October , 2002 Report of the a.o.i.r. executive committee Prepared by Nancy Baym AoIR Executive Committee President: Nancy Baym Vice-President: Matthew Allen Secretary: Ulla Bunz Treasurer: Benjamin Bates Open Seats: Radhika Gajjala and Annette Markham Appointed Seats: Monica Murero and Randolph Kluver Student Seat: Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki Publications Officers: Jeremy Hunsinger and Charlie Breindahl Past President (ex-officio): Steve Jones 2004 Conference Chair: Kate O'Riordan Ethics Working Group Chair: Charles Ess 1. Introduction & General (Baym) This is the place to find out what's going on in the association. It's long, it's not always thrilling, but it's always the best way for you to keep up so please read it! Our 24/7 discussions of the month on the executive committee mailing list are summarized in Ulla Bunz's section of the report, 2004 Conference Host Kate O'Riordan provides a Sussex overview in the conference chair report below, and Charles Ess keeps us posted on ethics. All this and more! Read on... 2. Executive Officers' Reports 2.1 President (Baym) 2.1.1 I'm thrilled to be taking over as president and want to thank the outgoing executive committee and everyone involved in making our Toronto conference a success. As this report is long enough already, I am posting more commentary under separate cover. 2.2 Vice President (Allen) 2.2.1 Matthew Allen completed his work as Program Chair for the conference, and would like to thank all the presenters, participants, organisers and volunteers who, truly, made it a great conference. He was honoured to have worked with such a great band of scholars and found the program work to be most enjoyable. Taking over as vice-president, Matthew will do some work on reviewing the experience of 2003 and planning future conference approaches, and developing some of the ideas proposed at the Internet Studies roundtable concerning information sharing on courses of study in Internet Studies. 2.3 Secretary (Bunz) 2.3.1 In the past few weeks I've prodded repeatedly to make the t-shirts happen, and chirped in on air-exec to advance members' interests. I've also ordered awards five awards plaques and the gavel for Steve and lugged them to Canada. At the conference I took 19 pages of notes that I'm transforming into the minutes of the outgoing executive meeting, the incoming executive meeting (both submitted to air-exec), and the general meeting (submitted to air-l). I also chaired the editors roundtable and gave a presentation. In addition I modeled the AoIR t-shirts and had an awesome time meeting old and new friends. This month on the Executive Listserve September 13 - October 25, 2003: - The exec did last-minute scheduling for various meetings. - The http://www.cafepress.com/aoir shop opened where you can purchase air-wear, mugs, bags, and other goodies. The exec members were rather excited about this and ordered lots of stuff! - After much discussion about various options, Barry Wellman took on the task of getting local t-shirts and shirts for the Toronto volunteers. - The exec began discussing various possible program chairs for the 2004 conference in Sussex, England and sent out a call for nominations. In the process the exec decided that in the future, neither the program nor the conference chair should be an exec member at the same time, as this creates conflict of roles. The exec also discussed the controversial issue of whether one should give a relatively "young" (academically speaking) person the program chair job to support new talent, or whether one should give a more "old" (academically experienced) person this task. Overall, there was a tendency toward the experienced person. The exec also began discussing other means of organizing conferences. - The exec rejected an offered partnership with another organization as there didn't seem to be enough shared interests. - Program chair Matt Allen shared with us last minute scheduling updates such as memorial sessions for Rob Kling and Neil Postman, and other panel rescheduling requested. - The exec coordinated about who should get what kind of "thank-you" gifts at the conference. - Since the conference, we've mostly shared conference feedback with each other and we welcome any more feedback from anyone. Meetings of the General Meeting have been posted to air-l in a separate message. 2.4 Treasurer (Bates) 2.4.1 Dealing with conference registrations and membership renewals. 2.5 Open Seats (Gajjala, Markham) 2.5.1 Gajjala: The Postcolonial Feminists Meet Internet Studies precon workshop went off well. We had productive discussions. We plan to have follow-up panel(s) for Sussex. Thanks to all the people who participated and shared and thanks to the local organizers and volunteers at Toronto for making it happen. The blogging for this is continuing and anyone interested in joining should email me (radhika@cyberdiva.org). During in-between panel session coffee breaks, there was discussion about increasing panels related to race, gender, sexuality, disability and so on. Tara Mcpherson, Michelle White, David Silver, Jillana Enteen, Jasjit Sangha and Trudy Rawlins among others had a few suggestions which I plan to follow up on. Also, during Brunch on Sunday, several interesting panel ideas for Sussex were discussed (at our brunch table over coffee, omelettes, bagels, cream cheese, ketchup and jam (there was an occasional fruit consumed). 