Gill's motivation to research Twitter is derived from attempt to understand how technology impact society. While  looking at the presentation Twitter in the Classroom she commented that many have Twitter but don't use them. Why? too much noise or they don't care what others do during the day.

This presentation is her introduction to twitter to students: http://wiredpen.com/2009/02/24/intro-to-twitter/

Her insigts from using heavily and teaching Twitter:

1. Twitter is a conversation space not a publication.

2. Disinformation and information can move so rapidly on Twitter, without any easy way to correct it. More problematic the messages ephemeral nature. Since archiving twits is still in its infancy, many of the twits are inaccessible if it is more than two weeks. The case of Iran is interesting - specially the disinformation that came out of Iran and was fed to a large audience according to a specific world view.

3. Twit is not a twit is not a twit - a twit about breakfast is not a twit about a conference or a news item.

4. Twitter has the potential to be a democratizing technology. See her project "The Book" for example. The case of the wineries is a great example to how stakeholders were involved in the discussions.

Politicians: Twitter is a conversation space not a publication

Some of her insights about the elections: in 2008 we came to see politicians who started to use twitter. But there was almost no candidate in 2008 who used twitter as a conversation media, twitted by the politicians. One that she can thing of is Senator Edwards. Once Obama got the nomination, people noticed that twitter exist. But Gill warns that one shouldn't use it like obama. The Obama Twitter was one-side channel with no interaction. His Twitter was all about "he" and "he". Same thing happened with Clinton and McCane. the problem is that John McCanes' twits are all gone now. They deleted all of them. Gill's lesson from that is that therefore we should try to archive it all because the traditional gatekeepers are gone.

I think that when it comes to public figures, we should definitely find mechanisms to be able to archive them. Politicians have to know that when they twit they are not 'off record'. The challenge is what happens ethically when you archive also conversations about people who are not public figures? How can we develop ethical mechanisms to allow eternal transparency and accountability and at the same time maintain privacy of individuals?

Having Blaise Cronin, Dean of the School for Library and Information Science at Indiana University give a talk, was as usual an inspiring and intellectual experience.

Did you ever wonder how the industry (in many cases but not always, a non-profit industry) of citations work? Who becomes a co-author on a masterpiece and who doesn't? What can we learn from the acknowledgments about the politics of creating a masterpiece? Who are those inventors and who are the informal collaborators that usually are not mentioned formally and vanish as time passes? These and some more related topics were discussed in his talk (His powerpoint can be download here). I will try to bring some of them with my comments.

Michelangelo -Capella Sistina

Just to give small examples - Michelangelo's genesis on the ceiling of the Capella Sistina, was the work of many apprentices and students under the mentoring of Michelangelo. Today, 500 years later, can we name even one of them? why no credit was given to them, although they took part in creating this masterpiece? Who was Robert Boyle's mysterious partner, that we know was the technician of most of his inventions? why he was never credited? Who should be credited for the invention of cloning Dolly? The technicians that worked on Dolly complained that their contribution is ignored.

Here are some statistics before analysis and speculations:

According to ISI data, published papers which involve multiple authors, specifically 50, 100 and 200 authors have increased tremendously from1981. I would have a wild guess, that if you check social science vs. exact science, you would find that these numbers applies mainly to exact science.

Can anyone imagine Foucault's book "The Archeology of Knowledge" written by 50 different people simultaneously? And indeed most of the examples Blaise gave were from the exact and life sciences.

Is there a connection between the number of authors and the number of acknowledgments? Take a look at the two tables for example taken from JACS (Journal of the American Chemical Society).

Two parallel trends -  the number of multi-author papers has increased and so the number of acknowledgments. Looking only at this table, one cannot conclude whether the increase in acknowledgments is bigger than the increase in the number of authors.

BTW, while most of the acknowledgments deal with thanks to financial supporters, and help in tools and technology in JACS, this changes when moving to other disciplines.

So the next figure below shows that the number of acknowledgments did increase more than the average number of authors.

So does it mean that people became more polite now and they mention anyone who saw even one word of their manuscript? or does it mean that the increase in the number of authors during the years should have been higher and maybe some of these acknowledgments should have been co-authors? so not politeness, but political consideration of reducing potential conflicts with co-workers?

