More details here: http://giga-net.org/page/2013-annual-symposium

Important dates:

• Abstract submission – July 1
• Initial decisions – July 29
• Full papers due – September 30
• Symposium – October 21

We spoke mostly about our personal experiences and practices we have noticed by observing our colleagues. Dan made a point that using social media shouldn’t be thought of merely in terms of self promotion, but as another way of finding and engaging with your community. Natalie, focusing on opportunities offered by social media, emphasized them as another way to network and do outreach. I talked about the costs of participating and not participating.

It is worthwhile to note that we all agreed that today it may not be practical to distinguish between social media and other kinds of online presence. Everything is linked. So, we all talked more generally about online presence, rather than specifically about social media. The main takeaway points from my point of view were:

• Make yourself easily found
• Let others know about what you have done
• Find your community
• Make yourself useful
• Think of your online presence as an outreach
• Be thoughtful about the costs associated with maintaining digital presence

Below the fold you will find more detailed accounts of each point. You can also use the links above to navigate to the section that interests you.

The bottom line is that there are benefits and costs associated with maintaining your online presence, particularly through social media. It is important to be thoughtful about what you do and why you do it. There are many tools out there and it takes time and effort to figure out what works for you and how to integrate it in your mundane professional activities.

Hope some people will find this useful.

As always, you are welcome to add your thoughts and suggestions.

Make yourself easily found. It may sound trivial, but people expect to find information about you online. This is particularly true if you are on the job market. People you interview with do that, people on search committees do that. In fact, it turns out, they ask questions when they can’t find you easily. But it’s not just search committees who are looking for you. Your colleagues, potential collaborators, students, or people interested in your research may also be trying to find you. As Natalie pointed out, these days it’s seems that it is not enough just to do good research; it is also important to make your research easily accessible (more on that later). So, make it easy for people to find you.

Let others know about what you have done. You want to help people find useful stuff about you. This is somewhat related to costs of not doing anything to maintain digital presence. Whether you intend that or not, you are leaving digital traces; or other people do that for you. In his book, Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has a number of colorful examples of how digital traces have influenced people’s careers in an adverse manner. If what you do is research, you want people to be able to find that easily.

The easiest way to proceed on this front is to maintain a personal page and have reputable online sources linking to it. You can have a self hosted site (like the one you are currently reading, which uses WordPress as its backbone) or you can use one of the many third party services such as WordPress, Blogger, Google Sites, etc. If you are at Cornell, you may use the university-provided WordPress-based platform. Alternatively, if you don’t need the flexibility offered by a personal site or you think this is too much work to maintain one, you can make some of the professional social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Academia.edu your main online “home.” Natalie also stressed the importance and the usefulness of lab websites (and research group websites). I would add that having them link to your personal site will also help your reputation with Google.

Find your community. Dan made an excellent point that maintaining your social media presence is not about shameless self-promotion; it is about finding a community you care about and want to be part of, and then engaging with it. In that sense it is not much different from networking in the physical world. Your community can be defined through particular conference, subject areas, or specific people. However you approach it, you should be proactive. Natalie mentioned a quote from Reid Hoffman (co-Founder of LinkedIn), who stressed that one should view her/his own career as a startup, which means being proactive and network.

Thinking about your community, you should also think about where in cyberspace they “live” and how and what about they communicate online. Here, it may be a good opportunity to think about your use of social networks and how you perceive your different audiences in these spaces. People tend to use sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Academia.edu for different purposes. Dan suggested that it is OK to share a little bit of personal information about yourself, allowing others to see the human behind the academic. Natalie was talking about how she views Facebook more as a place for private and personal communication, so she does not communicate about professional issues there. My professional and personal worlds are pretty intertwined, so Facebook is as much place for catching up with friends as it is a place to publicize my research. In fact, most of my “purely” professional networks reside on regular mailing lists; fewer can be found on Ning. Also LinkedIn is not a place where I would post pictures of my most recent trip.

Make yourself useful. Once you have identified your community, think about how you can be useful to it. People love to hear good news and always appreciate information about conference, calls for papers, job opportunities, etc. (and sometimes even feedback ) As Dan put it, “be the same cool person you are, but in social media.” Natalie talked about how she has recently started engaging on Twitter and how it allowed her to help organizers of a conference she was going to participate in; it also led a few journalists her way. I find Twitter particularly useful for sharing information. Twitter gives me a socially filtered stream of interesting and relevant news and announcements; at the same time I can share information instantly whether it comes via Twitter or other media.