2.5.2 Markham: Radhika Gajjala and I, the two members occupying the role of "open seat" on the exec committee, met at the Toronto conference to discuss our goals and brainstorm ways that we can combine our resources to work toward our specific goals. I also met with multiple association members to get an initial and grounded sense of what they envision the organization to be and what they wanted the organization to help them with. To many members, I posed the question, "What sort of collaborative research agendas or big projects woud you like the association to facilitate?" Radhika and I intend to follow up on this informal information gathering with more formal requests for information from the membership. 2.6 Appointed Seats (Murero, Kluver) 2.6.1 Murero: After serving AoIR as conference chair in Maastricht (NL) I feel very honored to be appointed by the executive committee to cover the "appointed seat" for the next 2 years. I am sure I'll learn a lot, and have the honor to assist the association in continuing to grow and develop internationally. Please feel free to contact me anytime for any questions or suggestions at murero@eircom.net or monica.murero@infonomics.nl . I also would like to sincerely thank and congratulate the former members of the exec committee, friends David Silver, Berry Wellman and Leslie Shade. The members of the new committee are a fabulous group to work with, under Nancy Baym's presidency. We have already started working on next year's conference!!!!!! As Romans used to say "dulcis in fundo" : I'd like to address a very sincere thank you to everyone who helped making AoIR 4 in Toronto a "broadband" reality. 2.6.2 Kluver: I am grateful for the opportunity to work with AoIR in the capacity of appointed member of the executive committee. Special thanks to the Toronto organizers, who put together a great event, and Matt Allen, who put together a tremendous program! I enjoyed seeing old friends and meeting new ones. My goals for my time on the Executive committee are to participate in any way that I can to strengthen the organization and highlight its unique role in the academic community, and to strengthen collaborative research between other Asia-based Internet researchers and the vibrant research community that is AoIR. 2.7 Student Seat (Tkach-Kawaski) 2.7.1 First of all, I want to thank all the AoIR members for their support of my election as grad rep. I am very enthusiastic about taking this on and look forward to working with my fellow graduate students and the AoIR exec over the next two years. I also want to thank Lisbeth Klastrup for forwarding various pieces of information to me about the position and what has been done to date. About ten students attended the grad students' meeting at AoIR 4.0 in Toronto, and I had the opportunity to talk informally with about 10 or 12 students at other times during the conference. During our formal meeting, attendees indicated that they would like more dialogue concerning a combination of methodological and academic issues. We brainstormed a number of ideas, which I will be researching in more detail over the coming weeks. Jeremy has forwarded information to me concerning the grad students list, and I will be attending to that as well when I return to Japan (which will be October 28 or 29, depending on your time zone). 2.8 Publications Officers (Hunsinger, Breindahl) 2.8.1 Hunsinger: helped with the last minute conference preparations helped at the conference where needed helped a bunch of people renew and register helped charlie put up the papers went to conference meetings missed charlie at the conference had a good time otherwise at the conference and probably other things. 2.8.2 Breindahl: I have been busy updating the member's area with papers from the conference (still not quite finished). Also still fighting a tidal wave of spam to our lists. 2.9 Past-President (Jones): I'm looking forward to helping AoIR in any way that I can and to seeing its new leadership move it forward. 2.10 2004 Conference Chair (Kate O'Riordan) 2.10.1 Location and context: The University of Sussex is on the South Coast of the UK, in the countryside of the Sussex Downs. It is just outside the coastal city of Brighton and Hove and very close to London. The University website is at www.sussex.ac.uk. We are really excited about the AoIR conference coming here and faculty, and postgraduate students alike are involved in the planning. The City of Brighton and Hove is a centre for new media companies, digital arts exhibition and training and community internet projects and the University houses an innovation centre in partnership with local businesses. Digital media production and theory, internet studies, learning technologies and programming are all significant parts of the curriculum and departments across the arts and science schools have interests in the AoIR organisation and conference. Planning: The conference planning is underway with capacity already booked and campus accommodation on hold for September 19-22nd of 2004. The conference will be campus based and all the sessions, accommodation and catering will be available on campus, although delegates will also have good opportunities to visit Brighton. I am working on the detailed budget at the moment and I have already submitted a draft expenditure forecast to the exec. Themes and content: These have not been finalised but I would like the theme to be focused around ubiquitous and embedded communication technologies in practice and theory. I look forward to working with