But there are few problems with acknowledgments. Nobody remembers them, they are not recorded anywhere in a systematic way, and in the academia there is no system of incentives that will acknowledge the acknowledgments. So it is more profitable and worthwhile for a colleague to be cited than be mentioned in the acknowledgment. With citations researchers are being more evaluated. More citations more status. Blaise gave a wonderful example that when we use someones' publications to develop an idea or to describe the literature we cite them, and therefore they are being rewarded. But if we ask a colleague to help us with a statistical analysis, and this colleague might even spend hours and hours the maximum we would do in the profession is to acknowledge them, not even one citation as a cure.

So if the world is going toward interdisciplinarity - maybe it is time to create also a system that will acknowledge the acknowledgments and by this reduce the politics behind them?

Blaise gave the example of Rob Kling. If you look at the following figure you will see that Rob Kling collaborated mostly with people who were in his environment (UCI), not necessarily people he preferred to work with. When he moved in 1996 to Indiana he stopped working with most of his UCI colleagues.

e-Government track HICSS-42

Good papers were presented at the eGovernment track at HICSS-42. One particular paper that attracted my attention was the paper of John Bertot titled Emerging Role of Public Librarians as E-Government Providers. According to the paper libraries are becoming a central place for certain populations to access e-Government services. Some of these services you can see in the following figure taken from the article:

One of the main findings of the article is that, the demand for e-government services in libraries pose challenges. Suddenly librarians are requested to do things they were not trained for. For example, help filling up a driving license form, a birth certificate, helping with medical records etc...  Add to that the belief that many librarians share about their "neutral" role, and consequenly the article shows that librarians in some cases may serve as an obstacle to e-government deployment in Libraries. I thought one way to interprete their reluctance can be through Network Gatekeeping Theory . Gatekeepers have different rationales for gatekeeping and so librarians - it looks like one of these is the attempt to preserve their culture, the librarian's culture. E-government activities may be grasped as a threat to their training, to their neutral professional stance. Also, from a power perspective, some of them do not have enough skills to help users/patrons. That makes them feel uncomfortable and maybe afraid to be reflected externally as non-professionals or technically not-competent.

BTW - It was nice to learn that there are 17,000 public libraries in the US (which is more than the number of McDonalds branches in the US).

freedom of information

This is the first post about freedom of information. Here are some important links to different reports about freedom of information. The next phase would be reading and analyzing these reports. So stay tuned:

· Privacy International – Report about freedom of information around the world 2006 - http://www.privacyinternational.org/foi/foisurvey2006.pdf

· UN - http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/files/26159/12054862803freedom_information_en.pdf/freedom_information_en.pdf

· US government - http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07441.pdf

· UNESCO – Freedom of Information around the world 2006 http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/files/26159/12054862803freedom_information_en.pdf/freedom_information_en.pdf

· Council of Europe - http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Reports/Html/164.htm

· UK – FOI act - http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/freedomofinformationquarterly.htm

· UK – Annual Report 2007 in the UK about freedom of information - http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/foi-report-2007-final-web.pdf

· US Department of Justice - Reading Rooms - http://www.usdoj.gov/oip/04_2.html

In a web 2.0 world the relationship of gatekeepers-gated is intriguing. The users ability to produce information and the dynamic relationship between users and gatekeepers makes NGT (Network Gatekeeping Theory) a great framework to analyze these chages.

An elaborated article about Network Gatekeeping Theory can be found here: Barzilai-Nahon Karine, 2008, “Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping: A Framework for Exploring Information Control“, Journal of the American Information Science and Technology, Vol. 59(9), pp. 1-20.

This was created by the help of http://www.wordle.net

This chapter on gatekeeping offers a systematic exploration of the main trends and analytical frameworks relating to gatekeeping in the literature from 1995 to 2007. The chapter looks at eight fields: library and information science (henceforth information science), communication, law, management of information systems, management, political science, public affairs, and sociology. The chapter covers 24,669 articles in those disciplines, and looks thoroughly at 453 articles that use the concept of gatekeeping. The review demonstrates the lack of analytical tools to respond to two important phenomena: the dynamism of gatekeeping and the essential role of those involved in the gatekeeping process.

The chapter uses Network Gatekeeping Theory as a basis for analysis. More about Network Gatekeeping Theory - see here.