Começa hoje a Conferência Virtual Paulista

(por e-mail)
A Conferência Virtual Paulista sobre Transparência e Controle Social se inicia nesta segunda-feira, 23 de janeiro, com o recebimento de propostas/diretrizes sobre os quatro eixos temáticos da 1ª Consocial. Após um ciclo de quatro palestras virtuais interativas, que ocorreram entre os dias 10 e 19 deste mês, está aberto o espaço virtual de participação e manifestação direta de ideias e opiniões relativas à temática de transparência e controle social. Podem ser apresentadas até cinco Diretrizes/Propostas em cada um dos seguintes eixos de discussão:

Eixo 1: Promoção da transparência pública e acesso à informação e a dados públicos;
Eixo 2: Mecanismos de controle social, engajamento e capacitação da sociedade para o controle da gestão pública;
Eixo 3: A atuação dos conselhos de políticas públicas como instâncias de controle;
Eixo 4: Diretrizes para a prevenção e combate à corrupção. 

Até o dia 06 de fevereiro de 2012, qualquer pessoa poderá acessar o link no site e enviar suas propostas/diretrizes para contribuir para o aumento da transparência e do controle social. Participe!

CFP: Academic research into Wikipedia: Beyond English Wikipedia and towards comparative perspectives

(por e-mail)

DIGITHUM: THE HUMANITIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE
http://digithum.uoc.edu

Issue 14 call for papers (English, Catalan and Spanish)

Download call for papers: http://www.onlinecreation.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/digithum-call-for-papers-november11-en1.pdf

Deadline for submission of originals: 1 March 2012

Publication date: May 2012

Subject: Academic research into Wikipedia: Beyond English Wikipedia and towards comparative perspectives

This year saw the celebration of the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia. In 2011, following its creation 10 years ago, Wikipedia became one of the world’s 10 most visited websites and one of the most active virtual communities. It currently has around 20 million articles – 3.7 million of which are in English: the most popular version. It has  some 365 million regular readers, around 90,000 regular editors – all voluntary – and hundreds of thousands of people who contribute anonymously.

Wikipedia is one of the numerous examples of mass online collaboration projects to follow in the footsteps of open-source software production and its modus operandi. Some authors see this new type of collaboration as representing an innovative form of social production, given that it operates on the edges of the market and its rules, functions successfully without many hierarchical organisational structures or command management systems and is developed thanks to the cooperation of thousands – or, in some cases, millions – of geographically dispersed people working voluntarily and without expecting any direct remuneration. The term commons-based peer production was proposed recently to conceptualise this practice (Benkler, 2006).

Since about 2005, there has been growing interest from the scientific community, and in particular from the field of social and human sciences, in researching this historically unprecedented phenomenon. A recent review of the scientific bibliography on Wikipedia has identified over 2,100 scientific articles and 38 doctoral theses with Wikipedia and/or its sister projects as their object of analysis. However, this volume of scientific production has focused excessively on the English version of Wikipedia when Wikipedia is now available in 279 different languages. Consequently, the current bibliography does not pay sufficient attention to the dynamics and peculiarities of versions of Wikipedia in other languages, which makes a comparative analysis showing the contrasts and similarities between the different communities difficult.

The aim of this Digithum issue is to bring together articles that explore all aspects of Wikipedia – and other related projects – which may prove relevant from a social and human science research perspective. As well as the subjects that have been the focus of the scientific studies to date – motivation and type of participants, organisation and governance, regulatory structure, publishing dynamics, content quality and reliability, teaching uses, the role of technology, etc., (Okoli 2009) – proposals for new problems and objects of analysis will also be welcome. The theory and discipline may be linked to any field of social and humanistic research: political science, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), economics, etc.

Articles should have an empirical basis and use established qualitative or quantitative research methods in social and human sciences. Papers whose empirical focus is on versions other than those in English will be especially welcome and, in particular, those that present comparative studies showing contrasts and similarities between different size projects and/or projects in different languages, including Catalan. However, we will not be excluding papers about the English version.

Bibliography

Benkler, Y. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.Yale University Press: Yale.
Lovink, Geert and Nathanel Tracz (eds.). 2011. Critical Point of View. A Wikipedia Reader. Institute of Network Cultures: Amsterdam.
Okoli, C., 2009. A Brief Review of Studies of Wikipedia in Peer-Reviewed Journals. In: 2009 Third International Conference on Digital Society. p 155–160.

