Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. The technologically tethered, iPhone-addicted figure is an image we can easily conjure. Most of us complain that there aren't enough hours in the day and there are too many e-mails in our thumb-accessible inboxes. This widespread perception that life is faster than it used to be is now ingrained in our culture, and smartphones and the Internet are continually...

India's right to information movement demonstrated the potential to combat corruption through social audits – an exercise to share and verify public records with people. India's right to information movement demonstrated the potential to combat corruption through social audits – an exercise to share and verify public records with people. But this process requires a lot of time, skill and organizational effort – thanks to which very few audits are organized in India despite its potential. We...

Over the past decade there has been a phenomenal growth in mobile phone and internet usage in Africa which has attracted substantial media and academic interest. Over the past decade there has been a phenomenal growth in mobile phone and internet usage in Africa which has attracted substantial media and academic interest. However questions remain about the economically transformative nature and potential of this diffusion of communication infrastructures and artefacts. Based on over two...

An in-depth study of the most powerful electronics contractor and the lives of its 1.4 million workers. During 2010, 18 workers attempted suicide at Taiwanese-owned Foxconn Technology Group's Chinese facilities, where Apple and other high profile branded products are produced and assembled. They ranged in age from 17 to 25 - the prime of youth. Fourteen died, while four survived with crippling injuries. What had driven the young Chinese workers to commit the desperate act? What light did they...

How can NGOs like Oxfam come together with academics and practitioners alike to tackle emerging privacy and security challenges when it comes to effective management of data? Data has invaluable applications to ensure organisations like Oxfam are needs driven and responsive, meanwhile there are also huge risks to communities if the related processes are not designed and managed in a responsible manner. Adopting meaningful approaches to data security and ethical methodology is not a new effort...

Alloysius Attah will discuss some of Farmerline's success factors, including its locally adapted technological solutions and strong local outreach. Development organizations, governments, and many others have put high hopes in the potential of mobile technology to improve and upgrade agricultural markets and value chains. However, with a few exceptions, traction and scale of mobile applications targeting African farmers have mostly remained elusive. Farmerline is one such exception. In a...

Since Tavaana's launch in 2010, the e-learning institute has safely educated thousands of Iranians about democracy and human rights. Since Tavaana's launch in 2010, the e-learning institute has safely educated thousands of Iranians about democracy and human rights. Through our live e-classes, documentaries and lectures aired on satellite TV, robust social networks, dissemination of ebooks and more, we are able to teach and inspire civic discourse about highly censored topics such as...

Tales from the Zooniverse or, What to do with a million scientists

panel examines online learning through comparing and contrasting the MOOC format with traditional online strategies. In the last few years MOOCs have achieved a great deal of attention in higher education. While addressing the issue of scale, there is much debate over how well they satisfy learning effectiveness, satisfaction, and overall quality. This panel examines online learning through comparing and contrasting the MOOC format with traditional online strategies. The discussion will focus...

Facing the Crowd: Past, Present, and Furtures of Digital Labor Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Interview with Tom Steinberg on the topics of his talk "There Ain't No 'e' in PPE - How do we fill the digital skills gap at the top levels of government and politics?" Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Interview with Matthew McGregor of Blue State Digital on the topics covered in his seminar "Digital strategy, social media and elections".

Interview with Beth Noveck on receiving an internet and society award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Beth Noveck discusses the work of NYU's Governance Lab (which she directs), and the role of data in opening up government. She starts by discussing the origins of her interest in open government, democratisation, and political culture. She then discusses how opening up government data can translate into positive outcomes -- in terms of delivery of services, greater transparency, and...

Interview with Laura Bates on receiving an internet and society award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Laura Bates discusses the origins of the Everyday Sexism project, its intended audience, and the early difficulties she faced when talking about the problem of the normalisation of sexism and getting people to acknowledge its existence. She discusses the irony that the Internet can be used both as a medium to enable people to join together to promote positive social change, but also to...

Interview with Dame Stephanie Shirley on receiving a lifetime achievement award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Dame Stephanie Shirley, the OII's founding donor, discusses her early career as founder and Chief Executive of software company, Xansa plc. She discusses organisational and early feminist culture, the role of women in IT / STEM (and how to encourage greater involvement), and entrepreneurship and social consciousness, particularly in relation to her important role as a...

Interview with Barry Wellman on receiving a lifetime achievement award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Barry Wellman discusses his early work on urban sociology and social networks in the city, and describes how this fascination with the evolution of community relationships shaped his scholarship. He offers insights into the concept of 'networked individualism' as it plays out across different spheres of our lives, particularly in networked work, and sets a research agenda for the next stage...

The value of not knowing something illuminates some basic assumptions about knowledge and allows us to ask a series of interesting questions about how the information society will develop.  Our relationship with knowledge is an uneasy one. As we progress the cost of acquiring knowledge seems to be sinking, and the choice of what knowledge to pursue becomes more pronounced. We can imagine a world in which we could find out a whole range of things, at a moderate cost, but will choose not to...

Tim Wu will discuss the science of attention, the history of the attention industries, and some of the harms caused by overharvesting. He will also propose a model of attention sovereignty of importance for the future. Rich or poor, man, woman or child, each of us has 168 hours per week: it is how we use that time that differentiates us. Yet we seem to live in an era where the daily demands made on our time and attention are greater than ever before. This is due both to advances in...

This talk aims to provide a philosophical framework through which the current emphasis on data-intensive biology can be studied and understood. Over the last two decades, online databases, digital visualization tools and automated data analysis have become key tools to cope with the increasing scale and diversity of scientifically relevant information that is being accumulated (the so-called ‘big data’). Within the biological and biomedical sciences, digital access to data has revolutionized...

Tim Unwin focuses on current work at the CTO, where his own personal contributions focus especially on the use of ICTs by people with disabilities. Many of those engaged in using information and communication technologies for development in the early 2000s saw them as being an opportunity through which profoundly different social, economic and political structures could be created, that would in some way generate a fairer, more equitable global system. Recent rapid expansion in the use of...

Jon Agar will introduce the concept of working worlds, illustrate how they can be used to think about past and present science, and identify some problems and issues. In a recent historical survey of science in the twentieth century, I devised a concept 'working worlds' which I think helps understand science's relationship with its broader context. Working worlds are arenas of human action that generate problems. The intuition was that science does not operate in a featureless, level...

Julian Huppert discusses privacy in a digital age. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Rob Kitchin discusses how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’. ‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the...

David Souter uses the history and development of ICT4D as a framework to critique ICT4D approaches and consider the relevance of ICTs and ICT4D to the post-2015 development agenda. The presentation will use the history and development of ICT4D - and its relationships with both development policy and the ICT sector - as a framework to critique ICT4D approaches and consider the relevance of ICTs and ICT4D to the post-2015 development agenda. It will draw, inter alia, on recent work for the...

This seminar will investigate how different technologies were used by CDAC Network Members in the immediate response to Typhoon Haiyan, focusing particularly on how needs assessment data was collected, shared and acted upon. This seminar will investigate how different technologies were used by CDAC Network Members in the immediate response to Typhoon Haiyan, focusing particularly on how needs assessment data was collected, shared and acted upon. The session will discuss some of the challenges...