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Tobias Escher at the OII: eDemocracy at work - A user perspective on WriteToThem.comNovember 17

At last week’s eDemocracy’08 I talked about the users of WriteToThem.com and their experience when trying to communicate with their political representatives because this is what WriteToThem is about - making it easy for people to find out their representatives (councillor, members of parliament, etc) and sending them an email.

The truly amazing finding is that people who use the site are not the ones who are already politically engaged and organized. Those are using the site too but many have never before contacted their representative and most are not politically active at all - so here we observe a clear effect of engagement as the site activates people to participate politically who have not done so before.

Another interesting finding is that many citizens make very positive experiences when using the site to contact their representatives. Given a general climate of distrust between represented and representatives many user comments indicate a profound surprise at the respect and help they receive from their politicians. Crucially we can observe that the online experiences do at times translate into political participation offline e.g. in the form of voting as the quote below nicely illustrates:

“Mr [name of representative] went above and beyond what I expected to get, I thought I woul

Ian Brown: Internet! Panic!November 16

It seems that former Home Secretary John Reid has only just discovered some of the Internet scare stories of the 1990s. He tells the Daily Telegraph breathlessly:

"We have to recognise that on the net you can practically get the full DNA of the First World War flu that killed 24 million people."

If Mr Reid had taken the time to read any of the literature on this subject, he might realise that there is more to weaponising flu, anthrax and other biological agents than finding usually-inaccurate sets of instructions or DNA sequences online. He could start with Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation, first published in 2000. For an update he could even read my Terrorism and the Proportionality of Internet Surveillance. Maybe he should have done this before he started making policy in this area as Home Secretary.

I am slightly embarrassed to see that University College London is to host Reid's new thinktank, the Institute of Security and Resilience Studies.

Ian Brown: NHS medical research plan threatens patient privacyNovember 16

Vive la resistance! Following the Home Office, it seems Department of Health insiders are now also realising that gross invasions of privacy are not a magic solution to every social ill.

Harry Cayton, chair of the new National Information Governance Board for Health and Social Care, has told the government to quash plans to share patient records with researchers without consent:

There is pressure from researchers and from the prime minister to beef up UK research. They think of it as boosting UK Research plc. They want a mechanism by which people's clinical records could be accessed for the purposes of inviting them to take part in research, which at the moment is not allowed. I think that would be a backward step.

It would be saying there is a public interest in research that is so great that it overrides consent and confidentiality. That is not a proposition that holds up.

We believe this is a breach of good practice in confid

Han-Teng Liao: Unemployment and User-Generated ContentNovember 16

It has been established that (at least in US) the fluctuations in the unemployment rate is highly correlated with those in graduate student enrollment. What about user-generated content? Will the economic downturn and rising unemployment rate increase or decrease the user-generated content activities?

Such a question has been raised at Freakonomics. Though I personally find Andrew Keen’s suggestion that it could mean the end of free content on the internet unlikely, as the phrase “free content” in China does not necessarily mean “user-generated content”, “unprotected content”, or “un-copyrighted material”, I do believe such a question needs further reformulation. Given the dire economic situation, it is also worth the effort for a PhD student like me to suspend my day job for a moment and contribute to the “free content” here.

Let’s start with the recent news that Jerry Yang, the co-founder and CEO of Yahoo, might be unemployed before Christmas this year, at least according to the verdict of the Economist. While Yang is the symbol of first-wave Internet entrepreneur (and also a Taiwanese like me), Yahoo seems to be relativel

Anne-Marie Oostveen: Call for PapersNovember 13

If you are you doing interesting research on eGovernment issues you might want to consider submitting a paper to the International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR). As an editorial board member of this journal I have been asked to encourage my colleagues and contacts to send in their manuscripts. The IJEGR journal is looking for submissions that reflect the wide and interdisciplinary nature of e-government as a subject and manuscripts that integrate technological disciplines with social, contextual and management issues. For a list of possible topics, please take a look at the Call for Papers.

I am quite pleased about the fact that apparently more and more researchers seem to focus their studies on citizen needs. Editor-in-Chief Prof. Vishanth Weerakkody from Brunel University says:

“Most of the recent articles submitted to IJEGR have focused on adoption and diffusion issues of e-government services from a citizen’s perspective. This shows that the user related issues are very important and are treated as high priority by researchers.  This is particularly important as earlier e-government research (from 2001 to around 2005/6) has largely focused on the organizational and implementation side of e-government, while the focus is now shifting to adoption and diffusion from