Science and Industry

In previous text, I discussed mainly on Jyrki Kasvi’s presentation of information society. In this part, I will look closer on group works done. I participated to a group that had a topic of stimulating the dialogue between citizens and administration.

One interesting aspect presented there was change in citizenship: unlike most political scientist discuss{{Usually when this discussion starts, people do mean the conventional participation. This doesn’t mean that the actual participation}}, there might be active and strong civic society coming up and engaging in discussion with politicians and administration. Actually, these new communication tools make taking contacts easier. Actually, some of the recent Finnish social movements like Porkkanamafia and the demonstration against Lex Nokia use these new media to get citizens involved.

Secondly, many representatives from administration agreed that data does exist in the system, but the problem is more what to do with it and how to use it. Actually, administration people said that they don’t want to ask abstract question as they tend to get tricky. The want to keep it simple for all of us to participate – and I fully see why.

Thirdly, they also think opening their data storages here. Not part of administration but still publicly owned, YLE, has been doing this kind of work previously. Some of the participants demonstrated how they already know use provide their data for public use. I of course spoke about open APIs and how important they are to broader the developer base. Let’s hope someone listened…

I attended today a workshop arranged by Somus-program. The aim of the workshop was to get familiar with the use of social media in governmental context. I think they invited me due to my still unfinished bachelor work that looks at administration and what internal problems there are to extend e-Participation deeper there.

The day begun with Jyrki Kasvi and his presentation related to evolution of information society. Actually, what I consider remarkable was four different (rather trivial when one considers it now) use cases of ICT in civic society context:

1. to deliver messages to administration
2. to support the work of administration and political parts
3. to deliver the information back to citizens
4. to support civic discussion

One can easily see society can be in different level of preparedness with these topics. Thus, when we speak of Web2.0 in civic society context, the topic is huge; we need to define what we mean with this.

Secondly, actually one of the themes that popped up again and again, we need to think what we mean with democracy. Our current representative democracy and its philosophical background are based on aggeration of views. What if this change and we do not need a middle layer to aggerate these opinions? If we move to a new direct society, what must go? Out legal framework is slow and one could even speak of oligarchy as specialists have a specific role in the process.

Thirdly, the media has a huge role in creation of reality. Actually, media creates the reality where we live. At least used to create; now day’s active citizens have their own ways of presenting their voices and even become more popular than the official media. People will look alternative sources of information also and the truth becomes nontrivial. But, still, there may be media divide; as Kasvi demonstrated it: CNN people vs. FOX people and topic of Iraq.

Summa summarum, the context, i.e. culture, where we live is important to our current political live. Moreover, the culture of ours is at the moment in some sort of breaking point: as social media became main stream some concepts changed. We thus need to rethink quite many things and thus define the ways we work again. What is representativeness in e-Society, is it just the voices of the loud ones. More precisely, who makes the decisions and how they are made. I think Mr. Kasvi used interesting phrase “return of active citizenship.”

But this is already a huge post. So, more on the part II — I try to read my own notes from the workshop part. Those who want to read more from the presentations, please refer to this Jaiku. It is in Finnish only, sorry of that.