Tracing controversies in hacker communities: ethical considerations for internet research

This paper reflects on the ethics of internet research on community controversies. Specifically, it focuses on controversies concerning gendered, social interaction in hacking communities. It addresses the question how internet researchers should treat and represent content that individuals controversially discussed online. While many internet sources are likewise technically public, they may yet suggest distinct privacy expectations on the part of involved individuals. In internet research, ethical decision-making regarding which online primary sources may be, e.g., referenced and quoted or require anonymisation is still ambiguous and contested. Instead of generalisable rules, the context dependence of internet research ethics has been frequently stressed. Given this ambiguity, the paper elaborates on ethical decisions and their implications by exploring the case of a controversial hackerspaces.org mailing list debate. In tracing data across different platforms, it analyses the emerging ethico-methodological challenges

Liberalization, FDI and growth in developing countries: A panel cointegration approach

Using a panel cointegration framework, the article explores the two-way link between FDI and growth for a panel of 23 developing countries. In addition, it investigates the impact of liberalization on the dynamics of the FDI and GDP relationship. A long-run cointegrating relationship is found between FDI and GDP after allowing for heterogeneous country effects. The cointegrating vectors reveal a bidirectional causality between GDP and FDI for more open economies. For relatively closed economies, long-run causality appears unidirectional and runs from GDP to FDI, implying that growth and FDI are not mutually reinforcing under restrictive trade and investment regimes

Wikis

This entry describes the socio-technical specificity of wikis and their application in domains of culture, knowledge and learning. It begins by locating the wiki in the history of technological visions for collective cognition and continues by examining the material and social properties of wikis through a series of concepts: collective intelligence and crowdsourcing, openness and open collaboration. It examines some key tensions surrounding the properties of participation within open collaborative systems pointing to empirical research within media and communications, education as well as computer and information sciences. In doing so, it situates the ways in which wiki phenomena have been used to define ideological movements and fields of socio-economic activity in domains of science, culture and politics