colleagues to develop this further. AoIR conferences have always been show-cases for established and emerging expertise in Internet research and the conference content will as always, be owned by the members of the organisation. I look forward to helping to organise the framework for this to happen again. Challenges and Help: Fund raising will be a major challenge! In addition to this issue I would also welcome suggestions and support around the development of the planning and I look forward to working with the programme chair and other members of AoIR and the University of Sussex on this. 2.11 AoIR Ethics Working Group (Charles Ess, Chair) 2.11.1 The AoIR ethics committee was well represented at the AoIR 4.0 Preconference Workshop on Internet Research Ethics. Committee members Jeremy Hunsinger and Michele White served as presenters and Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Leslie Tkach Kawasaki helped facilitate discussion. We also heard from Keren Rice (Social Science and Humanities Working Committee, Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics, Canada) who gave us a Canadian perspective on research ethics - and from Elizabeth Buchanan, editor of the forthcoming volume, Readings in Virtual Research Ethics: Issues and Controversies, who gave us an excellent overview of U.S. IRB / human subjects protection issues and resources. From my perspective, the workshop was useful not only as it provided a conversation space in which questions and useful resources were shared, but also because the presentations and discussions helped us move forward a bit in appreciating additional complexities in discerning the appropriate response in the face of various ethical issues encountered in research - including: * how our re-presentation of computers, screens, avatars, etc., may work to incline us towards spatial frameworks and embodied models of self-identity online, even when dealing with humanities-based research methods, thereby inclining us towards Human Subjects protection models, rather than models perhaps more appropriate to humanities' methodologies (thank you, Michele!); * how advances in technology make the very notion of privacy on the Internet a highly questionable one (if you haven't seen Jeremy Hunsinger's slides on this point, look them up on the AoIR conference website - and be afraid; be very, very afraid...); * however far IRBs in the U.S. context and their equivalents around the world, and researchers may have come in acquiring resources and insights into dealing with various ethical issues (Keren Rice, Elizabeth Buchanan) - and while many that now crop up have a certain familiarity to them - there is still plenty more to do, e.g. # as IRBs and their equivalents beyond the U.S. experience increasing pressure from their institutions to protect their legal backside (a technical term, I believe), # as IRBs and their equivalents beyond the U.S. raise new questions that force us to reexaming prevailing definitions of basic ethical notions such as "harm" (e.g., is issuing informed consent _itself_ possibly capable of inflicting some sort of 'harm'?) and # as researchers move into new territories that have little or no ethical counterparts in either previous online research guidelines and/or in offline analogues - e.g., the example given to me by a conference participant of a research project that involved not only recording online behavior but also using video to record face-to-face interactions. The latter moves us firmly _outside_ the venues we have been considering and likely has very different codes and traditions to take into account: how do we responsibly conjoin these two together? In any case, we are hoping these conversations continue. As well, AoIR members will have seen that I've issued a request for accounts of researchers' encounters with IRBs and/or their equivalents outside the U.S. The hope is to collect enough case studies here both for discussion and so that we can refer future queries to these as something of the equivalent of precendent. In addition, we're hoping to start documenting where the AoIR guidelines are already being used by researchers and/or their institutional oversight authorities. So keep those cards and letters coming...: <chess@itu.dk> Next-to-finally: because of the usual attrition on the committee, we will consider adding a few more new members this year, especially with an eye towards international representation. If anyone would like to be considered, they should contact me. Finally, it seems clear from AoIR 4.0 that the interest in ethics is only growing stronger. As I've noted on the list, this year alone will see the publication of at least three volumes dealing with Internet research ethics - and I know that additional conferences and publications are in the works. In particular, there seems to be a growing awareness that one's methodology involves specific ethical commitments and issues: to choose a methodology is to choose an ethics, and vice-versa. So I'm hoping to organize one or more panels next year at AoIR 5.0 that will provide us with a variety of approaches to matters ethical - including, for example, a panel on the ethics/methodology interface; one on dealing with IRBs and their equivalents - especially for new researchers; and perhaps one reviewing recent literature on Internet Research Ethics. If anyone is interested in these - and/or has other ideas - please let me know. -- Charles Ess, chair AoIR ethics working group email: chess@itu.dk