Huan Sun | MIT Center for Civic Media

Recent blog posts by Huan Sun

Building the NGO Tech Network in China

Submitted by Huan Sun on April 11, 2013 - 1:21pm

On March 22 and 23, 2013, NGO2.0, Google Developers Community Guangzhou, the School of Software of Sun Yat-sen University, and TechSoup Global held the first Nonprofit Hackathon in Guangzhou. About 30 Chinese software developers and 10 NGOs participated in this two-day event. At the end, four teams came up with three web applications and one mobile app. A collection of pictures taken during the event can be found at our Netease album.

More Females on Sina Weibo but Less Influential than Males?

Submitted by Huan Sun on March 7, 2013 - 8:04am

This semester for a class on HCI, I have been looking at dual screen experience that people interact with mobile devices while watching TV in China. I collected over 1 million Sina Weibo messages during 'Chunwan' (春晚), a state sponsored TV program to celebrate Chinese New Year, which is also a popular cultural event that almost everyone in China participates. While the social engagement aspect of this study is still ongoing, for now one of the side findings from this data is quite worth-noting:

Within this data, over 60% users are female on Sina Weibo, but male users are almost twice likely to have a large number of followers(over 5000) than their female counterpart.

What Chinese NGOs Want to Learn about Internet

Submitted by Huan Sun on September 29, 2012 - 10:32pm

How do Chinese NGOs integrate new technologies to their work? What are the biggest barriers for them to fully take advantage of new technologies? Are information communication technology(ICT) infrastructures still the barriers for grassroots NGOs? What type of assistance they might need to develop integrated practices of the internet to advance their causes? Aiming at answering these questions, NGO2.0 is launching our third ICT capacity survey!

(Scene of 2012 Chengdu Web2.0 Training Workshop, China)

Network Analysis of Sina Weibo

Submitted by Huan Sun on July 24, 2012 - 4:47pm

Sina Weibo is one of the major micro-blogging services in China. According to a recent news report, Weibo has over 300 million users, and 100 million posts are generated everyday. In contrast with its counterpart in the West, a large number of studies on Twitter has been done, but the number of studies on Weibo is rather limited. Some researchers are constrained in studying Weibo because of language issues. For those who are sufficient in Chinese language, the research that has been done is mostly qualitative case studies.

Summary of posts about Berkman Center's Workshop "Understanding the New Wave of Social Cooperation"

Submitted by Huan Sun on April 4, 2012 - 1:07pm

On March 21st, Harvard Berkman Center hold a workshop entitled “Understanding the New Wave of Social Cooperation: A Triangulation of the Arab Revolutions, European Mobilizations and the American Occupy Movement” and the class of Networked Social Movements reflected on this event through this series of blog posts:

Artist As Researcher? Researcher As Artist?
–Gabi

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