Another way of being useful is sharing content. This can come in various shapes or forms. For example, Ethan Zukerman, who currently directs MIT Center for Civic Media, has been live-blogging various talks, which is great for all of us, who are not in the Cambridge area. He even put together a guide for conference blogging. Now that’s useful! I, personally, don’t think I can do what Ethan does, but I recently started Twitting conferences. It helps me focus during the talks and I am also offering something useful to my community.

Blogging is of course another useful way of sharing content. In my world I often see people soliciting advice about tools and readings (often via mailing lists), and then share compilations of resources on their personal blogs/sites. You can blog about your research, research of others, linking your area of research and current events or anything else that you think may interest you and your community. I think we often underestimate how interesting and unique our professional encounters in academia. We hear interesting talks, read the most recent research, have stimulating conversation with super smart people, and more. Share this with others!

Think of your online presence as an outreach. Talking about sharing your research with others, Natalie made an excellent point that making your research available online is now an important aspect of outreach. The most obvious place to start is actually making your own scholarship available online. Publishing in open access journals is becoming more and more common (note that some are trying to abuse this trend).

In some areas it is customary to upload drafts of papers to repositories such as SSRN or to their institutional repositories such as eCommons at Cornell. In many cases, you can negotiate with your publisher a permission to post a pre-print copy of your article on your website (or the actual article, after a certain embargo period). Some examples of how this can be done well are the websites of danah boyd, Zizi Papacharrisi, and Eszter Hargittai (the latter is also a good example of how a lab website can be used effectively). Today, Google Scholar is also making it easier to share your research. You may want to consider updating and making your Google Scholar profile public.

While making your research available is better than not sharing at all, you can do better than that. This will depend on the community you are communicating to, but you should also think how you make your research accessible both conceptually and linguistically. You may want to consider blogging about your research, sharing some preliminary findings or soliciting advice for a (technical?) problem you are trying to solve. I am having hard time to explain it to my parents what is that exactly I am researching, but I love this challenge. So, if I were to blog about my research, I would like to think how I can make it accessible to my parents and I heard others using a similar technique. After all, your research may be relevant to much larger audience than your immediate colleagues, so making an effort to open it up may pay off both for you and people who will learn from you (see some interesting work in communities such as ResearchBlogging or BigThink).

Be thoughtful about the costs associated with maintaining digital presence. Although the main focus of the panel was highlighting how social media can be useful in one’s academic life, there was an agreement, which resonated with many of the attendees, that there are costs associated with it. Creating and sustaining meaningful online presence takes time and persistence. Blogging, twitting, updating pages, etc. takes time away from other important activities. So, you have to be very thoughtful about your online presence. At the end of the day, there is no way around doing good research and teaching – both require time and attention. To me, this is mostly about forming the necessary habits that help you getting the job done.

I don’t think either of us on the panel or in the audience had silver bullet solutions for effective management of your online activities. It is really easy to get carried away in the worlds of Facebook and news-feeds. In fact, this may have nothing to do with your professional participation in social media. It is known that certain places on the Web act as black holes for time. I personally found browser addons that let you block or limit your time on particular pages to be particularly useful. I started using LeechBlock for FireFox and StayFocusd for Chrome when I was working on my dissertation and although it is really easy to circumvent these addons, they were helpful in assisting me altering my online habits. I limited my time on all the unnecessary sites to 15 minutes a day and although I still have these settings on, I don’t really feel the need to spend more than that on news, social networking, etc. These days I rarely hit the 15 minutes limit anymore.

If you have never participated actively in social media before, you will also need to form the habit of participation. This is quite different from tampering unproductive behaviors. For me, this is very similar to getting into the habit of writing, which is pretty essential if you have chosen the scholarly track. There are different self-help books that talk about forming those habits (e.g. Writing your dissertation in 15 minutes a day) and there must be tools that can help you doing that with social media. I have recently started using Tenxer, which monitors my weekly goals with Twitting and with cleaning my Inbox. Without obsessing about it, there is something about having a reflection on my behavior that I find helpful in changing it. But don’t get too focused on the tools, as they may become a source of additional cost in themselves.

The bottom line here is that you have to be thoughtful about your time and cognizant about the costs associated with engaging in social media. You have to focus on your research and your teaching first, but do factor social media participation into your planning and most importantly be persistent.

It took me almost two weeks to turn my scattered notes into this lengthy post. But I do hope some people will find it useful.

