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The PhD on the Information and Knowledge Society Programme recently opened the call for candidates — including 10 full time fellowships —, offering 33 student places in the following fields: Computer Science and Networking Technologies Community and Social Action Law and ICT eGovernance eLearning Information Systems New Economy Technology and health Technology and Education System Research Programmes As said, UOC’s research institute, the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, offers 10 grants for full-time PhDs that are carried out physically in its headquarters in Castelldefels’s Mediterranean Technology Park (20 minutes from Barcelona). It carries a stipend and access to travel funds. Please visit the PhD programme’s website, for detailed information about the...

I’m pleased to announce an event of which I’m part of the organizing committee, the course Network Society: Social changes, organizations and citizens, to take place in Barcelona, Spain, from 15 to 17 October de 2008. Some info about the course: Website of the course, with more information about the speakers, fees, registration, etc. Facebook Event There will be translation to and from Spanish and English PROGRAMME: NETWORK SOCIETY: SOCIAL CHANGES, ORGANIZATIONS AND CITIZENS Day 1 - Wednesday 15 October Introduction 09h00 - 09h30 : Opening 09h30 - 10h30 : Juan Freire - Presentation of the course 10h30 - 11h00 : Café Citizenship in the Network Society Chairs: Marc López 11h00 - 12h30 : Carol Darr 12h30 - 14h00 : Tom Steinberg 14h00 - 16h00 : Lunch Organizations in the...

I have been invited by the Spanish Center of Judicial Documentation (Centro de Documentacion Judicial, CENDOJ) to impart a conference at the III Encuentro de Información y Documentación Judicial de la Red IberIUS [III Meeting about Judicial Information and Documentation of the IberIUS Network]. The idea was to give an overview of what the Network Society is and what are the concepts besides collective creation. Here come my slides (in Spanish): Full reference and PDF downloadable......

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.Session VIII Round Table Towards citizenship 2.0? Eduard Aibar, Vice President, Research, UOC. So, the landscape has changed… but have citizens? has the concept of citizenship so much shifted as, supposedly, has the Web? Ana Sofía Cardenal, Professor of Political Science, UOC We’re putting all our eggs in the Web 2.0 basket, but data seem to bring evidence that all the promises of the web do not seem to apply: The demand for political information has not increased despite the supposition that it would be cheaper (in money, in time) to be informed on a digital socielty The supposition that costs of information have decreased is at stake too The participation does not seem to have changed either Few sites collect most...

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.Session VII Debate Electoral strategies on the internet The experience of the 2008 Spanish General Elections. José Rodríguez and Xavier Peytibí, political experts. In the Spanish general elections (March 9th, 2008), the web has had more importance than ever, but it still far from being a mainstream communication media. Main changes Interactivity between the party and the citizenry, with an increase on blogs and nanoblogs (e.g. twitter) resulting in an increase of the reach of the political message. New methods to outsource participation: not only members of the party and campaign volunteers, but also occasional supporters: from outsourcing to crowdsourcing. This has meant more reach and at a much lesser cost. Change of formats:...

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.Session VI Round Table Public opinion and participation on the internet: blogs and political parties Lourdes Muñoz, member of parliament, (PSC). PSC Secretary for Women’s Policy. Politicians and their participation in the Web 2.0 is but a part of a higher goal which is the development of the Information Society. The Web 2.0 provides new means for both citizens and institutions to have new channels to have their message sent, and their opinion heard. Indeed, there’s an increasing amount of readers and creators of blogs. And not only opinion, but participation. Some facts and figures about the penetration of blogs in the Spanish Congress Analysis and charts Data Related topics There is not a big difference between male and...

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.Session V Keynote speech Helen Margetts Government on the Web A shift of paradigm in Government Dunleavy, Margetts (2006) Digital Era Governance: the dominant paradigm of public governance reform (new public management) is dead. The digital-era governance is nigh… or just happening. What happened during the New Public Management? Disaggregation, into tiny decentralized government and quasi-government agencies Competition within the daily tasks of government, its relationships with suppliers, outsourcing, financing, etc. Incentivization: via privatization, performance related pay, charging, etc. What are we likely to see during the Digital-era governance? Reintegration, going the way back of atomization that the New Public...

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.Session IV Conference Lorenzo Cotino Electronic public services: e-government 2.0 The Regulation of E-Government 2.0 Law goes really behind the speed of times. The problem is that Law, or Administrative Law, faces challenging reality: .com can fail, but .gov cannot”. At the legal level, the big challenge of the Web 2.0 is the integration of content produced by third parties in another platform — or your content put in a platform run by a third party. Lorenzo Cotino Some things that e-Gov 2.0 can bring: G2C More information Transparency Participation Some things that e-Gov 2.0 can bring: C2G Best of feedbacks Crest of the wave innovation of early adopters Law enforcement by citizens: reports, complaints, etc. Some...

