October 2001 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

Science magazine article
by Barry Wellman 18 Feb '02

18 Feb '02

Folks, I'm delighted to alert folks to a review article I wrote in Science, reviewing work about computer networks as social networks. In addition to arguing that computer networks are social networks, it substantively focuses on how the Internet fits into everyday (nonwork) life and computer-mediated tools for knowledge acquisition and management in networked organizations. You can access this article via my website. The URL is below, just click on Publications. While you're there, feel free to sightsee some of my other recent, relevant stuff. Cheers, Barry ___________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman(a)chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 ___________________________________________________________________

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KM and CSCW in today's world
by Barry Wellman 31 Oct '01

31 Oct '01

story below Barry ___________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman(a)chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 ___________________________________________________________________ This story appeared on Network World Fusion at http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/1029collaboration.html Terrorism spurs Web collaboration effort By Carolyn Duffy Marsan Network World, 10/29/01 An obscure Web-based collaboration system under development by the State Department has caught the eye of Washington decision-makers as a possible solution to the information-sharing challenges that federal agencies face in the ongoing war against terrorism. The Overseas Presence Interagency Collaboration System was designed in response to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Currently in a prototype phase, the system would provide leading-edge knowledge management and collaboration tools over an intranet to 40 federal agencies with overseas operations, including the Defense Department, U.S. Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps. "Today, you've got 40 agencies with multiple ways of communicating. It looks like a spaghetti bowl," says Fernando Burbano, CIO of the State Department and the lead architect of the overseas Web collaboration system (See our interview with Burbano). "We want to go to a virtual knowledge management system that's secure. It's going to be available at the classified and unclassified levels." The overseas Web collaboration system entered the limelight this fall after the worst terrorist attacks ever in the U.S. State Department officials say this system is the furthest along in terms of providing the level of interagency coordination needed to respond to new threats such as the recent outbreak of anthrax. "The requirement for interagency collaboration and cooperation is paramount, not just overseas but domestically," says Anthony Muse, deputy CIO of the State Department. "Our project has been in the works for a year and half. We're not a Johnny-come-lately." In recent weeks, Burbano has briefed two Senate committees, the White House Office of Homeland Security and the Office of Management and Budget on the design and status of the overseas Web collaboration system. While this system was designed for counterterrorism initiatives, it also supports crisis coordination, law enforcement, trade relations and human rights efforts. "Even though [this system] is for foreign-affairs agencies, it's the same 40 agencies that need to communicate domestically," Burbano says. "The same software and hardware could be used." The CIOs of the 10 primary foreign-affairs agencies drafted the architecture and requirements for the overseas Web collaboration system. The system was funded last April, when Secretary of State Colin Powell allocated $17 million for a prototype and pilot test of the system as part of his agenda to upgrade the State Department's network infrastructure. In June, the State Department awarded three contracts to prototype the Web collaboration system. The winning contractors were Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), which teamed with PricewaterhouseCoopers; SRA International, which teamed with IBM; and Accenture, which teamed with General Dynamics and Booz-Allen & Hamilton. The State Department plans to select a winning contractor in January and to conduct a five-month pilot test of the system at posts in Mexico and India starting in May. The pilot test will include 2,400 users from the State Department and other agencies. The State Department will run the Web collaboration system on its OpenNet Plus architecture, which consists of 30,000 Pentium desktops and servers running Windows NT. The system will support document sharing, instant messaging, chat rooms, whiteboarding and advanced searching. "The big thing here is knowledge management. This isn't just a network," Burbano says. "What is knowledge management? In my view, it's getting the right information to the right people at the right time regardless of their location to support decision-making in a distributive fashion." The system will let users create communities of interest across agencies. Users from outside the State Department will access the system via a Web browser, and the system will be secured with public-key encryption, firewalls and intrusion-detection software. "Why do we need knowledge management at overseas posts or domestic locations? It's important because people rotate, and we lose know-how. We've got to capture best practices. And we need to find who else is working on something and who has the expertise," Burbano says. A classified version of the overseas Web collaboration system, also under development, will use the same hardware and software as the prototypes, Burbano says. Industry bidders say the system is at the forefront of applying knowledge management and collaboration techniques. "We do our own knowledge management here, but we're pushing the envelope with what we're doing in the State Department," says Meg McLaughlin, a partner at Accenture. "They are focusing on the use of commercial, off-the-shelf software, and they are making the commitment to modify their business practices instead of modifying software," she adds. Dean Thorsell, vice president of SAIC, says most federal agencies only have basic collaboration tools such as e-mail. "Just having access to shared documents over the Web is something that really takes [users] to the next step," he says. Industry sources say the overseas Web collaboration system could cost from $30 million to more than $100 million, depending on the number of software tools selected and how they are deployed. Deployment is not funded until the government's 2004 fiscal year, which begins in October 2003. But State Department officials say they could move up the schedule if money is allocated sooner. "If [Congress] moved up some money to this year and to FY03, maybe we could speed up the worldwide deployment," Burbano says. "Those things are being looked at."

