Anyone who has traveled the highways of America and has gotten used to the normal height of overpasses may well find something a little odd about some of the bridges over the park ways on Long Island, New York. Many of the overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet of clearance at the curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural peculiarity would not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In our accustomed way of looking at things such as roads and bridges, we see the details of form as innocuous and seldom give them a second thought.

It turns out, however, that some two hundred or so low- hanging overpasses on Long Island are there for a reason. They were deliberately designed and built that way by someone who wanted to achieve a particular social effect. Robert Moses, the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and other public works of the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, built his overpasses ac cording to specifications that would discourage the presence of buses on his parkways.

As an example, organization might deliberately plan the expense claim application unusable, hoping that the employees feel frustrated and do not submit their travel expenses¹. Or, in case of election candidates, decisions have been made either to allow or disable interactive dialogue in candidate’s site (as an example, see Stromer-Galley, 2000). And, in voting advice applications, someone has made decisions about the questions and answer options available (see Haukio & Suojanen, 2004).

So, there are decisions and therefore power structures in the online environments. Lukes (1974) discusses on the three faces of the power²:

1. Dahl’s view of direct power relation
2. The extended view, including the powers of the agenda setting
3. Lukes’s view of power also visible in the cultural frames and preference settings

The power in system design can be seen as an instance of the second face of power, it relates to the possibility to decide how discussion and decision making of any given item is made. This, however, is not a surprising observation, similarly traditional media has these kinds of powers, and this has been examined in that area widely, such as the ‘power of the media’-discussion.

Therefore, the question remains, is there anything worth studying. As one colleague pointed to me, I can reveal that there are power relations in the design, then what? Can I use this to make the world a better place or even provide some design and implementation guidelines for organizations? This is the place I still need to ponder, what is the potential contribution of this work?

1. This example is just to illustrate the powers of design and should not be considered as a critic.
2. Now I actually start to see the utility of political philosophy, maybe I should revisit some of the materials to further my knowledge and thinking here – I took a heavy focus in research methodologies instead.

So, I returned to the past, but why? William Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute visited Helsinki to make observations about his new article on research-centered computational networks. However, what I thought to be more interesting was the difference he made on networked institutions and networked individuals.

The more Internet orientated social scientists had a meeting before Dutton gave his presentation, and we went trough what we study and how the OII functions. Dutton made an observation that in e-democracy field research tends to focus on networked institutions.

With networked institutions, Dutton meant maintaining and empowering the existing structures with the capabilities of computer networks. An example of this might be the university, which maintains its academic status by creating institutional support services, such as blogs, document repositories, …

However, as I understood it, Dutton’s argument was that information and communication technology could go further and redistribute the power currently held in the structures. As the Web enables one to publish and collaborate without the middleman, Dutton’s idea is that individuals should be studied as part of the networking society too.

In terms of e-democracy research, some terms already cover these topics. New social movement is the most obvious for me: it studies how humans group together and act on a common cause, but they are not organized as an institution. Concept ‘reflective action’ can also be used to describe the phenomena: reflective actors use network technology to advocate their agenda. However, as Dutton observed, lots of effort goes to understanding and prototyping the use of technology for institutions, the existing structures – not focusing on re-inventing new systems that could allow more direct responsibility.

This is just one sample of the structure vs. agency-fight, ongoing in the social sciences. And, as in most cases, this is not a black-white question; rather there are grey colors too. So, both of these views of the world have explanatory powers, and in the best case they should be used together to create a more complete picture. And the presentation was a good reminder for me of the methodology lecture I had totally forgotten.

Well, I don’t attend conferences just to get one SPSS-file, there more in this. I’m currently working with Nokia to solve some of the threats and risks caused by children’s using Internet and connected context-aware handheld devices, or simply put: mobile phones and other gadgets. Based on my current understanding of this phenomenon, the key tools are to increase mediation with parents and peers and to develop media literacy and coping skills in this new World2.0.

As well pointed out by Kuno Sorensen: as we teach our children on traffic and correct behaviors there, we should teach the basics of mediated environments and communication in same way. And, I believe this can be achieved by increasing the interactions and guidance children receive when growing up.

Now you ask: “Well, Matti – that model is a nice sounding idea, but does that really happen … or is this just a daydream?” That is a good point, and requiring evidence is only sensible thing to do. I don’t know if mediation and support affect on the experiences of harm, it sounds valid and sound. But, after getting my hands on the File, I can run some of statistical analysis and see, if this makes sense with data too.

