Findings
Civic Hall is tracking how new movements organize and communicate during rapid growth. Reports from six groups suggest that everyone is using everyday tools to communicate, but no one is satisfied with them.
Meta data and data format are the most important characteristics of open government data for African media practitioners, according to survey administered in 5 African countries (n=198).
Americans like their government digital, according to a survey of digital service users (n=4,584 in Q4 of 2016). The report noted digital consumer satisfaction 2 percentage points higher than non-digital satisfaction, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but is a big change. Breitbart changed the media landscape and set the political agenda in the US election. This according to a study of 1.25 million stories published over an 8 month period, which explains how a “distinct and insulated media system” was able to re-position the poles of debate.
@Comparitech ranked countries by cyber security and internet freedom. The Scandis came out on top, Poland and Brazil land at bottom.
Community
Cardiff University has launched a Data Justice Lab for research and collaboration, that will do ” research that engages with data analytics from a social justice perspective.” Find them at @DataJusticeLab.
The Mask and the Flag is a new book about how contemporary protests combine ethos of anarchy and populism, building on 140 interviews with activists and witnesses. Meanwhile, a new report from @jwyg & @DanLammerhirt presents and summarizes six cases of civil society using cities’ public data infrastructures and @Bloggs74 presents evidence that the policy impact of research depends more on relationships than content.
New book: Digital Media Integration for Participatory Democracy is an expensive and hodgepodge collection of random articles.
All the useful resources:
- The Engine Room used research on civil society tool selection in 3 African countries to produce a practical tool. Alidade helps organizations choose the right tech tool. Applied research for the win. And it’s pretty too. But do you pronounce it like lemonade or like Alibaba?
- Delft University of Technology is launching a free MOOC on Open Government
- Research4Impact is a new match-making website for researchers and practitioners. Watch this space.
Academic Opps
CMPF Summer School 2016: Journalism in the Digital Age (fake news and propaganda) (Deadline: 5 Apr. Event: 5-9 June, Florence)
Journal of Alternative and Community Media is accepting proposals for special issues.
Calls for papers:
- Mixing Pop and Politics: Subversion, Resistance and Reconciliation in Popular Music (Deadline: 1 June. Event: 4-6 Dec, New Zealand)
- Risk and Crisis Communication in the Digital Age, International Crisis Communication Conference (Deadline: 9 Jun. Event: 19-21 Oct, Lisbon)
- Community and Creative Research. Developing Participatory Methodologies (special issue of Conjunctions, deadline 15 Aug)
Miscellanea & Absurdum
It was International Women’s Day last week, some of my favorites:
- updated bibliography for gender bias in the academe
- @Morchickit reflects on one year on Slack talking with women about being women in the world of open data
- @EngnRoom curated a list of feminist resources for a safer net
- Aili Mari Tripp explores the absurd way that violent conflict improves political gender equality, likely because there’s fewer men around to obstruct it.
- World Bank blog describes a meta review of 18 experiments suggesting that despite lots of second order gender differences in the workplace (having to do with risk aversion, approaches to competition, etc), women and men do not respond differently to performance pay incentives. Interesting.
- LA times surveys marches and boycotts in the US
In other news:
- Consumer Reports to consider cyber security in product reviews (headline from Reuters)
- Warrants to search Facebook pages are a new site of legal throwdown. That seems positive.
- There’s now a TV series about crowdsourced science
- John Grimwade catalogues visualization tools from the analogue era. Beautiful.
- A scientific examination of the garbage Trump posts on Jared and Ivanka’s day of rest (from Slate, spoiler, suspicions confirmed).
