Oxford Internet Institute

Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. The technologically tethered, iPhone-addicted figure is an image we can easily conjure. Most of us complain that there aren't enough hours in the day and there are too many e-mails in our thumb-accessible inboxes. This widespread perception that life is faster than it used to be is now ingrained in our culture, and smartphones and the Internet are continually being blamed. But isn't the sole purpose of the smartphone to give us such quick access to people and information that we'll be free to do other things? Isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier? In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. She argues that we are not mere hostages to communication devices, and the sense of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set rather than the machines that help us set them. Indeed, being busy and having action-packed lives has become valorized by our productivity-driven culture. Wajcman offers a bracing historical perspective, exploring the commodification of clock time, and how the speed of the industrial age became identified with progress. She also delves into the ways time use differs for diverse groups in modern societies, showing how changes in work patterns, family arrangements, and parenting all affect time stress. Bringing together empirical research on time use and theoretical debates about dramatic digital developments, this accessible and engaging book will leave readers better versed in how to use technology to navigate life's fast lane.

India's right to information movement demonstrated the potential to combat corruption through social audits – an exercise to share and verify public records with people. India's right to information movement demonstrated the potential to combat corruption through social audits – an exercise to share and verify public records with people. But this process requires a lot of time, skill and organizational effort – thanks to which very few audits are organized in India despite its potential. We hope to change this by creating digital tools for activists, which they can use to organize social audits continuously at low cost, and thus challenge corruption in a sustained manner. The technology involves collecting public records online, disseminating it to people via mobile phones and collecting their feedback so that the activists can redress grievances in a timely manner. I will share the progress of the project so far in this talk.

Over the past decade there has been a phenomenal growth in mobile phone and internet usage in Africa which has attracted substantial media and academic interest. Over the past decade there has been a phenomenal growth in mobile phone and internet usage in Africa which has attracted substantial media and academic interest. However questions remain about the economically transformative nature and potential of this diffusion of communication infrastructures and artefacts. Based on over two hundred firm level interviews in Tanzania and South Africa this paper explores the impacts of the 'information revolution' on small and medium enterprise development. Contrary to perceptions it finds evidence of thin integration, devaluation and neo, rather than disintermediation. The implications of this for African development are then explored.

An in-depth study of the most powerful electronics contractor and the lives of its 1.4 million workers. During 2010, 18 workers attempted suicide at Taiwanese-owned Foxconn Technology Group's Chinese facilities, where Apple and other high profile branded products are produced and assembled. They ranged in age from 17 to 25 - the prime of youth. Fourteen died, while four survived with crippling injuries. What had driven the young Chinese workers to commit the desperate act? What light did they cast on China's much touted economic transformation in the era of export-oriented growth? The mystery that our investigation seeks to explore is not only the "inside story" of Foxconn; it is also the nature of global capitalism embodying with specific relationship between Foxconn and its buyers, the largest and richest being Apple, as well as that between Foxconn and the Chinese state. These are the relationships that shape conditions on the factory floor and ultimately workers' lives. An in-depth study of the most powerful electronics contractor and the lives of its 1.4 million workers enable us to draw out the deep contradictions among labor, capital, and the Chinese state in global IT production.

How can NGOs like Oxfam come together with academics and practitioners alike to tackle emerging privacy and security challenges when it comes to effective management of data? Data has invaluable applications to ensure organisations like Oxfam are needs driven and responsive, meanwhile there are also huge risks to communities if the related processes are not designed and managed in a responsible manner. Adopting meaningful approaches to data security and ethical methodology is not a new effort within Oxfam and the development community nor is it for academics. What is new, however, is the way that the changing digital landscape is presenting new challenges and opportunities which we must react to and ensure staff have resources and knowledge about how to collect, store, manage, use and even dispose of data responsibly. How can NGOs like Oxfam come together with academics and practitioners alike to tackle emerging privacy and security challenges when it comes to effective management of data? As Oxfam are in the process of applying a Responsible Data Policy, how can we learn from and support one another, particularly when it comes to guidance and what policy means in practice?

