karen louise smith

Having worked on a collaborative submission for the Digital Economy Strategy consultation in Canada, I was very interested to come across this debategraph of a similar British initiative regarding the Power of Information Taskforce (2007). I plan to try out the debategraph interface to map a policy issue of interest sometime soon.

At the University of Toronto, I am helping to organize a consultation to prepare a collaborative submission to the Federal Government's Consultation on the Digital Economy. We are holding a roundtable on June 14th

We are also organizing via a wiki and there are numerous ways to get involved:

1. Opinion gathering (via the wiki): Do you have prelminary thoughts and ideas which respond to the consultation topics? If yes, add them to our submission document. Comments are welcome from event participants as well as from individuals who may not be able to attend. Contributions to the submission document will close a day or so before the Roundtable day in order to consolidate the and reorganze the postings for discuss at the Roundtable.

2. Roundtable discussion (in-person, half day on June 14): You need to register separately for this roundtable discussion day on the Roundtable event sign up page. Scribes will record ideas and add them to the consensus document wiki during the event.

3. Submission finalization (via wiki)
a) Consolidated draft statement: to be posted after the event by Wed June 16
b) Your further comments and feedback: accepted until Mon June 21
c) Endorsement period: all participants who attend the event will be assumed to endorse the submission. If you choose not to endorse it, please let us know by removing your name from the endorsement page by Thurs June 24. If you object to particular numbered clauses of the statement, you can also note this on the endorsement page of the wiki.
d) Submission finalized, with endorsements and submitted: Mon June 28

I hope you will join the wiki or attend in person on June 14!

I am currently preparing an exploratory paper to submit to the Online Deliberation 2010 conference, to be held in Leeds, England. The conference is an opportunity to delve into in-depth, online conversations where policy or political issues are considered, compared and discussed. I plan to present the ethnographic methods which are appropriate to examine offline and online participation associated with Ontario bills.

To help me prepare my paper, I am also currently reading Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice, edited by Todd Davies and Seeta Peña Gangadharan (CSLI Publications, November 2009). The book compiles papers from a previous conference where I presented and it is available online under Creative Commons license.

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The Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation or, C2D2 conference happened over the weekend in Toronto. I attended a number of interesting and relevant sessions. The images below were created by Daniel Rose of the Omkase Group and Lissa Sorsa of ThinkLinkgraphics.com. A few of my less beautiful notes from sessions are listed below.

Image by: Daniel Rose

Image by Lissa Sorsa

Mental Health Strategy
Since the Kirby Senate report on mental health was released, a non-profit called the Mental Health Commission of Canada has formed. The Commission has consulted extensively to inform their strategy document. During the session, the presenters demonstrated the use of real-time voting clickers to gather feedback from participants attending public meetings. For me, this session raised many interesting questions concerning the meaning of ‘Commissions’ in Canadian society and where public engagement is situated within the policy-making process. In line with the theme of my proposed dissertation work, I think there are many interesting considerations when a Commission is ‘outside’ government as part of the work of a non-profit organization or it is alternatively ‘inside’ government as part of the Royal Commission tradition. I look forward to following up on some themes from this session.

Youth @ the polls
Many levels of government: federal, provincial, municipal, and community-based, came together to consider what encourages youth to vote and participate politically. Additionally, a representative from Apathy is Boring brought forward civic engagement as a multi-faceted process and experience of citizenship. Youth voices were present and prominent in this session.

Canada @150
The Canada @150 session allowed participants to experience a mini version of the process undertaken by 150 ‘young’ civil servants (with 5 years or less of experiences in government) to envision our collective Canadian policy future. The session was interesting in that we got an insider’s glimpse of the web 2.0 infrastructures used to run this engagement process. I always love an insider view! Our wrap up discussion focused extensively on the difference between internal employee dialogue and deliberation and broader public involvement.