As we all know, the mobile application market has boomed, mainly due to iOS and Anrdoid-systems and the online market places they have. However, what I haven’t seen yet is a study on the application use and lifetime in a more broad manner. I remember seeing in an paper in the Pervasive 2010 about one game and the usage patterns of it. But, we don’t know so much on how the applications are used, in what situations they are used and more focused, why are they used. We know… they are used.

Böhmer et al. suggest a new sensor type called appsensor, only to focus on application and use of them. This allows us to go deeper in the use, just seeing what applications are popular at what time and what places — like done in the paper. Naturally, one can figure out more uses for appsensors — self organizing maps, data mining, … all the cool applications. Maybe I briefly highlight some aspects observed in this study to demonstrate the value.

Firstly, the sample is based on 4 000 something Android users, mostly from the states. They use all applications about one hour per day, and an average time application is opend… is 72 seconds. Short time… The core functionalities of traditional phones are used even more shortly: communication 47 seconds, maps 45 seconds, productivity — like calender — 61 secs. The “new” emerging things, multimedia, browsers, games, lifestyle apps, clearly are in the better side: 83 secs, 74 secs, 114 secs and 168 secs.

There are spikes when specific application categories become more important: tools category is popular around 6 am to 8 am, communication apps dominate the use 11 am till 8 pm and games are played during the evening. And location affects this too, some apps are popular in airports, and there are differences between Europeans and US users.

In general, what the results indicate is that we can build smarter smartphones. Instead of being a multipurpose device, it seems that certain patterns exists and the next step would be to facilitate these. And, for science — now this data was anonymized, can more data of users make us see even more. Especially this data is important, as similar kind of data surely exists in the HQs of Apple, Google and Nokia: we need to understand what that means as a privacy question.

However, I’ve now started focusing on the ethics of research. I do know the world around us, particulally the US, is way ahead in this area. The situation here in Finland is somewhat more open: in social sciences we do not have ethics review committees and therefore role of researcher is more important when choosing whether something can and should be done.

Unluckily, my master’s degree doesn’t include any research ethics. I don’t know the situation in other universities, but I do assume that real talk of research ethics starts in post-graduate studies. So, here’s some good hints for those still working with the Master’s degree and planning to analyze something related to online life – this may be blogs, IRC-channels, communities, websites, …

The first thing one should check is the Association of Internet Researchers’ ethical guideline (2002). The guideline provides a set of questions relevant for making decisions, however it does not provide many practical hints. For those, one needs to search the extensive literature, also collected in the ethical guideline.

One reference I’ve used is Sharf ‘s (1999) observations. She has five guides for everyone studying online communities:

1. the effects of the research should be evaluated throughout the research period
2. the researcher should inform the community about his research and the purposes of it
3. researcher should get consent from the participants
4. the participants should be allowed to review and comment the research
5. the privacy and wellbeing of the virtual community should be maintained even during the research

These outline rather well the special nature of Internet research: you may be observing people who do not know they are being observed, like they are among friends. The community may include topics participants are not comfortable to discuss if their identity is known by wider audience. So, us, as researchers should make sure that we do not hurt the communities and the people we aim to study.

However, now I’m again working in the ICT domain, in the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Aalto-university. As a Finnish man, I’m required to either do military or non-military service, from 6 months to 12 months of duty. I’ve selected the non-military service and HIIT was kind enough to provide me a position for this duty.

My current work focuses in political participation and voting advice applications (more of these some day, hopefully…), children and media and further inquiry to playfulness as a design concept. And, maybe some other tasks also.

My uttermost experience is that the platform is still half way there. The API access is not so good that I wished it to be, and actually my initial application idea cannot be implemented in Windows Phone 7 as I don’t have access to data. Let’s just hope that there will be significant progress in this area. For this post, I share some of the core experiences.

Launchers and chooser kill innovations

Microsoft has decided accessing core mobile phone functionalities, such as sending a SMS or picking a contact, must be done via openers and choosers. The main argument for this design decision is security, this way 3rd party application developers can’t do anything nasty with users’ data or use costly features.

I accept the security comments, however the problem that this practice means I don’t control the interaction flow and in the end it means I cannot create a holistic experience. As an example, an application that would send an SMS automatically is impossible, you need to use a specific launcher and wait for user’s to press send button. However, for a taxi ordering application I would make the user flow so simple that user just needs to press one big button. You know – Friday evening and you’re hardly standing…

Second comment for this is, that the choosers and openers may be designed for a specific purpose only and not kept in mind we, the developers, might want to do hacks and things like that. Here a good example is contact chooser, or as they put it: EmailAddressChooserTask or PhoneNumberChooserTask. What if I would want to use the profile icon from contacts? Why isn’t there just a ContactChooserTask that would return me a contact object?

