927 research outputs found

    Service Guidelines of Public Meeting’s Webcasts: An Experience

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    International audienceIn Italy, public meeting webcasts are frequently adopted by local public administrations to support the "information provision" process. This is supposed to increase the citizens' awareness and participation to public life. In the paper, the experience gathered from the design of both the architecture of a webcasting system and the "webcast's production and distribution process" is presented. The system implementation is discussed referring to a large Italian Public Agency

    Parliamentary online public engagement in the 21st Century : A comparative perspective with a focus on Austria and Portugal

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    This thesis concerns how parliaments, as institutions, utilise the Internet (and ICTs) to reach and engage citizen. It is structured around the concept of parliamentary (online) public engagement, which has only recently gained some attention in the research agendas of political science and legislative studies. This concept covers a very wide range of outlets and activities offered by parliaments, which can have different purposes and can assume both passive and active forms of engaging with citizens. This thesis focuses on a comparative study of PWs in 21 countries in Europe, and it is complemented by multiple case studies. A mixed method approach was applied, relying on both quantitative and qualitative data and methods. First, the measurement and description of parliamentary online public engagement activities and tools in 21 European parliaments was undergone. Then, it proceeded to a qualitative strand, first assessing the causal conditions necessary and/or sufficient for explaining the results from the quantitative strand and second studying in two case studies in depth – Portugal and Austria – in order to understand the relevant mechanisms, processes and critical actors behind parliaments’ online public engagement strategies over time. Empirically, the study finds that parliaments are selective in their strategies for engaging with the public. In their selectivity, most parliaments choose to invest largely in information provision, leaving other activities of public engagement as secondary. This means that most parliaments have not yet implemented activities and tools to truly engage with their citizens. Additionally, some of the examples found are of an experimental nature or are still in their infancy. Furthermore, parliaments still have a long way to go in pursuing the way they delivery public engagement activities to their audiences. Descriptive results also show that parliaments are cautious when it comes to citizen’s actual participation in the policymaking and prefer to convert conventional forms of participation to digital versions instead of creating innovative democratic instruments. From the explanatory analysis it was possible to conclude that besides parliamentary resources, a committed leadership and political will from key critical actors are also important when it comes to changing the way parliaments engage with citizens through digital media. Additionally, these institutions are mimicking other parliaments that are perceived as successful in using ICTs to communicate and engage with citizens as a response to environmental uncertainty. Finally, it seems that inter-parliamentary cooperation, i.e. learning mechanisms, are increasingly relevant for parliaments on these matters

    We the undersigned: anonymous dissent and the struggle for personal identity in online petitions

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    Anonymous signatures pose a significant threat to the legitimacy of the online petition as a persuasive form of political communication. While anonymous signatures address some privacy concerns for online petitioners, they often fail to identify petitioners as numerically distinct and socially relevant persons, Since anonymous signatures often fail to personally identify online petitioners, they often fail to provide sufficient reason for targeted political authorities to review and respond to their grievances. To recover the personal rhetoric of the online petition in a way that strikes a balance between the publicity and privacy concerns of petitioners, we should reformat online petitions as pseudonymous social networks of personal testimony between petitioners and targeted political authorities. To this end, the pseudonymous signatures of online petitions should incorporate social frames, co-authored complaints and demands, multimedia voice, and revisable support.M.S.Committee Chair: DiSalvo, Carl; Committee Member: Bogost, Ian; Committee Member: Klein, Hans; Committee Member: Murray, Janet; Committee Member: Pearce, Celi

    Chasing Sustainability on the Net : International research on 69 journalistic pure players and their business models

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    This report outlines how online-based journalistic startups have created their economical locker in the evolving media ecology. The research introduces the ways that startups have found sustainability in the markets of ten countries. The work is based on 69 case studies from Europe, USA and Japan. The case analysis shows that business models can be divided into two groups. The storytelling-oriented business models are still prevalent in our findings. These are the online journalistic outlets that produce original content – news and stories for audiences. But the other group, service-oriented business models, seems to be growing. This group consists of sites that don’t try to monetize the journalistic content as such but rather focus on carving out new functionality. The project was able to identify several revenue sources: advertising, paying for content, affiliate marketing, donations, selling data or services, organizing events, freelancing and training or selling merchandise. Where it was hard to evidence entirely new revenue sources, it was however possible to find new ways in which revenue sources have been combined or reconfigured. The report also offers practical advice for those who are planning to start their own journalistic site

    Mapping Digital Media: Malaysia

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    The Mapping Digital Media project examines the global opportunities and risks created by the transition from traditional to digital media. Covering 60 countries, the project examines how these changes affect the core democratic service that any media system should provide: news about political, economic, and social affairs.Malaysia has had a torrid relationship with digital. Mahathir Mohamad, the former Malaysian prime minister, fell in love with it in the 1990s when he launched the Multimedia Super Corridor, a sort of East Asian Silicon Valley, to develop the local information and communications technology industry.Two out of three Malaysians regularly use the internet (even though large areas of the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, where nearly a fifth of the population lives, pose logistical challenges regarding infrastructure) and a third of the population have a 3G mobile subscription. Broadband household penetration in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, is 112 percent because many citizens have both fixed and mobile accounts. Nearly half the population is on Facebook with an average of 233 friends each, the greatest proportion in the world, all on social networks for an average nine hours a week. And they still seem to find enough time to watch television for three and a half hours a day and to listen to the radio for three hours.The outlook is for an expansion of internet and mobile-based platforms for news, comment, social networking, activism, and entertainment. However, a change of government is probably a prerequisite for the kinds of changes that would usher in greater diversity in broadcast and print, such as regulatory independence, repeal of the Printing Presses and Publications Act, and the dismantling of monopolies, rules on cross ownership, and political parties' ownership of media companies

    Radio evolution: conference proceedings

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    Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

    Election Data Visualisation

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    Visualisations of election data produced by the mass media, other organisations and even individuals are becoming increasingly available across a wide variety of platforms and in many different forms. As more data become available digitally and as improvements to computer hardware and software are made, these visualisations have become more ambitious in scope and more user-friendly. Research has shown that visualising data is an extremely powerful method of communicating information to specialists and non-specialists alike. This amounts to a democratisation of access to political and electoral data. To some extent political science lags behind the progress that has been made in the field of data visualisation. Much of the academic output remains committed to the paper format and much of the data presentation is in the form of simple text and tables. In the digital and information age there is a danger that political science will fall behind. This thesis reports on a number of case studies where efforts were made to visualise election data in order to clarify its structure and to present its meaning. The first case study demonstrates the value of data visualisation to the research process itself, facilitating the understanding of effects produced by different ways of estimating missing data. A second study sought to use visualisation to explain complex aspects of voting systems to the wider public. Three further case studies demonstrate the value of collaboration between political scientists and others possessing a range of skills embracing data management, software engineering, broadcasting and graphic design. These studies also demonstrate some of the problems that are encountered when trying to distil complex data into a form that can be easily viewed and interpreted by non-expert users. More importantly, these studies suggest that when the skills balance is correct then visualisation is both viable and necessary for communicating information on elections
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