Alloysius Attah will discuss some of Farmerline's success factors, including its locally adapted technological solutions and strong local outreach. Development organizations, governments, and many others have put high hopes in the potential of mobile technology to improve and upgrade agricultural markets and value chains. However, with a few exceptions, traction and scale of mobile applications targeting African farmers have mostly remained elusive. Farmerline is one such exception. In a short time, with support from development partners, we have been able to provide mobile services that improve the livelihoods of over 5,000 rural farmers through communicating timely and relevant agricultural information (weather alerts, best farming practices, financial tips and market prices) through voice and SMS messages directly to their mobile phones. We also support food companies (Hershey, Ecom Trading and Armajaro), governments, mobile network operators and agricultural businesses with services such as farm management, communication, data collection and traceability tools to better manage their partnerships with small-scale farmers and their entire supply chain. This talk will discuss some of Farmerline's success factors, including its locally adapted technological solutions and strong local outreach. Unlike other mobile solutions for agriculture, Farmerline enables two-way communication in every language and works globally.

Tales from the Zooniverse or, What to do with a million scientists

panel examines online learning through comparing and contrasting the MOOC format with traditional online strategies. In the last few years MOOCs have achieved a great deal of attention in higher education. While addressing the issue of scale, there is much debate over how well they satisfy learning effectiveness, satisfaction, and overall quality. This panel examines online learning through comparing and contrasting the MOOC format with traditional online strategies. The discussion will focus on both quantitative metrics related to learning outcomes and research based, best practices in the literature.

Facing the Crowd: Past, Present, and Furtures of Digital Labor

Interview with Tom Steinberg on the topics of his talk "There Ain't No 'e' in PPE - How do we fill the digital skills gap at the top levels of government and politics?"

Interview with Matthew McGregor of Blue State Digital on the topics covered in his seminar "Digital strategy, social media and elections".

Interview with Beth Noveck on receiving an internet and society award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Beth Noveck discusses the work of NYU's Governance Lab (which she directs), and the role of data in opening up government. She starts by discussing the origins of her interest in open government, democratisation, and political culture. She then discusses how opening up government data can translate into positive outcomes -- in terms of delivery of services, greater transparency, and strategies for collaborative goverment-citizen solutions -- and also how easy/difficult it is in practice to open and promote cultural change in government. She discusses how our notion of citizenship needs to change: we need a more active conception of citizenship, with citizens regarded as cocreators and participants, rather than simply monitors of government. Working in both the academic and policy worlds, Beth closes by emphasising the importance of being academically rigorous and evidence-based, while also engaging with the real world; that is, having an impact on policy and the running of institutions, and doing academic work quickly and well, with "real-world urgency". We should consider not just what we 'can' do with new media to promote a stronger democratic culture, but also what we 'should' be doing.

Interview with Laura Bates on receiving an internet and society award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Laura Bates discusses the origins of the Everyday Sexism project, its intended audience, and the early difficulties she faced when talking about the problem of the normalisation of sexism and getting people to acknowledge its existence. She discusses the irony that the Internet can be used both as a medium to enable people to join together to promote positive social change, but also to intimidate women (eg through trolling). She discusses what we can do to control trolling and sexual harassment, such as social media companies putting the safety of the user at the centre of their policies; government making sure that people are prosecuted for illegal behaviours such as making death threats (even when it 'only' takes place online); what we can do individually to speak out against unacceptable behaviour; and the important role of education in schools at a young age to combat the normalisation of sexism and violence against women. She finishes by discussing the future of the everyday sexism project; whether the tide is turning (she notes a massive increase in men writing in to say they didn't realise the scale of the problem, and women writing to say they didn't realise they could speak out..), or whether there will be as great a need for the project in ten years' time as now.

Interview with Dame Stephanie Shirley on receiving a lifetime achievement award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Dame Stephanie Shirley, the OII's founding donor, discusses her early career as founder and Chief Executive of software company, Xansa plc. She discusses organisational and early feminist culture, the role of women in IT / STEM (and how to encourage greater involvement), and entrepreneurship and social consciousness, particularly in relation to her important role as a philanthropist. She closes with thoughts on the future of the Oxford Internet Institute.