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.Session III Round Table Content on the internet: regulation or self-regulation? Chairs: Raquel Xalabarder, Law Professor, UOC Do we want to give up on the freedom we can have now? Do we want self-regulation or we want more education that leads to more commitment? http://www.iqua.net, Spanish Internet Quality Agency (IQUA) and CEO Derecho.com More than self-regulation, what it’s happening is that the liability to apply toughest laws if shifted towards the customer/user or the industry (ISPs and/or carriers). But this has not been a matter of consensus, nor a widening of the range (from tough to soft) of the regulation spectrum. Over-regulation puts an extra burden to the industry, making it more difficult for the Information...

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.Session II Debate Regulation of audiovisual content in the age of digital convergence Mónica Ariño, Policy Advisor, OFCOM’s International Team. What is convergence? What can be said about regulation of content on the Internet and the Internet itself? Privacy, cybercrime, copyright, fair use? Internet access? A big commitment is how to update broadcasting regulations that where set up in times very different from the ones we’re living in. A first thing to be updated is the concept of media literacy and whether the receiver is media literate. Another commitment is regulatory cohesion in the international landscape. Last, maybe the biggest commitment is fighting social alarm about “things” that are...

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.Session I Opening speech Eben Moglen Living Apart Together: Social Networking in the Free World Capitalism produces inherently defective technology, mainly because of the short sightedness of the whole process. Global heating and the combustion engine being one of the most present short sightedness examples of capitalism today. Social networking software might be at stake and be another good example of such defective technology, which will potentially cause social harm in the future as these technologies will deviate from appropriate, optimum, goals. The Net was created with a socialist ideology: Absence of advertising, absence of surveillance, absence of tracking what one was doing (reading, writing) on the Net, a collaborative...

In a seminar I imparted in January — Fostering the Information Society for Development in the Web 2.0 framework: from push to pull strategies — the case of Spain — I suggested that the most developed countries had reached sort of a threshold of installed infrastructures. Of course, this threshold could be pushed up and more infrastructures (or better and cheaper ones) could be installed, but the development of the Information Society would barely rely on that. According to the data available, I wondered whether the solution might be shifting from push to pull strategies, parallel to the shift that we’ve been living in the web landscape towards the so-called Web 2.0. This is the chart I then presented: [click to enlarge] Now, with data from the World Bank we can draw another...

For the fourth time — see here some notes about last year’s congress — at the School of Law and Political Science, Open University of Catalonia, we organize our Internet, Law and Politics Congress, this year’s tagline quite an appealing one: Social Software and Web 2.0: Legal and Political Implications. Programme (abridged) Monday, 2 June 2008 Living Apart Together: Social Networking in the Free World. Eben Moglen. Professor of Law and Legal History, Columbia University Law School, and Chairman, Software Freedom Law Center, New York. Regulation of audiovisual content in the age of digital convergence. Mónica Ariño, Joan Barata Content on the internet: regulation or self-regulation?. Gonzalo Díe, Mónica Ariño, Amadeu Abril, Miguel Pérez Subías, Raquel Xalabarder....

In my conference about Digital Citizens vs. Analogue Institutions I spoke — among other things — about the importance of blogging for democracy, human rights and the development of the Information Society. And I stated that, even if we could not draw a direct relationship between all these variables — which we cannot so far —, we could set up a path where all these concepts formed part of the same equation. Now Víctor R. Ruiz asks me to elaborate this idea. First things first: with the data available at the moment (in this case from UNPAN — UN e-Government Survey 2008. From e-Government to Connected Governance — and Universal McCann — Wave 3 —) we cannot state that there is a close or strong relationship between blogging and the development of e-Government. In the figure...

From 2005 to 2007, good friend Francisco Lupiáñez took part in a Manuel Castells’s project entitled Technological Modernisation, Organisational Change and Service Delivery in the Catalan Public Health System (aka PIC Salut). His main findings in the Public Health system related with the adoption of ICTs are really similar to the ones I pointed at — there related to the Educational system — in my conference Opening Session: Digital Citizens vs. Analogue Institutions (indeed partly based on data from a brother project, L’Escola a la Societat Xarxa: Internet a l’Educació Primària i Secundària (Volum I), also led by Castells and belonging both of them to a framework project about ICT adoption in Catalonia, Spain). These findings can be summarized as follows: ICTs are...

iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.Here come my notes for session XI. Round Table: Chairs: Jacinto Lajas Jose María Olmo Free Software penetration in the Administration still low. This also means (cause or consequence?) that bidding processes don’t usually include free software in their requirements, either as a condition or as a possibility. Consequences of this situation: Lack of cooperation and collaboration between administrations Interoperability made more difficult There is a lack of communities of free software for the Administration in which developers and users can meet and exchange impressions and design common strategies Francisco Huertas Free Software as a strategy to develop the Information Society. Free Software avoids: A...

iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.Here come my notes for session X. Round Table: Chairs: Goyo Tovar Antonio Fumero The Web: technologies, people and content. The Web brings potential, but using it is another issue. And in using it, context matters. Ícaro Moyano Age is a clear limit of Web 2.0. Three stages of the web: The web as a journal: unidirectional The web as media: everyone’s a journalist The web as a sharing place New Internet users no longer identify themselves with a nickname, but with their real names, including a snapshot of their own. And it seems that youngsters, that are usually said not being interested in politics, do use Social Networking Sites to engage in activism and promote campaigns. Marc Vidal Are the limits of the...

iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.Here come my notes for session IX Debate: The Handbook of the blog in the enterprise.Chairs: César Ramos Genís Roca We should focus on what is an enterprise and not on blogs. Do we agree on what do we understand by “enterprise”? An enterprise is: the acknowledged and legal way to have a personal adventure. A temporal union of people around an interest An interest group An institution: a big telecom is like a ministry, and a ministry like an enterprise. There are many enterprises: working for your own or employed, with or without employees, with or without workmates, with or without leadership, with or without partners, etc. Blogging in the enterprise is easy when you’re alone (e.g....

iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.Here come my notes for session VII. Round Table: Networked Citizens. Whence do blogs go?Chairs: Pau Llop Víctor Ruiz Blogs come from the participative sites that flourished after the Slashdot experience, both technically and conceptually. Blogs have been an evolution of forums, but only at the usability level, but the general idea has not really changed that much. And like forums, they are of short reach. Only 6% of the population read political blogs… but we keep telling politicians that they have to be on the Net and have their own blog. Does this make any sense at all? When everyone has a blog (if that ever happens), will we at last make of them an influential tool? Fernando Tricas Some questions about...

iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.Here come my notes for session V. Round Table: Connected Citizens. Cyberactivism.Chairs: Rosa Jiménez Cano Alana Moceri, president Democrats Abroad Spain First time that primary elections can be done on-line. This means increasing the number of countries where voting is possible from 34 up to 161. Online, everyone can contribute: absolutely everyone can upload videos to YouTube, photos to Flickr or text to any blog. Pro: democratization. Con: loss of control over your campaing. Fundrising is key and is a good proxy to test the health of a political campaign. Obama’s discourse is really 2.0: you can, empowerment, engagement. MyBarackObama.com is a good example of it, where you can even earn points as a...

iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.Here come my notes for session IV. Round Table: mGovernment. The Mobile Phone and its integration in e-GovernmentChairs: Nacho Campos What is a mobile phone Mobile A device you use every day 110% of penetration Many features Tomy Ahonen: the mobile phone is the 7th medium: Personal Always on Always with us Integrated paying method Immediate tool mGovernment: how the Administration adapts itself to the nomadic style of the citizen (The Economist) Goal: from m-murmur to m-chat to m-conversation (unidirectional, bidirectional, multidirectional). Barriers: Lack of leadership, political and technical Infrastructures Resistance to change of public servants Telecommunication Operators Lack of communication plans...

iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.Here come my notes for session III. Case Study: Gijón. The Connected CityChairs: Chiqui de la Fuente José M. Pérez The political role is fundamental in the process of change. Active listening is crucial, and it’s very important to avoid the “Big Brother” paranoia in order to let information flow free. Only with absolute openness can the Administration make its information interact with the citizen’s. Interconnection requires openness and access to private information — not the same thing as surveillance. This can be made possible by making public the “what” but anonymizing the “by whom”. Interesting experience: digital literacy courses which enrollment had to...

iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.Here come my notes for session II. Round Table: Innovation and Change. Is it possible to make the citizen’s life easier?Chairs: Jose Antonio Donaire Xavier Llinares Sala Users and managers don’t usually think equally concerning the design, use and satisfaction of a specific service. To make ends meet, some changes have to take place: There are too many public servants… in exchange of better, up-to-date, adding-value ones. Public servants that add value have to be rewarded. Barriers have to be removed. More management, less bureaucracy. Politics have to be de-professionalized and put, instead, professionals. Politics not as a career, but as a place for real experts to bring in ideas. The shift...

iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.Here come my notes for session I (part II). Opening Session (part II) Chairs Carmen Sánchez-Carazo Intelligent CitiesJosé Gumersindo García ICTs will improve the image that public administrations have before the citizenry: proximity, transparency, etc. e-Administration and Modernization go hand in hand and they are co-requisites for the development of both. The Public Sector does have to bet on digital literacy training for their public servants. But not only their employees, but also firms. With this digital literacy many projects can take place: instant messaging for better communication, datasharing through wireless networks, e-commerce, etc. Free software is very important for the Public Sector, and again,...

These are the materials I’m using at the iCities: Primeras Jornadas sobre Blogs, e-Government y Participación Digital [First Conference on Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation], for the opening speech, in which I take part on Friday 9th May 2008. Slides: Bibliography Castells, M. (2000). “Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society”. In British Journal of Sociology, Jan-Mar 2000, 51(1), 5-24. London: Routledge. Castells, M. (2004). “Informationalism, Networks, And The Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint”. In Castells, M. (Ed.), The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Dutta, S., López-Claros, A. & Mia, I. (Eds.) (2006). Global Information Technology Report 2005-2006: Leveraging ICT for...