Author Archives: birchallchris
Slow progress towards screen scraping conversations
It has been a long time since I blogged on this site. This is partly due to my involvement in a couple of really interesting research projects (the Digital Data Analysis project of the http://www.communitiesandculture.org network with Dr Helen Kennedy and Dr … Continue reading
How much do we need to think when making decisions
There has been widespread public and political disquiet in the UK recently at the bishops in the house of lords sending the benefits bill back to parliament for amendment. Why? People suggested that there was widespread public support for the … Continue reading
Digital Democracy: More than Public Opinion Pieces
The UK coalition government today published the list of e-petitions it has received so far through its e-petition website. Top of the list of topics that may be debated in parliament is a request to bring back the death penalty … Continue reading
Beyond the AV debate
A recent poll by the Institute of Public Policy Research showed that support for a switch to the Alternative Vote system (AV) from First-Past-The-Post may be growing in the UK. One of many, often contradictory, polls this one is just a small … Continue reading
Deliberation in e-Participation
In a PhD supervision meeting with Professor Stephen Coleman, we reflected on the role of deliberation in e-participation. Drawing a distinction between collaboration and deliberation and noting the differences between talk, political talk, deliberation and political deliberation, we talked about … Continue reading
Mediating debate for large scale argumentation
Mark Klein and colleagues recently developed a system for large scale online argumentation which goes some way to answering the question I posed in my last blog entry about how design can enable large scale deliberation within the bounds of … Continue reading
Designing for deliberation (continued)
To add to my previous post on designing deliberative systems I have been reading Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice by Todd Davies et al. (2009), particularly Part VI: Design of Deliberation Tools, as well as an interesting paper by Deen G Freelon … Continue reading
Designing for deliberation
I’ve been pulling together bits of background reading over the last two weeks, particularly in the area of interface design for e-participation and designing systems for deliberation. This is far from an exhaustive list of papers, but I hope I … Continue reading
Dr Simon Smith: Online research – analysing forums
The latest PhD seminar featured Simon Smith presenting to us two pieces of research that he had worked on: a health management project in digital inclusion and an international local e-democracy project. Both projects involved the use and analysis of … Continue reading
Supervision meeting three
After my meeting with Ann, Stephen was aware of my difficulties in projecting a structure of research that is worthy of PhD. I talked about the areas I had worked on: case studies; different technologies and ways of looking at … Continue reading
e-Participation and Online Deliberation 