Tag: Jonathan Gray

Session at AoIR 2016: Big Data Meet Grassroots Activism

DATACTIVE was invited to host a session at the AoIR 2016, the Association of Internet Researchers, that took place 5-8 October in Berlin. Stefania Milan, Lonneke van der Velden, Jonathan Gray, Becky Kazansky and Frederike Kaltheuner organised a fishbowl session, building on questions like ‘How are data and information changing contemporary activism? How do individuals and collectives resist massive data collection? How do they take advantage of the increasing availability of data for advocacy and social change?’.

To kickstart the Big Data Meet Grassroots Activism discussion, Jonathan Gray made a short clip on the production and contestation of socio-technical (data) infrastructures to. A full transcript of the video ‘Reshaping Data Worlds’ can be found at his website.

 

Reshaping Data Worlds? from Jonathan Gray on Vimeo.

DATACTIVE at AOIR in Berlin

The DATACTIVE team will host a session at AIOR2016 Big Data Meet Grassroots Activism, Berlin, 5-8 October, 2016

Stefania Milan, Lonneke van der Velden, Jonathan Gray, Becky Kazansky, Frederike Kaltheuner

How are data and information changing contemporary activism? How do individuals and collectives resist massive data collection? How do they take advantage of the increasing availability of data for advocacy and social change?

Citizens are increasingly aware of the critical role of information as the new fabric of social life. This awareness translates into new forms of civic engagement and sociotechnical practices that creatively combine complex information, software and platforms, and political activism. However, to date little has been said about the relation between the organized civil society, activism, and big data broadly defined. In particular, the dimension of collective action, the shaping role of technology and software environments, and the impact of big data on the civil society’s ecosystem remain largely unexplored.

This fishbowl session aims at stimulating an interdisciplinary debate on the interplay between big data broadly defined and grassroots activism. It intends to involve scholars of internet studies, science and technology studies, platform and software studies, as well as political sociology and activism. It evokes internet culture and practices, collective identities and organizational forms, activism and social justice, looking for their entanglement with software and code, platforms, and sociotechnical interfaces that facilitate grassroots’ engagement with data and information.

The five initial participants will contribute to set the agenda of the debate, by offering 5-minute presentations on the different aspects of the suggested theme, namely: data activism, open source intelligence and the use of devices to ‘watch the watchers’, open data for social change, activism and predictive analytics, anti-surveillance and privacy activism.

Expected outcomes include a) an interdisciplinary debate on the intersection of big data and grassroots activism structured around the fish’s ice-breaker presentations, and b) the creation of a network of interested individuals working on the interplay between big data and the civil society broadly defined.

DATACTIVE at Amsterdam Privacy Conference

Jonathan Gray presented the paper “Mapping Open Data and Privacy as Issues on Digital Media” at the Amsterdam Privacy Conference, the University of Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, October 25. Lonneke van der Velden and Stefania Milan served as respondent in the panel, which included also Linnet Taylor, Helen Nissenbaum  and Mireille van Eechoud.