As a teaching assistant for Information 1001 at the Toronto iSchool, I maintain a Twitter account for the course under the moniker of @ i1001. Although we are only half way through the term, the use of Twitter for the class has already been an interesting journey. The course has approximately 250 students enrolled and the Twitter account was originally envisioned as an auxiliary channel for participation and engagement. Here are some of my initial observations:

1) Creating a presence
I am the primary ‘tweeter’ for @i1001. This means I picked the photo for the account. In creating the @i100 account I was inspired by a course reading by Susan Leigh Star’s work on infrastructure and my summer visit to the Seattle Central Public Library. The image is a rainbow of RJ-45 or, Ethernet cables taken in the hallway before entering the book sorting room. In creating a presence or an identity for a course, the intention may need to be made transparent, just like infrastructure.

2) Sharing
As a tweeting TA, I share a lot of links on Twitter. Typically, I post links which extend upon concepts discussed in lecture. The benefit of being on Twitter however, is that students send links back! Course relevant YouTube links, web comics, and other resources are frequently shared by students. A rudimentary liveblog of the lecture sometimes emerges from the aggregated tweets.

3) Backchannel conversations
Some of the most interesting conversations always happen on the backchannel. Twitter is a place where questions can be asked and participation can be directed without having to speak to the entire lecture hall.

4) Getting to know each other
Tweeting for a course allows me to get to know the tweeting students a little better. What are their hobbies? What news stories peak their interests? What do they find interesting and relevant.

Having finished this blog post, I’ll now tweet it back to i1001 and introduce some new people to my blog.

It seems that everything interesting these days is happening at the Convention Center in Toronto.

During the American Political Science Association (Sept. 3-6, 2009 - also at the Convention Center) I was able to attend workshop on Coding the Blogosphere run by Stuart Schulman. Currently, I am considering how I can use the toolkit to gather materials which can be collected via RSS feeds.

Today, I attended WIREDcamp, part of the Ontario Government’s showcase event. WIREDcamp builds upon the unconference ChangeCamp event in Toronto to consider government in the age of the internet and participation. It was open to ‘public’ participants defined very broadly (i.e. Ontario government, Federal government, municipal government, non-profits, etc.). I attended a variety of sessions that dealt with issues such as: Government participation on third party (i.e., typically corporate sites), eConsultation, and why government employees may feel a ‘chill’ to participate in certain online arenas. If you are interested in finding out more, the event is documented at: www.technowonk.ca

This is my badge from Showcase. They read the barcode on my badge before I could enter some areas of the event.

Recently, I have been putting a number of hours of work into the IDforum.ca website, through my research assistantship with the Performing Identities project.

Some notable recent accomplishments:

• The National public forum on EDLs
  On March 24th, 2009 we traveled to Ottawa, Ontario. Our research group worked with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Consumers Council of Canada, and the Council of Canadians to co-organize the National public forum on “enhanced” drivers licences, privacy and state surveillance under the new Canada-U.S. border regime.

  
  
  
  Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/librarianinblack/518920792/sizes/s/ See original Creative Commons license

Until Monday, the CRTC was accepting comments on traffic management (aka net neutrality). In preparing my comments, I edited the form letter made available through www.saveournet.ca. It was a very easy process to submit comments.

Save Our Net is an important grassroots initiative which is mobilizing Canadians to speak about the impacts of throttling and the importance of net neutrality. Members of Save Our Net include individuals, civil society organizations and ISPs supporting net neutrality. Comments are still being collected by Save Our Net if you missed the CRTC deadline.

Submitted comments to the CRTC:

Dear Commissioners:

Karen Smith PhD Student, Faculty of Information & Knowledge
Media Design Institute University of Toronto

I am at ChangeCamp (aka #ChangeCamp, @ChangeCamp) today at the M@rs center at U of T today. I will post more later.

Recently, two promising possibilities for summer institutes and doctoral colloquiums came to my attention. For anyone who is not an academic, summer institutes and doctoral colloquiums are like summer camp for PhD students. You send in an application which may include any combination of: reference letters, a paper and a research statement. If selected, you get to spend a few days (or a week) networking with other students and guest faculty. Last year, I attended the Values In Computer and Information System Design (VID) at Santa Clara University. VID was excellent and this year I hope to attend one of the following:

• The iGov Research Institute being held in Seattle, Washington http://www.ctg.albany.edu/institute

• The PhD Colloquium at the eGov Conference in Lintz, Austria http://www.egov-conference.org/egov-2009