Interview with Barry Wellman on receiving a lifetime achievement award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Barry Wellman discusses his early work on urban sociology and social networks in the city, and describes how this fascination with the evolution of community relationships shaped his scholarship. He offers insights into the concept of 'networked individualism' as it plays out across different spheres of our lives, particularly in networked work, and sets a research agenda for the next stage of his remarkable career.

The value of not knowing something illuminates some basic assumptions about knowledge and allows us to ask a series of interesting questions about how the information society will develop.  Our relationship with knowledge is an uneasy one. As we progress the cost of acquiring knowledge seems to be sinking, and the choice of what knowledge to pursue becomes more pronounced. We can imagine a world in which we could find out a whole range of things, at a moderate cost, but will choose not to because we believe that it would be wrong to attempt to know those things. That would be consistent with how knowledge has been viewed over the centuries, and would require us to develop a sense of when it is morally defensible to choose ignorance over knowledge. The value of not knowing something illuminates some basic assumptions about knowledge and allows us to ask a series of interesting questions about how the information society will develop. This talk will examine a number of ways in which this tension can play out.

Tim Wu will discuss the science of attention, the history of the attention industries, and some of the harms caused by overharvesting. He will also propose a model of attention sovereignty of importance for the future. Rich or poor, man, woman or child, each of us has 168 hours per week: it is how we use that time that differentiates us. Yet we seem to live in an era where the daily demands made on our time and attention are greater than ever before. This is due both to advances in information technologies, and also the rise of Internet business models that depend on the sale of human attention. In this talk, Tim Wu will discuss the science of attention, the history of the attention industries, and some of the harms caused by overharvesting. He will also propose a model of attention sovereignty of importance for the future.

This talk aims to provide a philosophical framework through which the current emphasis on data-intensive biology can be studied and understood. Over the last two decades, online databases, digital visualization tools and automated data analysis have become key tools to cope with the increasing scale and diversity of scientifically relevant information that is being accumulated (the so-called ‘big data'). Within the biological and biomedical sciences, digital access to data has revolutionized research methods and ways of doing science, thus also challenging how life is researched and understood. Prominent scientists have characterized this shift as leading to a new, ‘data-intensive' paradigm for research, encompassing innovative ways to produce, store, disseminate and interpret data. This talk aims to provide a philosophical framework through which the current emphasis on data-intensive biology, and more generally the role played by data in scientific inquiry, can be studied and understood. To achieve this, I focus on what I call data journeys: the ways in which scientific data are disseminated across a multiplicity of contexts in order to function as evidence for knowledge claims. As I will show, the more widely data are disseminated and re-used, the more significant their epistemic role is deemed to be. To be transformed into knowledge, scientific data need to be ordered, labelled and packaged to make them portable – that is, capable of being picked up and transported across different sites. In this talk, I focus on the role of online databases as key sites for data packaging, whose structure and functioning strongly affects how existing data about organisms are transformed into new claims about the biological world. Building on a close study of the material conditions under which data travel, I then put forward three main arguments: (1) portability is a defining characteristic of data as a component of scientific inquiry, which crucially depends on the specific domains through which data are made to move; (2) what counts as data in the first place depends on the procedures and contexts through which researchers attribute evidential value to objects and processes; and (3) the fruitfulness of data-intensive science can thus be understood as resulting from the skilful use of information technologies to articulate and multiply the contexts in which different types of data can be organised and interpreted.

Tim Unwin focuses on current work at the CTO, where his own personal contributions focus especially on the use of ICTs by people with disabilities. Many of those engaged in using information and communication technologies for development in the early 2000s saw them as being an opportunity through which profoundly different social, economic and political structures could be created, that would in some way generate a fairer, more equitable global system. Recent rapid expansion in the use of mobile technologies and social media has convinced a newer generation of researchers and practitioners that this project is still on track. In this seminar, Tim Unwin will draw on his experiences at the boundaries between theory and practice, to explore whether such optimism is indeed justified. Themes that he will (probably) address include notions of empowerment, poverty, political violence, and challenges of implementing effective ‘development' interventions. The seminar will draw particularly on some of his current work at the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, where his own personal contributions focus especially on the use of ICTs by people with disabilities as well as on skills development and entrepreneurship, but he will also take a longer term perspective that builds (almost invisibly) on his early work as a medieval historical geographer.