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Search for Articles
by Colleen Walsh 31 Oct '01

31 Oct '01

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AoIR 2.0 Papers
by shade＠aix1.uottawa.ca 31 Oct '01

31 Oct '01

Many thanks to all AoIR participants in Minneapolis. As we did last year, we are asking people to submit their papers or abstracts so that they will be available on the web for attendees. Attendees should send the papers/presentations in html or pdf formats in their final formats (Microsoft or other unmentioned proprietary formats not mentioned as acceptable above will not work) to papers(a)aoir.org. Our Jeremy Hunsinger will work on getting these up in the near future. If you have any questions, please email me! Leslie Shade

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Survey Methodology on the WWW
by John White 31 Oct '01

31 Oct '01

All, I'm starting a lit review about conducting research on the WWW and I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I'm interested in three basic areas: 1) What are the differences between paper & pencil methods versus web (including but not limited to cost, design, response, etc) 2) What, if any, research exists regarding best practices? 3) Surprises, anecdotes, and special skills required to become a seasoned 'net researcher. I'm hoping someone will be able to identify useful content for each of these. --JW

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some more conference thoughts
by Frank Schaap 31 Oct '01

31 Oct '01

I enjoyed the conference very much, Minneapolis too, and I'm positively sure now that missing the first conference was and is a shame. Some quick thoughts on the conference though, maybe they're of use for organising the next one. I attended the pre-conference web analysis workshop and I feel that the format of that workshop worked very well. You're stuck in a room for most of the day with about 20-30 people, so you get to know eachother a little better. Working through different aspects of a particular topic also means that you get progressively more indepth and at the end of the day I felt that my thinking and understanding of the matter had been enriched by the trajectory taken in the workshop. It might be an idea to have several such day-long workshops on different topics, either as it was organised now, sort of semi-official, or maybe as a part of the conference. This ties in with something I briefly spoke about with David Silver. A lot of people work in their own niche of research and for whatever reason have never ventured into MUDs, IRC, games or database driven websites (and/or ethnographic, qualitative or quantitative research). It might be a nice idea to have something of a 'technology workshop,' where you could get a good overview of the different technologies behind the different fields/environments people research (and maybe, as the methodological icing on the cake, what methods they use). Although I understand the need for the crammed schedule of the conference, I missed a proper, organised lunch break where you can sit down, eat, relax and chat with some people. Maybe this is an American vs European thing as I discussed with some people, but having no lunch break in the programme means you either skip lunch, skip a session or attend a session munching on a sub. As they say, HTH, just my .02 euro; I liked the conference as it was and these are just a couple of things that I think might be even better next time. Frank. -- The Cyberculture, Identity and Gender Resources ==> http://fragment.nl/resources/

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Air-l digest, Vol 1 #198 - 9 msgs
by msrdssg＠fs1.ec.man.ac.uk 30 Oct '01

30 Oct '01

Sarah Green is out of the office until Monday, November 5th. If your query is urgent, please contact the Social Anthropology Office on 0161 275-4000.