As it turns out, whoever hacked the site has edited .htaccess, so that it would perform the redirect only on mobile devices. Veronica and I removed the infected files, which did resolve the redirect issue. But we couldn’t figure out how to clean the meta data infection. So, at the end, there is now a relaunched ThinkMacro. Luckily, WordPress is really great with making export/import of your content easy.

Fresh start actually feels rather nice.

Here is her announcement:

Are you?

• A Syracuse University Student
• A native speaker of English
• At least 18 years old
• Able to use Google’s search engine

Sign up for the study and influence future search engine design!

• We will schedule the session at your convenience. Overall anticipated time commitment is 1.5-2 hours.
• You will be asked to search with Google, your search will be recorded, and then you will be interviewed about your decision-making.
• You will be paid $15 for your participation and you will enter a raffle to win a $50 Amazon gift card.

To sign up email Veronica: vmaidel@syr.edu

GigaNet is interested in receiving abstracts related to Internet Governance themes, especially those containing innovative approaches and/or emerging research areas. We encourage submissions on the following topics:Internet policies on freedom of expression (censorship, kill-switches, filtering, policies that promote free expression, corporate social responsibility)

• Internet freedom and governance in regions in transition (Arab region, Caucasus etc.)
• From PIPA to ACTA: National and international agreements on online copyright enforcement
• Cyber-security, the state and international relations
• Dataveillance and privacy – the economic perspective
• Global Internet infrastructure policy (net neutrality, peering and interconnection, ASN assignment, routing infrastructure security, etc.)
• Innovative methods for Internet Governance research
• The role of the UN and intergovernmental institutions in global Internet Governance
• Policy issues surrounding ICANN’s new gTLD program
• IP addressing: economic and technical challenges of scarcity and governance
• Internet governance and development

Other proposals on questions of global Internet governance will also be considered.

The deadline for submitting abstracts is May 20th (if accepted, you’ll have to submit the full paper by September 30th).

You can find the full CFP here.

I started a post-doc position with the Cornell eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI), based in Cornell Law School. The project runs a very interesting operation called Regulation Room. It offers a platform and, even more importantly, a process for online public participation in the federal government rule-making process (if you don’t know what rule-making is, you are with the majority of people out there and should definitely go to the Regulation Room, because it has all the explanations). I will be working on collaborative drafting of policy input and consensus building around policy issues; aspects that currently are absent from the platform and frankly not sure will be necessarily a standard part of it. I hope to write about this work as I move along.

Yet, even before I started working on my own piece of CeRI research, just learning about the Regulation Room prompted interesting conversations that easily linked to my interest in the digital divide. The result is a paper I co-authored with one of my new colleagues, Rebecca Vernon, which will be presented later this week at the ”New ICTs + New Media = New Democracy? Communications policy and public life in the age of broadband” (CFP) – a workshop organized by the Institute for Information Policy at Penn State University and the New America Foundation.

I am not sure what the policy of the workshop is about publishing the papers, so in the meantime I’ll post the extended abstract. Hope you’ll find the premise interesting. If you are interested in the rest, please email me or just leave a comment.

Between Twitter revolutions and Facebook elections, there is a growing belief that information and communication technologies are changing the way democracy is practiced. But how universal are those effects? In this paper we look into what van Dijk labels “motivational access” in digital divide as an impediment for citizens to actively utilize information and communication technologies for civic engagement. We focus on the Cornell University eRulemaking Initiative as our case and conduct an in-depth investigation into its recent efforts to get the public involved in the Department of Transportation rulemaking process using online tools. Recommendations based on this analysis address both national policy frameworks and agency specific regulations.

The digital divide is viewed as major impediment to information-technology-enhanced democratic processes. But if you build it, will they come? Will making broadband more readily available necessarily increase participation in democratic processes? Will making government information available online motivate citizens to engage with government institutions? Will opening up communication channels necessarily yield productive feedback from people? Are the barriers for meaningful civic participation online primarily technological?

Regulation Room (http://regulationroom.org) is a project of Cornell University eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI). It is an online platform developed to engage the public in the federal agency rulemaking processes. In addition to its technological platform, Regulation Room has developed a set of moderation and outreach techniques to make both the procedures of rulemaking and the content of the rules more accessible to the general public. CeRI works with the Department of Transportation on actual rules the agency is seeking public comment on. As such, it serves as a real-life laboratory to explore uses of technology in democratic processes.