Jon Agar will introduce the concept of working worlds, illustrate how they can be used to think about past and present science, and identify some problems and issues. In a recent historical survey of science in the twentieth century, I devised a concept 'working worlds' which I think helps understand science's relationship with its broader context. Working worlds are arenas of human action that generate problems. The intuition was that science does not operate in a featureless, level environment; rather it responds to an uneven, given landscape of which working worlds are the major features. Our lives, but especially our sciences, have been organised by our orientation towards working worlds. In this seminar I will introduce the concept of working worlds, illustrate how they can be used to think about past and present science, and identify some problems and issues.

Julian Huppert discusses privacy in a digital age.

Rob Kitchin discusses how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data'. ‘Smart cities' is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data'. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The final section of the paper provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining five emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.

David Souter uses the history and development of ICT4D as a framework to critique ICT4D approaches and consider the relevance of ICTs and ICT4D to the post-2015 development agenda. The presentation will use the history and development of ICT4D - and its relationships with both development policy and the ICT sector - as a framework to critique ICT4D approaches and consider the relevance of ICTs and ICT4D to the post-2015 development agenda. It will draw, inter alia, on recent work for the World Bank, to assess ICTs in post-conflict reconstruction; for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, to address the relationship between ICTs and sustainability; and for UNCTAD and the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development, to consider the implications of emerging ICT trends for developmental outcomes.

This seminar will investigate how different technologies were used by CDAC Network Members in the immediate response to Typhoon Haiyan, focusing particularly on how needs assessment data was collected, shared and acted upon. This seminar will investigate how different technologies were used by CDAC Network Members in the immediate response to Typhoon Haiyan, focusing particularly on how needs assessment data was collected, shared and acted upon. The session will discuss some of the challenges faced in collecting data following a crisis, and will give examples of how Members are working together to try and overcome these. The CDAC Network is a network of media development organisations, international NGOs, inter-governmental agencies and technology providers, with a vision to improve two-way communication between humanitarian responders and populations affected by disasters. For more information visit www.cdacnetwork.org.

Vili Lehdonvirta discusses emerging markets on the Internet.

Andrew Przybylski discusses the motivational dynamics of how people approach ICTs, social media and video games.

Rebecca Eynon summarises key areas of her research on learning, education, and the Internet.

Scott Hale discusses epetitions

Jonathan Bright explores the impact of social media on news consumption. He examines how social media users choose what to share, how this varies by platform, and what the implications may be for the type of news coverage that people receive.

Luciano Floridi presents 'The Onlife Initiative', a project he chaired for the European Commission on how ICTs are modifying our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us.

Luciano Floridi discusses his new book, 'The Ethics of Information', and outline the nature and scope of Information Ethics. With the help of three metaphors, Professor Floridi outlines the nature and scope of Information Ethics, the new philosophical area of research that investigates the ethical impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on human life and society. In the course of the presentation, he introduces some of the topics he has analysed in his book, 'The Ethics of Information' (OUP 2013), a book in which he has sought to provide the conceptual foundations of Information Ethics.

Dan McQuillan examines the Internet in a post-PRISM world, and asks if its power to tackle global poverty will be lost. This seminar will examine the Internet in a post-PRISM world, and ask if its power to tackle global poverty will be lost. While recognising the danger of nation states breaking up the Internet, I will concentrate on the already existing threat of tracking & big data and the emergence of algorithmic regulation. ICT4D may never have delivered on the promise of development anyway, so I won't mourn its passing but will point instead to the risk of a neocolonial cybernetics running across the Internet and the Internet of Things, and the risk of renewed subjugation through ideas like Smart Slums. Based on my experiences with civic hacking and the crypytoparty movement, I will identify participatory methodologies and critical pedagogy as key to post-digital citizenship and to our ability to disrupt predictive 'states of exception'.

