Topics

This page is for topics that we have not yet scheduled (but potentially should). Please add suggestions to the bottom of this page.

Discourse theory

We should do a survey overview of the topic.

Discursive tools and practices

We should do a survey overview of the topic.

Anonymity

"on the internet, nobody knows that you're a dog." Or tall, or 12 years old, or a hairdresser by day, or a lesbian, or in India, or with a harelip, or... but also: now that we can't filter by that by default, what do we filter by? Do we now bias towards good writers - and what of people who communicate best non-verbally?

Sources

Where does the information for/during discussions come from? Interfaces/ease-of-access/digestibility of information affects how quickly it can get injected into conversations? (examples: hitting wikipedia in the middle of a dinner discussion, calling an expert friend or hitting another IRC channel to answer a quick question, etc). How does this affect how people prepare for conversations? (If you can easily look up notes during the meeting, why take them down beforehand?) Trying to apply some thoughts about info access in libraries to this.

Identity and expertise

How are participants in an internet dialog identified and credentialed? What gives weight to a participants' arguments - or phrased another way, what type of participants and arguments have weight, and what determines this for each discussion, participant, and discussion point?

Socio-technical gap

Problems encountered in the act of discoursing itself are sometimes addressed via social means, technological means, or both. It has been suggested that technological tools should support social processes, but there is an adaptation of each realm to the other - how does this back-and-forth take place in the design of a successful technology-enabled discussion?

Deliberation Day

The paper on the study, and where similar effects re: citizen participation may be seen.

The first USA CTO

President-elect Obama's promise to appoint the first USA CTO has turned many heads, and discussions on what the (as of yet unappointed) CTO should do have started up, notably at http://obamacto.org/. Several other related links not purely focused on "US CTO" issues:

• http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/32788/presidential_transition_2_0_how_to_use_new_social_media
• http://www.govloop.com/

Unconferences

Unconferences represent a form of event-based discourse that seems chaotic but is actually organized around a set of well-codified rules intended to encourage initiative-taking by participants and ensure that the event is truly community-run and ad-hoc. Also known as "Open Space" events, they take several different forms, including Barcamps (which have been expanded to podcamps, etc.)