karen louise smith

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.

Today I presented a paper at OISE at the Learning Democracy by Doing conference. My paper was titled: Transparent Technology? Exploring the political and design values of eDemocracy for citizens. My paper explored:

• transparency as a design value in eGovernment websites
• conflicts between government and citizen definitions of transparency
• the CAIRS database as an example of different enactments of transparency
• design and use of technology as a form of ‘doing democracy’

I promised some of the audience members to place references online. Please click the title of this post to access them.

I sent off my registration materials today for the Learning Democracy by Doing: Alternative Practices in Citizenship Learning and Participatory Democracy conference at OISE, University of Toronto. The conference runs October 16-18, 2008.

I received an unorthodox birthday party invitation the other day. DGP is turning 40 and there is going to be a lab reunion. I am a friend of the lab and I plan to attend.

"The University of Toronto’s Dynamic Graphics Project, in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science, invite DGP alumni and friends to attend its 40th anniversary and scientific workshop. DGPis40 celebrates the 40-year history of an incredibly successful, award-winning research group that encompasses the research areas of graphics and human-computer interaction (HCI). The event will feature talks by leaders in the field (most of whom are also DGP alumni), research demos and poster sessions by alumni, students, and faculty, and opportunities for socializing and celebrating the rich history and promising future of DGP. It will bring together 125 to 200 DGP students, faculty, alumni, faculty alumni, and friends since DGP's inception."

The full conference program is available.

I have to read more carefully to find out if there will be any cake.

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.

I just registered to attend Trust in Science, an academic workshop happening in Toronto at the CBC building on October 15-16, 2007. It's free to register.

I'm looking forward to the panel on the distribution of expertise in relation to health.