Gregory Asmolov suggests applying the notion of activity systems and zones of proximal development, as conceptualized in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), to the field of ICT4D. The presentation suggests applying the notion of activity systems and zones of proximal development, as conceptualized in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), to the field of ICT4D. Relying on the principles and analytical apparatus of CHAT (Vygotsky; Leontiev, 1978; Engeström, 1989) it discusses crowdsourcing platforms and online mapping applications as artifacts that mediate activity systems. Based on case studies from the field of crisis response, the presentation discusses various structures of activity systems that are mediated through information technologies. The talk also seeks to establish association between the structure of activity system and the degree of statehood in particular socio-political environment (Livingston & Walter-Drop, 2013). The presentation relies on a fieldwork conducted in Australia and Russia in 2013.

Richard Heeks explores new post-2015 development agenda and its implications for ICT4D (information and communication technologies for development) research priorities. With the Millennium Development Goals about to reach their sell-by date, the new post-2015 development agenda is currently being formulated. This talk explores that agenda and its implications for ICT4D (information and communication technologies for development) research priorities. The presentation begins with an overview of the post-2015 process and a cross-check that the new agenda is worth attending to. Arguing it will be the single most important shaper of future development priorities, the talk then analyses three aspects of the post-2015 framework compared to that inspired by the MDGs: elements of the agenda that are becoming less important; issues which continue; and new issues and ideas that are on the rise. With two years to go until the post-2015 framework is activated, now is a good time to consider the implications of this comparison for our future research priorities in the sub-discipline of ‘development informatics', and the extent to which these might – or might not – cohere around a vision of “Development 2.0”.

Discussion of Internet surveillance, parliamentary oversight of security services, the Digital Economy Act, communications data, and government data sharing.

Internet safety has been at or near the top of the political agenda in the UK for half a decade. Do the UK's children have a better internet experience compared with kids elsewhere? Internet safety has been at or near the top of the political agenda in the UK for half a decade. From the Bailey and Byron reports, the formation of UKCCIS, 'active choice', Maria Miller's June call to action to the industry, to the Prime Minister's big summer speech and his November summit – no stone has been left unturned in the drive to protect children from the Internet's dark forces. BT and Facebook have both borne the brunt of politicians' attention and Simon Milner has therefore been in the thick of the political debate throughout this time. Has it all been worth it? Will the UK's children have a better internet experience compared with kids elsewhere?

Visualization is a ubiquitous technology, just like telecommunication. However, unlike a telephone system, humans play an integral part inside the "box" of visualization. This poses a significant challenge in establishing a theory of visualization. Visualization is a ubiquitous technology, just like telecommunication. However, unlike a telephone system, humans play an integral part inside the "box" of visualization. This poses a significant challenge in establishing a theory of visualization. While information theory, which underpins tele- and data communication, has shown to be applicable in many aspects of visualization, it becomes inadequate when we consider various phenomena of perception, cognition, emotion and interaction in visualization. While it is a piece of computer-assisted technology, it cannot distance itself from fundamental questions (e.g., truth, data, information, and knowledge), some of which have been explored by philosophers for thousands of years. We are inspired to address this challenge by building on existing concepts and discoveries in disciplines such as communication, psychology and philosophy.

In recent years, a number of fully global, online labor markets have emerged. In these markets, buyers hire workers from around the world to perform tasks amenable to remote completion, such as computer programming, data entry and graphic design. This tal In recent years, a number of fully global, online labor markets have emerged. In these markets, buyers hire workers from around the world to perform tasks amenable to remote completion, such as computer programming, data entry and graphic design. This talk will describe the important features of one such market, worth over $1 billion to date, explain several large-scale social scientific experiments conducted within that market, and conclude with a discussion on the policy issues raised by online work and online labor markets. One experiment involved introducing e-commerce style recommendations to a labor market, which had surprising effects on non-recommended candidates. Other experiments involved increasing the "cost" of online job applications to increase their signal value, and examining how market participants conceal their preferences for strategic reasons. The policy discussion will address concerns about downward wage pressure, abuse by unscrupulous employers and circumvention of existing labor protections, and consider the potential of online labor markets to contribute to global development via "virtual migration".

