Science and Industry

I’m currently working on my master’s thesis in political science. My topic is the examination of ten non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs’) web presence from 1990’s to 2011. This research is motivated by Stein’s (2009) and Brundin’s (2008) research, which indicate web presence is more formal one-way communication, not participatory two-way communication. However, two-way participatory communication would have several democratic effects such as empowerment of citizens.

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.

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 just came back from Mindtrek 2008 conference. The conference is related to new media and it’s usage in different fields, mostly about social media, ubiquitous media and games. So what I actually learned there? Maybe it was the tendency that social interaction is going to push itself to all areas we’re working on.

On the other hand it’s interesting to be in social media event where the use of social media seems to be… exception. I did Jaiku during the event, as did other’s too. But rather many did notes in the old fashion way (nothing against it — I love to work with pen&paper), which seemed strange. Actually this is every now and then happened in other places: for some reason formal settings seem to kill the use of social media tools.

So, I got an CD-rom with all the papers. I need to read the paper Social is the New Pink
by Damien Marchi, as it might have some new radical views. Then I got some new colleagues and met some old ones.

I spoke of ubiquitous media and political life, trying to argument that this new way we communicate has changed and will change how we do politics. Not allways in the good way but in some way anyhow. To see the presentation, head to Qik and SlideShare.

Updated: Link fixed!