[Ci4cg-announce] Towards a Public Communication and Information Infrastructure Part II

Tue May 10 16:38:22 PDT 2016

Dear all

my esteemed colleague Prof. Jean Burgess (cc’ed) is the Director of the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT. I asked her to comment:

> Thanks, Marcus!
> 
> Yes, it sounds particularly closely related to the Issue Mapping work I have been doing and of course all the things going on more broadly in our public communication and social media analytics programs involving Axel and team as well – we are doing a lot in this space. 
> 
> See my paper here http://mappingonlinepublics.net/2015/06/03/hybrid-forum-digital-appendix/
> And here https://www.academia.edu/24960334/Mapping_sociocultural_controversies_across_digital_media_platforms_One_week_of_gamergate_on_Twitter_YouTube_and_Tumblr
> And our entire Mapping Online Publics website: http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
> 
> Very interesting idea to build a usable open platform for tracking public debates, but the problem is if it’s also built for participation in debates, you’ll just end up attracting the kinds of people who are into open platforms for public debate, so the risk is just creating more filter bubbles. My idea is to recognise that people engage with controversies in a very mundane, everyday way and leave traces of this engagement on all kinds of platforms. So any tools I would build would be focused on trying to present the full diversity of debates back to the public, and to provide data and tools to allow interested members of the public to get a sense of the diversity of perspectives on an issue. I’m working on some prototypes to allow Tableau to be embedded in a rich media issue website, to allow for public data exploration – it’s part of my new professors’ grant project Public Understanding of Digital Media.
> 
> I think it’s important to build on past work in these efforts to build tools. E.g., the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam has been active in mapping issue networks and providing public tools to do so for years. 
> 
> We should point them to thing that have been led out of Amsterdam and also by Bruno Latour for ages in the issue mapping space and controversy analysis area: 
> 
> https://web.archive.org/web/20150310090045/http://www.mappingcontroversies.net/
> http://www.issuemapping.net/
> https://www.issuecrawler.net/

cheers, marcus

--
Professor Marcus Foth

i/Director, QUT Design Lab
School of Design, Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
m.foth at qut.edu.au – @sunday9pm – www.vrolik.de

CRICOS No. 00213J

ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’16)
Brisbane, June 4-8 – @DIS2016 – www.dis2016.org

> On 11 May 2016, at 5:02 AM, Justin Smith <justingriffis at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Not really sure if any of this is relevant to your effort.
> 
> But, have you seen this? http://opportunity.census.gov/#connect. Would be interesting to consider ways to integrate some of these services into an open platform that allows for deliberation, argument mapping and content sharing.
> 
> And Doug, we are already building it! One chunk at a time.... It think it would be cool to know what other projects are happening that implement some feature set of the ideal citizen platform, and see if they come with some type of API. This might be a way for different groups to work independently on different aspects of the platform and then link it all together. 
> 
> A gentleman and I are working on an argument mapper type of technology that generates a mind-map of sorts based upon websites, facebook posts, tweets, etc. It generates a "framing" of issues in social media. Hopefully, it will produce a measure of rationality and ideology in our public discourse. Perhaps, a citizen platform would include something like this but people could respond directly to the map, provide counter arguments, include links to evidence and so forth.
> 
> Cheers,
> Justin
> 
> 
> On Sat, May 7, 2016 at 2:40 PM, Doug Schuler <douglas at publicsphereproject.org> wrote:
> Thanks to everybody that sent me their ideas! I thought I'd send out the note that is intended to clarify what I'm looking for — although it might just add more confusion...  — Doug
> 
> 
> 
> I'm currently working on a short paper — basically an editorial or op-ed — on the idea of an open-ended, non-profit, citizen-led public alternative communication and information infrastructure project. I’m not exactly sure what that means but I’m envisioning something that supports a variety of basic features that people use (search, chat, photo posting, etc. etc.) as well as more advanced features such as deliberation, collaboration, decision-making, etc. It would probably need to be built with federated, integrated, distributed open source modules and be governed by its users and developers in some sort of open public way. It would be used without surveillance, data harvesting, censorship. The paper won't be long and it certainly won't be authoritative or comprehensive; at this point I'm just trying to help surface the idea and get feedback.
> 
> 
> My plan is to build the case somewhat in the paper and to suggest some ideas that are likely to be useful in thinking about moving forward. That's why I'm writing to you all. 
> 
> If you have any points or suggestions or examples that I need to know about as I work forward I'd love to hear them. I probably won't be able to incorporate everything in this initial piece but, ideally, as time goes on, the suggestions you make would help inform the project.
> 
> Please send me your thoughts on this.
> 
> Thanks!!
> 
> — Doug
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> -- 
> Justin G. Smith, PhD.
> Director of WSU Extension Mason County
> Assistant Professor - Community and Economic Development Regional Specialist
> 
> WSU Extension Mason County
> 303 N. 4th St. Shelton WA 98584
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> justingriffis at wsu.edu
> https://mason.wsu.edu
> 
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