This collaborative blog post summarizes the project Ricarose Roque and I have been working on for the Introduction to Civic Media class (CMS 860).

Abstract

In my "hello world" post for this blog, I tried to define Civic Media as

…a set of tools, technologies and practices that enable wider and more active participation in a democratic process.

While writing this post, I remember trying to unpack the concept of "democratic process", but I wasn't sure about how to go about it. I talked about the "curation and synthesis of public knowledge" and the importance of expression, but it felt that there needed to be a clearer distinction between what was to me, the "traditional" democratic process, and the processes that I would typically think of in the context of the civic media landscape.

On the midnight of 5th June 2011, Indian police violently cracked down on a peaceful group of protesters who had convened together against corruption and untaxed money stashed away in foreign tax havens (referred to as "black money" in India). On the 7th of June, Anonymous announced "Operation India" on Twitter, kicked off by the defacement the website of the Indian federal government's nodal IT agency, the NIC, and the release of a list of demands. The demands consisted of:

This a collaborative post on the project Ricarose Roque and I have been working on:

Interview Protocol for Moderators
To understand the perspective of community moderators, which includes a full-time online community coordinator, we plan to interview one or two members of the moderation team. We frame our interview questions using our project’s three research questions (listed below). To make our conversations concrete, we plan to ask moderators to identify two-to-three examples of particularly challenging scenarios of moderation specifically around civic engagement of Scratch community members. Below is our interview protocol for moderators organized around background questions, specific examples, and looking ahead.

Research Questions for the Interview

BBC is one of the few mass media outlets that has a worldwide footprint, and as someone who used to live in a region which is heavily covered by the BBC, it was very interesting to see the "outside perspective" that it brought in for issues which had a strongly localized context. With the BBC going into the practice of inviting participation (via social networks) to their reporting process, I think it would be very interesting to see the resultant blending of the local and the outside perspective.

The BBC has published their social media policy online, and as I was going through it, their editorial guidelines for using pictures from social media seemed very interesting to me. The guidelines cover three important areas - context, consent and amplification.

This diagram is inspired by a talk Bill Moggridge gave at the Media Lab, where he talked about the concept of the unit of participation - where smaller the unit of participation (blog post larger than a tweet), the easier it is for people to participate.

While growing up in Calcutta, every day, while going to school, I would see a group of people having an animated conversation near the bus stop. They would be gathered around a long board made of weaved bamboo strips, on which the day's newspaper would be pasted - all the pages one after the other, in a horizontal line. Some would be simply silently reading the various articles, but more often than not, there will be a group of people, with tea and snacks from the roadside tea stall nearby, engaged in an active discussion around the day's news. It was an everyday occurrence, and as I explored the city further, I realized that similar newsboards were scattered all over - near busy bus stops, tea stalls, and occasionally, near religious temples. There was something different about the newspaper that was pasted on the newsboard - it was not a standard commercial newspaper - it was "Ganashakti" (translated as "Power of the people"), the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The CPI(M) was the largest constituent party in the Left Front coalition that was in power in the state.

This is the refined project proposal which Ricarose Roque and I have been working on:

Project Description

To bring some context to our work, we start with a story…

A young girl learns about animal testing from her favorite TV show. To express her shock about the way that animals are being treated, and to raise awareness about it, she creates an interactive media project and shares it in a large online community of other young creators. In her project, she includes graphic photos of animal testing laboratories to show how horrific it can be. Some kids love her project, but others have strong negative feelings about the use of such graphic images. A debate ensues in the comments section of the project between the two groups, and soon, the moderators have to intervene. The moderators decide the images are too graphic for its young audience and decide to label it as not for everyone, which makes it less prominent on the website and harder to find.

For me, it was difficult to read both the Garnham and Chakravartty pieces (which is not surprising, since I come from a purely engineering background, and this is definitely out of my comfort zone). However, while going through the readings, I was constantly reminded of the debate in India about the issue of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Indian companies, especially in the news media. After independence in 1947, the Indian government had prohibited any foreign investment in print media (a law was passed in 1955). But in 2002, the decision was reversed, and now, up to 26% ownership of print media in India can be foreign [1]. However, this came with a rider - foreign investment in news agencies is still barred[2]. This is the first step, in the context of Indian print media, towards what Garnham points[3] out as one of the characteristics of the phenomena of mass media turning into full-scale commodity production:

Increased international competition and the resulting take-over of domestic, national publishing companies, advertising agencies, private broadcasting stations etc. by multinational companies.

The 2007 report Packet Forgery By ISPs: A Report on the Comcast Affair by the Electronic Frontier Foundation talks about the practices of Comcast (the second largest Internet Service Provider in the United States) to control and differentially prioritize the flow of information through their network. This "interference", as the EFF calls it, consisted mostly of Comcast crafting specialized TCP/IP network packets to disrupt the connections of users using peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols such as BitTorrent and Gnutella. In the report, EFF describes the technical details of the methodology adopted by Comcast, explains its immediate and potential negative effects, counters the official argument/explanation put forward by Comcast, and finally, provides some possible countermeasures to defeat the mechanism being used.