Topics

This page is for topics that we have not yet scheduled (but potentially should). Please add suggestions to the bottom of this page, and feel free to modify the descriptions for topics already listed.

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?

Meta-Public Policy

See, e.g., Larry Lessig's Change Congress movement: http://change-congress.org/about/. Being Larry Lessig, the whole thing is tech-friendly.

Online Activism

Of course there are a lot of custom-built tools for mobilizing people online to get things done in the real world. On the other hand, what about more general tools? We've all been invited, via Facebook, to join groups and attend events (the Obama campaign certainly made good use of this); is there a generalizable model here?

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.)

Open Source Software

How can a dispersed, multilingual collection of coders working for free assemble something as complicated as a web browser, let alone an entire operating system? Open-source projects are famously free-wheeling, but different organizational models and tools have sprung up to solve these obstacles.

Internet Governance

Much like open-source software, the Internet can be considered a collection of servers, pipes, and users spread all over the world. How does it keep working? One easy answer is that the United States (through actors public and private) just sort of gets its way. This isn't really a satisfying answer descriptively or normatively, though. With the rest of the world contributing more and more to the Internet as a whole, is it time for a change?

Other

Deliberative polling literature

In a nutshell, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_opinion_poll

Deliberation Day

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

Peer-to-Patent

See http://www.peertopatent.org/

Collaborative Textbooks

Maybe also Harvard's new open access policy for academic work?

Chillingeffects.org

And other, similar layman-focused legal projects