Issue coordinators

Eduard Aibar, lecturer, Arts and Humanities department, and IN3 researcher, UOC Mayo Fuster Morell, postdoctoral fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

Publication guidelines

Articles must not exceed 5,000 words and must contain the following information:
+ Title
+ Abstract (200 words) containing the basic aspects and results of the paper.
+ Keywords (between 4 and 6)
+ Body of the article, divided into sections and subsections
+ Bibliography
To ensure a blind review of articles, the following documents should be submitted
separately:
+ Author’s details (name and surname, professional affiliation, professional postal address, e-mail)
+ Brief CV (100-200 words) and photograph
Articles may be submitted in Catalan, Spanish and English.
For more information, please visit the Author Guidelines section of the website
(http://www.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/digithum/about/submissions#authorGuidelines).

CFP: 2001-2011 Changing Internet Politics

(por e-mail)

2001-2011 Changing Internet Politics
In the past decade, contrasting trends have alternately fuelled hopes  and fears concerning the potential of the Internet and then new digital personal/social media for democratic participation. Despite the persisting problem of the digital divide, Internet users have grown in number from about 300 million to the 1.4 billion of today, and a new generation of tools, providing mobile and simultaneous 'community' services, seems to have reshaped the way in which people connect and communicate.

Whilst it is generally agreed that the new media have been important resources for social movements since the end of the 1990s, it is also apparent that they still to encounter obstacles against their systematic entry into the general public sphere and effective influence on political decision-making, with the exception of rare and brief episodes/events. In parallel, in many countries, digital participation seems to have gained a strong position in the rhetorics adopted by governments and institutional actors (under the labels of e-democracy
and e-participation).

In spite of this institutional fascination with the Web, throughout the past decade the claim for an Internet Bill of Rights on the global multi-stakeholder agenda (WSIS) has had to face the 'securitarian turn' produced by the global terrorism alarm since the 11 September attacks. Moreover, Internet 'politics from below', in their collective as well as individual forms, like those emblematically practiced by bloggers and social networks, has suffered from the increasing processes of market colonization and corporate concentration deployed on the Net and their implications in terms of the privatization of privacy and censorship policies, with and without state intervention.

Nevertheless, there is considerable evidence for the Internet's growing libertarian political impact. This is the case of the global challenge to state secrecy raised by WikiLeaks and also by the spring 2011 uprisings in the Mediterranean Arabian countries. But is also the case of recent developments in the contentious politics of some European countries (e.g. the Spanish 'indignados', or the successful Italian referendum movement) where digital social networks have proved powerful means to convey demands for a radical renewal of politics based on a stronger and more direct role of citizens, and on a critique of post-democratic functionings.

Sociologica invites scholars to analyze this decade of Internet politics with its ambivalent dynamics. Equally welcome are papers devoted to empirical analysis of specific aspects, or which seek to draw a wider picture of Internet political trends throughout the decade.

The final deadline for submission has been extended until *March 10, 2012*. The papers selected will be published according to the order of their final acceptance by the journal, and they will be commented on in
the Essays section.

More details about the journal:
www.sociologica.mulino.it

info.sociologica@mulino.it

Wikipedia e o SOPA

Página da Wikipedia hoje

Como editor da Wikipedia, não estou completamente de acordo com a iniciativa. Considero errado estrategicamente politizar toda a construção colaborativa de conhecimento diante da discussão de um único ponto político, de um [ainda] projeto de lei. É como se dissessem "quem escreve na Wikipedia acredita nisso, nisso, naquilo" ou, ainda pior, "o conteúdo que está depositado aqui tem viés tal".

Existem outros projetos muito mais sorrateiros caminhando ou se espreitando por aí (e principalmente por aqui). Se cada um deles merecesse um protesto desse naipe, a Wikipedia logo se transformaria num site do Geocities, com todos os banners do mundo.

Sem dúvidas que a atitude é barulhenta e há mérito nela. E sou contra o Sopa também, claro.

Update:  Entre os protestos, o mais bem-humorado até agora é o do The Oatmeal:

Update 2: o update anterior veio do Cleston.