Andile Ngcaba discusses the ability to address the challenge of the growth of Internet in Africa from multiple perspectives. Much has been written about the development of communications, and particularly the Internet in Africa. The existing thinking and narrative has attempted to explain the reasons it lags many other regions of the World, and focused on technical and economic inhibitors. Notwithstanding this base of knowledge and literature, Andile Ngcaba would like to tackle this issue from the perspective of a practitioner. In doing so, his focus will be on the ability to address the challenge of the growth of Internet in Africa from multiple perspectives. These perspectives include: Internet Governance; Access to orbital slots and space based electromagnetic frequency spectrum; Investments; Language diversity; and Institutional structures.

Ethan Zuckerman explores contemporary anxieties about "a crisis in civics" and looks at the idea that civics is changing along with digital media to become more participatory and inclusive, but harder to understand and predict. The last decade has seen a shift in media from a world where a small, professional group produces news, opinion and entertainment to one where a much broader set of the population is involved making and sharing media. This shift has had important implications for the news business and for social change, with social media a part of popular protests around the world. The most important shift may be yet to come: a shift in civics, where participation in the public sphere is less about engagement with government institutions and more about individuals and groups using media, markets and code as well as laws to seek change. Ethan Zuckerman's talk will explore contemporary anxieties about "a crisis in civics" and look at the idea that civics is changing along with digital media to become more participatory and inclusive, but harder to understand and predict.

Dr Thompson addresses some of the opportunities and contradictions presented by ICT4D and considers some emerging ways in which ICT4D researchers may contribute to the field. The discipline of ICT4D has never appeared more, or less, relevant. On the one hand, technology has become unprecedentedly pervasive, plastic, mobile, and cheap; increasingly based on open standards, emerging, platform-based architectures beckon towards an empowered era of development hubs, mashups, and commercial and social enterprise that increasingly offer those in emerging economies an independent, 'continuous beta' of thought and activity. On the other, it might be said that such positive developments challenge those working in ICT4D, and even 'development' itself, to engage in a new way with people who are increasingly 'doing it for themselves'. In this talk, Thompson addresses some of the opportunities and contradictions presented by this tension, and considers some emerging ways in which ICT4D researchers may contribute to the field.

In a development context, the ways in which new media objects (eg ICTs) are defined in relation to other objects, people and institutions map out new figurations of power and connection, that revalue and recombine political agency. Drawing on case study material, this paper focuses on ways in which definitions of 'media' and other technical objects act to promote or prevent 'connection'. In a development context, the ways in which new media objects such as ICTs are defined in relation to other objects, people and institutions map out new figurations of power and connection, or new 'technological zones' (Barry), that revalue and recombine political agency. Consideration of the politics of technology needs to be moved away from seeing ICTs as neutral tools to be enabled or as problematic interventions to be contained; rather, we need to be able to make visible and negotiable the possible communicative assemblages that might be produced.

An assessment of the optimism surrounding the opportunities that social media offer for humanitarian action, drawing on analysis of the phenomenally popular and controversial Kony 2012 campaign. In early March 2012 the Kony 2012 viral video took the world by storm. Attracting over 70 million views in less than a week from its release it was equally criticized and admired as an example of the power of social media. In this talk Madianou assesses the optimism surrounding the opportunities that social media offer for humanitarian action. Drawing on the analysis of the phenomenally popular and controversial Kony 2012 campaign she observes that the architectures of social networking sites orientate action at a communitarian level which heightens their post-humanitarian style (Chouliaraki, 2012). However, an emerging new genre of reporting and commenting, which she has termed 'polymedia events' can potentially extend beyond the limitations of SNS communication by opening up the space for reflexivity and dialogical imagination.

A seminar exploring technology and regulation in the Somali territories of the Horn of Africa. This seminar explores technology and regulation in the Somali territories of the Horn of Africa. Despite weak or non-existent government institutions, innovation has flourished with local solutions to local challenges. Money transfer companies have been leading the expansion and investments in ICT development. Mobile banking, inexpensive Internet connection, and dozens of media outlets are an unexpected reality in this war-torn region. The seminar explores how ICTs are regulated and the role of the private sector in ICT development.

Discussion of dominant approaches by intergovernmental agencies to information society policy and the prospects for introducing critical perspectives that acknowledge the power relations which inform information society strategies and actions.