C# has inconsistencies

One thing I observed was language inconsistencies in C#. This sounds like a small thing and surely it is a minor detail. However, let me just pinpoint this, as I got some gray hairs from this:

Let’s assume you want to disable a button. It’s done by button.IsEnabled = false;
Now let’s also assume you want to make the button invisible. How would you do it? button.IsVisible = false; would be my first guess, but no. It is button.Visibility = false;

Gimme beautiful and powerful UI widgets!

However, syntax is always syntax. Let’s not worry about that. However, based on my experience, making a beautiful interface with fancy animations and nicely shaped elements requires “a few” additional steps. And, unluckily these additional steps meant for me that there were no fancy effects or dialog box or anything else cool. If you wish to get some deeper understanding, look at iOS guidelines.

Conclusions: Quick and Dirty

Based on this experience, the toolkit allows quick and dirty applications, but building “a proper” application might be more complicated. There’re cool ideas, such as the application being just XAML pages and that data can be binded to interface.

However, the overall experience is that things are dirty hacks that are kept together with glue. And, it’s not a good feeling for serious application developers.

But, let’s return to the topic of this post. Previously I promised to return to my first research question, which claimed that

the institutionalization process of the hosting organization creates less participatory environment in the organization. This will also affect the web presence, making it less participatory.

Based on the analysis of two newer organizations in my dataset, ATTAC and Roska päivässä-liike, mixed evidence appears. There have been minor shifts in ATTAC’s online presence, which went from participatory to non-participatory, and then again participatory due to the rise of the social media. In Roska päivässä-liike, this pattern can’t be observed; the site has remained the same.

As said, the evidence is mixed. Also considering the amount of variant in the participatory approach in the older organizations, there seems to be another factor than the institutionalization process, which determines how participatory the web presence is.

Well, this is a somewhat disappointing result. However, this already indicates a major problem, or as they say in the academia, an opportunity for further study, in my research. Currently I have only used external data sources of the organization. This study should be continued with interviews and other analysis of the decision regarding the online presence. In this way I could tie certain interesting patterns in the web sites, such as turning blog commenting on and off, into the organizational context.

Stein and Brudin both use only one time slot in their analysis. Still, the online media has evolved and is constantly evolving. Also, the NGOs evolve and may change their online strategy. Thus, one must use longer time span to also see the evolution and the changes.

As said, the evolution of web presence is constant and there are several factors that affect the online presence. For example, the changing role of online media, which is now media of the masses, may affect this presence. It may also be technological advantages on the media itself or the trends and styles of online media in any given time. Or, it may be changes in the hosting organization and their thinking and acting.

Here I limit my research to only two questions:

1. The institutionalization process of the hosting organization creates less participatory environment in the organization. This will also affect the web presence, making it less participatory.
2. The mega-trend of Web 2.0, meaning here the focus on user generated content and platformalization of this media, in means such as blogs or social networking sites, creates demand for participatory approach. This also means that due to platformalization the more participatory channels are available for NGO use.

Based on my analysis of ten NGOs, I can now focus especially on the second hypothesis and later report on my findings with the first one. It seems that even while the Web 2.0 has an effect on NGO web presence, we may not conclude that the sites as such are participatory, focused on dialogue between NGO and citizens. It seems that the change has made it possible to comment and react to NGO’s actions and views. However, the agenda is set by NGOs’ themselves.

Secondly, based on this sample it seems that most of the organizations don’t participate in the dialogue even while it has been made possible for citizens. This is a classical and well-reported problem in e-democracy domain, which may lead to frustration and therefore decreased motivation to participate.

As said, these are early results that still require more analysis and further thinking. Unluckily, my master’s thesis is written in Finnish, but those who want may follow the development of weekly snapshots.

One may question the practical use of this research. Even while I have analyzed NGOs, the same results may be applied to governmental organizations and businesses. Thus, one end result of my master’s thesis is hopefully a set of recommendations on the creation of a participatory online community.

But, why this topic? Why to care of the children? Well, as the studies, such as EU Kids Online, have shown, even pre-teen children use more and more of ‘multimedia’ features of devices, such as cameras, apps and the Internet.

This gives interesting opportunities in various fields, such as safety, education, … But also threads are there, such as being exposed to porn((Actually, my strangest memory ever was when being in Assembly-event and some children asked if our mobile phones had filtering software on them.)) to cases such as bullying  or hover-parenting.

The technology around us is changing once again and the question is that what will society do. This is why more and deeper research is needed. As the Portal song says: “There’s research to be done.”