Over the past 15 months, Regulation Room worked on 3 rules that resulted in formal comments submitted to the Department of Transportation. In this paper we unpack what it takes to engage citizens in democratic processes and help them make their participation count. Our analysis suggests that while digital divide defined in terms of physical access and technological literacy may play a role in impeding civic engagement, they may not be the only important factors. In effect, while ensuring that all citizens have broadband access and well-developed technical skills go a long way toward ensuring public participation in democratic governance, it will not result in the desired breadth and depth of participation without further policy changes and investments in new technologies. Practices that evolved around the use of technology on the one hand and the engagement with government processes on the other, play an important role affecting civic online participation.

The paper presents an assortment of lessons and observations from “Regulation Room” and offers policy recommendations that suggest viewing civic online engagement through the lens of socio-technical practice, wherein the technology requirements for citizens to engage effectively in democratic processes are examined in conjunction with the normative assumptions of individuals as they interact with their government through online media.

In other news, which you may have already seen on Facebook, an article I co-authored with Erik Nisbet and Tarleton Gillespie got published in The Information Society and we got some press coverage in Cornell Chronicle. Here is the abstract of the paper:

Addressing the reasons for—and the solutions to—the “digital divide” has been on the public agenda since the emergence of the Internet. However, the term has meant quite different things, depending on the audience and the context, and these competing interpretations may in fact orient toward different policy outcomes. The goals of this article are twofold. First, the authors unpack the term “digital divide” and examine how it has been deployed and interpreted across a range of academic and policy discourses. Second, through a framing experiment embedded within a nationally representative survey, the authors demonstrate how presenting respondents with two different conceptual frames of the digital divide may lead to different perceptions of who is most accountable for addressing the issue. From this, they discuss the dynamic relationship between the construction and communication of policy discourse and the public understanding of the digital divide, as well as implications for effective communication about the digital divide and information and communication technology policy to the general public.

Feel free to contact me if you want to read the entire piece and don’t have access.

The full title of the workshop is “Core Internet values and the principles of Internet Governance across generations” and the idea is exactly that – to have a dialogue between Internet pioneers and young Internet activists on the core of what the Internet stands for.

We had a great group of people.  On the one hand, there were young people from different parts of the world.  On the other hand, there were more senior Internet thinkers and practitioners.  Here is the full list of participants (in alphabetical order):

• Bill Graham, Global Strategic Engagement, the Internet Society (ISOC)
• ‘Gbenga Sesan, Paradigm New Nigeria
• Drew Smith, Student at Elon Univeristy and participant in Imagining the Internet project
• Grace Bomu, Young Kenyan lawyer, secretary of the ICT Consumers Association of Kenya, and cultural activist
• Laura DeNardis, Yale Information Society Project
• Marie Casey, Elected female representative at the ITU Youth Forum of future leaders, Geneva, 2009
• Nii Narku Quaynor, Ghana.com
• Rafik Dammak, Tokyo University
• Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google
• Vladimir Radunovic, Diplo Foundation

Ian Peter, who chaired the last year workshop on Internet Governance, was also supposed to take part in the workshop, but unfortunately he was not able to make it to Vilnius.

I hoped to be able to share a report from the workshop here, but other tasks take priority at the moment and I will be posting the report later.  I do think we had a very interesting and lively discussion, so I thought at this point I will just share the video footage of the event.  If you have a couple of hours to spare, I think you will find this engaging.

[HTML1]

As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome!

As we can see, in most cases, our participants searched; this is consistent across both groups and I think was not particularly surprising.  Similarly, the use of bookmarks was equally consistent across both groups, which in my view was more surprising (perhaps since I am not a big bookmark user).

The differences, as you can see, were in the use of autocomplete and reliance on links.  Interestingly, in the Chinese sample, there were significantly more instances of using reliance on links compared to the use of autocomplete.  In the US sample what we see is practically a mirror image of this trend – significantly larger proportion of instances involved the use of autocomplete.

What makes it even more interesting is a glimpse at where do the Chinese participants follow the links from.  We are still organizing that data, but my initial observation is that many of those are coming from websites that basically large repositories of links (for example take a look at www.2345.com or www.114la.com).

All this brings up some thoughts about the role of English in the online experience.  In my view, one plausable explanation of this data can be the knowledge of English language.  I can see how use of the autocomplete function comes more “naturally” to the native speakers, compared to those for whom English is a second language.  The large collections of links that were utilized by our Chinese participants, further support this idea – why would you make an effort of typing in an inconvenient language, when you can go to just one website, where all the links you use are?

There are currently more questions than statements suggested by the snippet above – there is still a lot of work to be done on these data.  Having said that, I’d love to hear your thought about this little observation.  Please share…

You can find the slides from the presentation here.