Panellists discuss the opportunities and challenges posed by big data for research and public policy-making at the conference "IPP2012: Big Data: Big Challenges". This is the opening plenary panel of the conference Internet, Politics, Policy 2012: Big Data, Big Challenges? organised by the OII-edited journal Policy and Internet (Oxford, 20-21 September 2012). The panellists discuss the potential and challenges of big data for public policy-making. Big data offers enormous scope for understanding societal behaviour and citizens' willingness - or unwillingness - in terms of civic engagement. It can allow the design of efficient and realistic policy and administrative change. Also, however, it brings ethical challenges, for example when big data is used for probabilistic policy-making, raising issues of justice, equity and privacy. And big data generation and analysis requires expertise and skills which can challenge governmental organizations in particular, given their dubious record on the guardianship of large scale datasets, the management of large technology-based projects, and capacity to innovate.

Nigel Shadbolt discusses the opportunities and challenges posed by big data for research and public policy-making during his opening keynote of the conference "IPP2012: Big Data: Big Challenges".

Duncan Watts discusses the opportunities and challenges posed by big data for research and public policy-making during his opening keynote of the conference "IPP2012: Big Data: Big Challenges".

Patty Kostkova discusses Twitter-based early warning and risk communication of the 2009 swine flu pandemic during a seminar on quantitative methods in social media research held at the OII on 26 September 2012. The need to improve global population monitoring and enhance surveillance of infectious diseases has never been more pressing. Factors such as air travel act as a catalyst in the spread of new and novel viruses. The unprecedented user-generated activity on social networks and online media over the last few years has created real time streams of personal user data which provides an invaluable tool for monitoring and sampling large populations. Epidemic Intelligence relays on the constant monitoring of online media sources for early warning, detection and rapid response; however, the real-time information available in social networks provides a new model of monitoring populations and enhancing the early warning function. The communication of risk in any public health emergencies is a complex task for government and healthcare agencies. This task is made more challenging in the current situation when citizens are confronted with a wide range of online resources, ranging from traditional news outlets to information posted on blogs and social networks. Inevitably, some have greater scientific veracity than others. Twitter is an information source but is also a central hub for the publishing, dissemination, and finding out about online media. In our study, we investigated the role of Twitter during the swine flu pandemics in 2009 from two perspectives. Firstly, we demonstrated the role of the social network to detect an upcoming spike in an epidemic before the official surveillance systems - up to week in the UK and up to 2-3 weeks in the US. Secondly, we illustrated how online resources are propagated through Twitter, and that there is a focus on identifying trusted information sources at the time of the WHO's declaration of the swine flu 'pandemic'. Our findings indicate that Twitter does favour reputable sources but that bogus information can still leak into the network.

Panos Panagiotopoulos discusses use of Twitter in UK local government during a seminar on quantitative methods in social media research held at the OII on 26 September 2012. Panos Panagiotopoulos presents part of a project on UK local government microblogging, a practice which has become a significant element of the public sector social media agenda. Many authorities in the UK have created Twitter accounts in an effort to update the public with frequent, concise and real-time content. The broader study described in the video is based on a study of Twitter accounts maintained by 187 officially listed UK local government authorities. Over 296,000 tweets were collected and analysed in two stages: an examination of the Twitter networks developed by the accounts was followed by a structural analysis of the tweets. The combination of online data collection and social media analytics techniques enabled us to reach important conclusions about the use of Twitter by local authorities. The findings indicate high level of maturity of Twitter in the UK local government and point to several directions for further increasing the impact and visibility of those accounts within a social media strategy. We particularly identified the importance of Twitter as an information sharing and engagement channel during unexpected events such as the 2011 riots and adverse weather conditions.

Luke Sloan discusses space-time as a sampling condition for new social media research during a seminar on quantitative methods in social media research held at the OII on 26 September 2012. This brief talk introduces some of the issues that social scientists will have to contend with when applying traditional terrestrial modes of analysis to social media data. Based on the potential user requirements of the platform being developed at the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS), this talk reviews the need to reconceptualise sampling, demographics, geography and the temporal dimension with reference to naturally occurring locomotive data.