e-Democracy driven by civil society: Developing a theoretical basis to design for bottom-up participation

This short paper outlines initial ideas for a programme of research related to e-Democracy which commences in October 2008 and will be undertaken over the next three years. The research specifically intends to focus on factors in the architecture of online discursive spaces which may affect sustained and meaningful participation. It begins by describing the context as it relates to Community Informatics (CI). It then outlines the nature of one of the online communities that will be at the centre of the enquiry. Finally, it outlines four theoretical perspectives which seem to offer a route to analysis and sense-making, suggesting how a synthesis of these perspectives might contribute to original insights for CI

Governance in Social Media: A case study of the Wikipedia promotion process

Social media sites are often guided by a core group of committed users engaged in various forms of governance. A crucial aspect of this type of governance is deliberation, in which such a group reaches decisions on issues of importance to the site. Despite its crucial --- though subtle --- role in how a number of prominent social media sites function, there has been relatively little investigation of the deliberative aspects of social media governance. Here we explore this issue, investigating a particular deliberative process that is extensive, public, and recorded: the promotion of Wikipedia admins, which is determined by elections that engage committed members of the Wikipedia community. We find that the group decision-making at the heart of this process exhibits several fundamental forms of relative assessment. First we observe that the chance that a voter will support a candidate is strongly dependent on the relationship between characteristics of the voter and the candidate. Second we investigate how both individual voter decisions and overall election outcomes can be based on models that take into account the sequential, public nature of the voting

Signed Networks in Social Media

Relations between users on social media sites often reflect a mixture of positive (friendly) and negative (antagonistic) interactions. In contrast to the bulk of research on social networks that has focused almost exclusively on positive interpretations of links between people, we study how the interplay between positive and negative relationships affects the structure of on-line social networks. We connect our analyses to theories of signed networks from social psychology. We find that the classical theory of structural balance tends to capture certain common patterns of interaction, but that it is also at odds with some of the fundamental phenomena we observe --- particularly related to the evolving, directed nature of these on-line networks. We then develop an alternate theory of status that better explains the observed edge signs and provides insights into the underlying social mechanisms. Our work provides one of the first large-scale evaluations of theories of signed networks using on-line datasets, as well as providing a perspective for reasoning about social media sites

Improving the Quality of Knowledge Assets: Governance Mechanisms and Their Implications

Knowledge management initiatives are less likely to be successful if knowledge repositories do not provide high-quality knowledge assets. Two mechanisms employed by organizations to ensure knowledge quality are using experts to control or edit users’ contributions (such as in a refereed repository), and using a community of users to review, rate, or edit existing contributions (such as in a community-driven wiki). The goal of this paper is to explore these two mechanisms by drawing upon the concept of societal governance from sociology, identify the conditions under which they are preferable, and discuss their impact on how users contribute to and reuse information from knowledge repositories. Propositions are suggested and implications are discussed

Recommendation with multi-source heterogeneous information

© 2018 International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence. All right reserved. Network embedding has been recently used in social network recommendations by embedding low-dimensional representations of network items for recommendation. However, existing item recommendation models in social networks suffer from two limitations. First, these models partially use item information and mostly ignore important contextual information in social networks such as textual content and social tag information. Second, network embedding and item recommendations are learned in two independent steps without any interaction. To this end, we in this paper consider item recommendations based on heterogeneous information sources. Specifically, we combine item structure, textual content and tag information for recommendation. To model the multi-source heterogeneous information, we use two coupled neural networks to capture the deep network representations of items, based on which a new recommendation model Collaborative multi-source Deep Network Embedding (CDNE for short) is proposed to learn different latent representations. Experimental results on two real-world data sets demonstrate that CDNE can use network representation learning to boost the recommendation performance

RegulationRoom: Field-Testing An Online Public Participation Platform During USA Agency Rulemakings

Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government\u27s most important policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of interested citizens. RegulationRoom, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to alert and effectively engage new voices in rulemaking. Initial results give cause for optimism but also caution that successful use of new technologies to increase participation in complex government policy decisions is more difficult and resource-intensive than many proponents expect

RegulationRoom: Field-Testing An Online Public Participation Platform During USA Agency Rulemakings

Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government\u27s most important policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of interested citizens. RegulationRoom, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to alert and effectively engage new voices in rulemaking. Initial results give cause for optimism but also caution that successful use of new technologies to increase participation in complex government policy decisions is more difficult and resource-intensive than many proponents expect

Explaining Virtual Community Participation: Accounting for the IT Artifacts through Identification and Identity Confirmation

This study draws upon self-verification theory, social identity theory and self-categorization theory to investigate the dual effects of system design, i.e., identity confirmation (the self) and identification (the community), on virtual community (VC) participation. An important theoretical development is the conceptualization of VC identity and the elucidation of its system design determinants. Community presentation, i.e., system design features for presenting a virtual community identity, is hypothesized to facilitate identification by setting the boundaries for inter-group comparison and highlighting the in-group homogeneity. Furthermore, system design features that prior research identified as determinants for identity confirmation, i.e., self-presentation, deep profiling, and co-presence, are argued to have impacts on identification directly by influencing social comparison and indirectly by making the VC identity attractive. The research model accounts for the dual roles of system design features, i.e., effects on identification and identity confirmation, in explaining VC participation. The implications of these results for both theory and practice are discussed

Balancing Inclusion and “Enlightened Understanding” in Designing Online Civic Participation Systems: Experiences from Regulation Room

New forms of online citizen participation in government decision making have been fostered in the United States (U.S.) under the Obama Administration. Use of Web information technologies have been encouraged in an effort to create more back-and-forth communication between citizens and their government. These “Civic Participation 2.0” attempts to open the government up to broader public participation are based on three pillars of open government—transparency, participation, and collaboration. Thus far, the Administration has modeled Civic Participation 2.0 almost exclusively on the Web 2.0 ethos, in which users are enabled to shape the discussion and encouraged to assess the value of its content. We argue that strict adherence to the Web 2.0 model for citizen participation in public policymaking can produce “participation” that is unsatisfactory to both government decisionmakers and public participants. We believe that successful online civic participation design must balance inclusion and “enlightened understanding,” one of the core conditions for democratic deliberation. Based on our experience with Regulation Room, an experimental online participation platform trying to broaden meaningful public engagement in the process federal agencies use to make new regulations, we offer specific suggestions on how participation designers can strike the balance between ease of engagement and quality of engagement—and so bring new voices into the policymaking process through participating that counts