Book review: Regulating code: good governance and better regulation in the information age

"Regulating Code: Good Governance and Better Regulation in the Information Age." Ian Brown and Chris Marsden. MIT Press. March 2013. --- In issues from online surveillance to social media ethics and piracy, questions of internet governance surround us. In Regulating Code, authors Ian Brown and Chris Marsden make a case for multi-stakeholder co-regulation based around the function of code rather than national geographic boundaries. Alison Powell reviews the argument made through the authors’ five case studies of where regulation meets code

Virtual communities and professional learning across a distributed remote membership

Headteachers, or Principals, of schools work in isolation from each other yet share common practice and domain of leadership and management. They exhibit the characteristics of a community of practice yet are remote from other members of their community. Similar communities of practice can be identified for other types of school leaders, subject co-ordinators for example, and for professionals in other disciplines – consultant registrars in health, optometrists working in dispensing opticians, museum curators, and so on. This paper explores ways of using virtual communities to develop professional learning in these communities of practice. We discuss our work in the context of education and formal and informal learning communities of school leaders and explore how the lessons learnt have general application. We present a model for professional learning through online collaboration and communication, and look, in particular, at the concept of time and its effects in the virtual community

Web Blocking Policy made behind closed doors?

Is it appropriate for web-blocking proposals to be agreed behind closed doors? Earlier this week, documents from a closed-door meeting between Minister Ed Vaizey and a rightsholders group that included the Premier League, the Publishers Association, BPI, Motion Picture Association and others were leaked to blogger James Frith. The leaked papers from the meeting imply that the rightsholders would like to bring in a voluntary web-blocking scheme that would act as a ‘self-regulation’ system allowing rightsholders to quickly block websites without thorough legal intervention

Accountable machines: bureaucratic cybernetics?

Alison Powell, Assistant Professor at LSE, argues that the accountability of algorithms is intrinsically linked to governance structures and citizenship in society. Algorithms should be used to support decision-making for the benefit of society rather than to target individual consumers

Open culture and innovation: integrating knowledge across boundaries

What does open source mean for culture? For knowledge? As cultural production has come to be characterized by contribution as well as consumption and as alternative modes of intellectual property transfer challenge the ‘dominant paradigm’ that knowledge and information should be protected and monetized, the logic of ‘open sourcing’ has extended into many cultural spheres. This article positions ‘openness’ as a value that intermediates between re-usable software code, institutional transparency, and expanded opportunities for participation in knowledge production cultures. By observing and analyzing the expansion of ‘openness’ from computer software to electronics hardware, we can develop a framework that identifies the tensions between socio-cultural visions of knowledge commons and the realities of governing those commons. This research focuses in particular on the knowledge related to electronics hardware and other material objects governed by open hardware licenses. The insights in this article are valuable for anyone studying open source and peer production processes and the knowledge claims surrounding them

Hacking in the public interest: authority, legitimacy, means, and ends

The cultural appropriation of ideas about hacking and opening knowledge have had significant impact on ways of developing participation in creating public interest knowledge and knowledge commons. In particular, the ideal of hacking as developed through studies of free and open source (F/OS) has highlighted the value of processes of participation, including participatory governance, in relation to the value of expanded accessibility of knowledge, including knowledge commons. Yet, these means and ends are often conflated. This article employs three examples of projects where hacker-inspired perspectives on scientific knowledge conflict with institutional perspectives. Each example develops differently the relationships between means and ends in relation to authority and legitimacy. The article’s analysis suggests that while hacker culture’s focus on authority through participation has had great traction in business and in public interest science, this may come limit the contribution to knowledge in the public interest - especially knowledge commons

Algorithms, accountability, and political emotion: on the cultural assumptions underpinning sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular metric for news and social media platforms. Alison Powell reflects here on the implications of sentiment analysis and its potential connection with the rise and intensification of emotion-driven politics. The data inputted to ‘train’ algorithms on sentiment analysis has enormous impact and is imbued with assumptions about the world. What mechanisms might make these algorithms more accountable

Alternative civic architecture: maps of the alternative internet

Building wireless networks differently can illustrate different ways of occupying space and organizing access to communications. In this latest post in our alternative internet(s) series, LSE’s Alison Powell discusses some of the ways that alternative internets have brought attention to architectural choices about networking, and highlights how these politicizations might be valuable in the age of the top-down “smart city” where corporate infrastructure often combines with centralized control

Will the ‘Honest Brokers’ of Internet Governance Have Any Real Power?

Our own Alison Powell responds to the European Commission’s announcement on Wednesday that it will pursue a greater role in internet governance and expresses doubts that the US will really cede power

Five Minutes with Alison Powell on what data means, how it is produced and what influence it has for decision-makers.

Data, information and knowledge are powerful aspects of contemporary society. Managing Editor Sierra Williams recently caught up with Alison Powell on the development and expansion of Data and Society activities taking place at the LSE. Alongside a new MSc programme, a broad range of research is set to be explored, such as the ethics of data and surveillance systems, the roles of data intermediaries in creating value and meaning from data, and the social and cultural consequences of platforms