certain types of YouTube videos only have to read the video’s comments to gain insights, and people studying the impact of any news event are likely to find many relevant blogs and discussion forums containing public opinion. For researchers, there are now many free tools to download and process this kind of information on a large scale. This talk will give examples of empirical analyses of MySpace, YouTube, and blogs for issues such as gender, swearing, and the UK election leaders’ debates in order to start a discussion of the new research potentials of the web.

Professor Rachel Gibson

Content Analysis of Web Campaigns: From Brochureware to Action Centres

The focus will be on providing an overview of the methods and data that have been used to examine political campaigns online, focusing particularly on the development of content analysis for party home pages. The evolution of coding schemes will be profiled, moving from the approaches used to analyze static web 1.0 offerings of the late 1990s to the activist oriented sites, represented most clearly by MyBarackObama.com in 2008.

Dr Neil Benn
The ‘Web of Data’ as Data for Social Research: DBPedia, Data.gov.uk, and the Semantic Web

This talk will focus on some of the technical issues of analyzing user activity on the Web, where the Web is increasingly evolving from merely a Web of linked documents to a Web of linked, open data.  It will introduce recent research in the Semantic Web, in particular the Linked Data movement and recent initiatives to publish government data using W3C standards for publishing linked, open data. The talk will also highlight the potential that this trend to publish linked, open data has on the idea of digital citizenship.

Poor public engagement and voter turnout have been cited as examples of a failing democracy in the UK and reasons for the lack of public engagement have been discussed. Some blame a lack of voting choice but others hold to account the perceived lack of accountability of MPs or distrust and cynicism amongst the public as well as a feeling of detachment from decision making, often linked to the limiting of public involvement to a single vote per parliament. Such public disengagement can negatively affect either voting system by encouraging poorly informed voting and agonistic politics. Indeed, some have argued that a weakness of AV is its potential to give greater power to extreme views through increased support of minority parties. This is a debatable theory rather than a fact and perhaps misses the point about our democratic failings. The debate should not be about how can we constrain, silence or deny these extreme views through design of a voting system but how can we encourage the public to engage deliberatively, exploring issues and exchanging opinions so that individuals can participate in a more informed and enlightened way. Improving governance through informing and consulting the public, encouraging deliberative and collaborative interaction and integrating public feedback into policy making are popular topics raised by many scholars. Coleman and Gotze (2001) addressed the issue, showing how engaging the public in more deliberative activity can transform political involvement from preference assertion to preference formation. They described how online spaces have the potential to facilitate mass conversation and deliberation, exchange of views and information and ultimately more considered political involvement.

While electoral reform is currently all over the UK blogosphere, there seems to be a lack of formal public deliberation about the issue. Interestingly, a series of offline debates has been held to allow citizens to deliberate electoral reform. Recorded and made available on the internet, it is notable, however, that this is not accompanied by an online debating facility to allow a wider community of citizens to discuss the issues themselves. The current focus on the voting system itself is perhaps hiding the issue that needs our attention – whatever the voting system, voters should be encouraged to form considered, well-informed opinions.

Ref: Coleman, S. and Gotze, J. (2001) Bowling Together: online public engagement in policy deliberation, London: Hansard Society, 2001

54% of adults used the internet for political purposes in the last cycle, far surpassing the 2006 midterm contest. They hold mixed views about the impact of the internet: It enables extremism, while helping the like-minded find each other. It provides diverse sources, but makes it harder to find truthful sources.

Fully 73% of adult internet users (representing 54% of all US adults) went online to get news or information about the 2010 midterm elections, or to get involved in the campaign in one way or another. We refer to these individuals as “online political users” and our definition includes anyone who did at least one of the following activities in 2010:

• Get political news online – 58% of online adults looked online for news about politics or the 2010 campaigns, and 32% of online adults got most of their 2010 campaign news from online sources.
• Go online to take part in specific political activities, such as watch political videos, share election-related content or “fact check” political claims – 53% of adult internet users did at least one of the eleven online political activities we measured in 2010.
• Use Twitter or social networking sites for political purposes – One in five online adults (22%) used Twitter or a social networking site for political purposes in 2010.

Read the full report The Internet and Campaign 2010 on the Pew Internet & American Life Project Web site.

8% of the American online population is still not as many people as participate in democratic life everyday, but the most interesting finding is that twitter is particularly popular with young adults, minorities, and those who live in cities (raising questions about the relationship between the digital divide and social divides).

Most interesting, ‘observations related to users’ personal or professional lives are the most popular types of updates, while location-based tweets and links to videos are the least commonly mentioned’. This is a striking finding different from another study which identified that over 85% of post come from media sources, simply re-twitted by users (See Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon work below).

Report main findings

On the digital divide:

• African-Americans and Latinos – Minority internet users are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as are white internet users.
• Urbanites – Urban residents are roughly twice as likely to use Twitter as rural dwellers.

On types of posting:

• 72% of Twitter users say that they post updates related to their personal life, activities or interests.
• 62% of those we queried said they post updates related to their work life, activities or interests.
• 55% of these Twitter users share links to news stories. One in ten (12%) do this at least once a day.
• 54% of these Twitter users say they post humorous or philosophical observations about life in general
• 53% of these Twitter users use Twitter to retweet material posted by others

Links:

http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Twitter-Update-2010/Findings/Overview.aspx

http://snacda.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/what-is-twitter-a-social-network-or-a-news-media/

The movement from fringe site to mainstream news could not have been managed without the close assistance of The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel. Wikileaks is a uniquely well-funded fringe organization, but its successful ability to takeover the news-cycle in so many spaces seems likely to raise eventual questions about the possible power of citizen journalism writ large. The fact that an amateur news organization has made such a significant impact may eventually be more important than any of the data thus far leaked, and the willingness of newspapers to bring such information to mainstream markets seems a clear sign that the old powers are willing to deal with the new.  Or that they have reached a stage where they have little choice but to deal with organizations such as Wikileaks.

While clearly a prospect unique to-date, I’m curious how much of a potential signifier for future forms of citizen journalism Wikileak’s easy transition to the mainstream press might represent to other observers.

Update December 4th: Here are a couple of more viewpoints on the leaks that might be worth examination and commentary. Dan Gillmor, who heads the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, has a series of questions related to Wikileaks, including some similar thoughts on the involvement of major newspapers. Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society discusses how Wikileaks has shone a light on the manner in which our “public” Internet is corproate owned. Zuckerman’s issue is of course related to the need for a public space for deliberation taken  up recently by Professors Coleman and Blumler of Leeds University in their book The Internet and Democratic Citizenship.

Leeds Trinity College’s Centre for Journalism is joining forces with Guardian Local to launch a new local community news project here in Leeds. The Local Community News Hub will, among other things, seek to bring together local community organizations, citizens, and professional journalists in order to discuss ‘collaborative journalism’ and how members of the community might contribute to the local news agenda.

Catherine O’Connor, Head of Journalism at Leeds Trinity College, said:

We are very pleased to be working with Guardian Local on this project because of their pioneering approach to collaborative journalism. It is the ever-changing relationship between journalists and audiences which inspired the thinking behind the Community News Hub.

The Community News Hub will be launched on Wednesday 17 November.