karen louise smith

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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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.

My most recent post at metronauts.ca highlights an upcoming content-generation and research opportunity which promises to be very interesting. This initiative will make use of Metrolinx's online consultation mapping tool and remix screencast materials on the metronauts community blog with participant permission.

The Metronauts blog site has launched. I became involved in Metronauts through my participation at bar camp style events in Toronto and Hamilton. My first posting to the site is titled Buttons bells and bike racks. I will continue to cross post here.

This semester, I have been involved in the design research series at KMDI. Here is the abstract for the series of talks:

"Epistemologically, what do designers ‘know’? Are there ‘designerly ways of knowing’ distinct from the recognised scientific and other scholarly ways of knowing? Speakers from different disciplines will take these questions as their point of departure to explore what, for them, constitutes a legitimate knowledge claim. And, since research in knowledge media design is typically trans-disciplinary, we will also explore ways of fostering communication across disciplinary boundaries and bridging traditional epistemological divides."

The series has been successful so far and I’m looking forward to the speakers in future weeks, including Nigel Cross.

I’m at home right now on the couch and Michelle Obama is on CNN and Larry King live. Seeing Michelle on TV reminds me to Google her husband on YouTube to find the Yes We Can music video.

The video is old news by now, but I felt the need to check it out anyways. When I arrived on YouTube, the counter displayed 3,409,935 views. After I played the video, I scrolled down and looked at the comments. As one might expect any political video with over 3 million hits, some of the comments contribute little to a deliberative public sphere. My overall impression of the video however, is that it packs a punch. The simple rhetorical refrain of 'Yes We Can' is inspiring to me. As a Canadian, I cannot vote in the US election but I will continue to watch with interest.

I mean what I say. It is now 12:31 am and Michelle has departed from Larry King. They've moved on to Mike Huckabee and apparently the Democrat/Republican coverage is in balance this evening.

The provisional schedule for Politics: Web 2.0 conference being held in April 2008 at Royal Holloway University in the UK just got posted. I will be attending and presenting a paper related to photoblogging and social change.