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Call for collaboration in an EU project on e-democracy
by mboudour＠upatras.gr 30 Oct '01

30 Oct '01

Dear all, We are in the process of preparing a proposal for an EU RTD project on e-democracy in Europe which will be submitted into the key action of the 5th FP called Improving Human Research Potential & the Socio-economic Knowledge Base. The deadline of submission is January 15, 2002. Those interested in joining the forming consortium are kindly invited to contact me. Note that in the EU projects only organizations from the 15 European Union countries can participate. In particular, we are interested in the third theme of the above mentioned call whic is entitled: Citizenship, governance and the dynamics of European integration and enlargement This covers research on the following issues: 1. Relations between representative institutes and participatory procedures, changing role of political parties, social movements and NGOs, citizens involvement in economic and political decisions and processes. 2. Multi-level (local, regional, national, European and global) governance issues in various policy fields (such as health, labour standards, environment, organised crime etc.) in terms of the accountability of European and international institutions, assessments of constituencies and evaluations of impacts. 3. Assessment of changes in regulatory competences (including public/private sectors differences), comparative analysis of risk regulation, assessment of socio-economic impacts of regulation. 4. European citizenship's provisions analyses of legal, social, cultural etc. iterpretation of 'rights' - the role of media - new threads to established rights and their violation. 5. Prevention and early warning of and resolution of conflicts including analysis of causes, experiences of organisations and various forms of European cooperation. 6. Social, economic and cultural impacts of EU enlargement including implications for welfare systems and for social and economic cohesion and problems of integration. A few months ago we had submitted a similar proposal to an IST call. That proposal, called eGOIST, although it passed the evaluation, was not finally funded because of last minute financial shortcuts. The eGOIST proposal, which might be the basis of the new bid, is available online at: http://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/~mab/egoist/eGOISTproposal.pdf Those (from EU countries) interested in participating at the new e-democracy bid that we would like to submit to the January IHP call should contact me and indicate their interests as well as their possible contributions to the bid. Best, --Moses A. Boudourides Associate Professor Department of Mathematics University of Patras 265 00 Rio-Patras Greece Tel.: +30-61-996318 Fax: +30-61-992965 http://www.math.upatras.gr/~mboudour

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Call4papers-Finland
by Jonathan Lillie 30 Oct '01

30 Oct '01

I am organizing a session at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference June 29-July 2 in Tampere, Finland. I invite both grad students and faculty to submit papers; the session listing is posted below. If you wish to submit to the session, email a 150-word abstracts of your paper, or full papers to me; papers are due by Jan. 31. For more information about the conference, see the Crossroads web site at www.crossroads2002.com. I see this within the context of working towards or discussing the nature of a 'critical Internet Studies' per the round table talk at the conference in Minneapolis. -------------------- Doing Cultural Studies in Cyberspace Considerations of communication technologies in modern cultures have been instrumental in rise and development of Cultural Studies. Thus far, however, the scholarly response within Cultural Studies to analyzing Internet technologies has not been as strong or systematic as with (for example) television. Although a great deal of Internet- focused research has been multidisciplinary, a Cultural Studies approach has really not been achieved despite the fact that a recent wave of critical work aimed at demystifying the role of capitalism in controlling innovation, distribution, and discourse in regards to new media technologies can perhaps be seen as a beginning. What does Cultural Studies have to say (and to do) regarding the growing presence of Internet technologies in the everyday lives of many people in communities around the world? Papers that explore the contextualities and contingencies of Internet use and those that explore the role of Cultural Studies in rearticulating 'cyberculture studies' or 'cyberspace' in general are invited for participation in this panel. Organiser: Jonathan Lillie The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Journalism and Mass Communication 129 Windsor Cir. Chapel Hill North Carolina, USA 27516 E-mail: jlillie(a)email.unc.edu

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call for proposals - invitation
by radhika gajjala 30 Oct '01

30 Oct '01

Hi all, I am putting together a special issue on cyberfeminism for the online journal Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge at http://www.rhizomes.net/ It occurs to me that there are several in this group who might have interesting (multimediated) contributions to make to such an issue. If you have a proposal for a contribution - please email me at radhika(a)cyberdiva.org with your thoughts and ideas for a piece. I would like to have these ideas in by the end of November 2001, so a selection can be made. feel free to pass this info on to anyone you think might be interested. thanks, radhika ___________ Radhika Gajjala http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik http://www.cyberdiva.org http://lingua.utdallas.edu:7000/4425/ __________

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