Abstract: 

Why have some developing countries faced persistent challenges at extending state authority throughout their territories? The consequences of incomplete governance are often severe in terms of public order, public goods, and economic growth, which raise the question of why ungoverned spaces remain without effective authority. Although there are many reasons why states leave broad swathes of their territory ungoverned, existing scholarship has overlooked the role of international politics. This dissertation demonstrates the importance of international factors in accounting for variation in state weakness, and argues that enemy states can subvert or deter the exercise of state authority near the borders of their neighbors. External interference can create or sustain ungoverned spaces in the target state, and yields policy benefits to the enemy state. Drawing on original data and a new measure of state authority, I support this argument with a cross-national statistical analysis that examines variation within countries, and a natural experiment from the case of Thailand that identifies the causal effect of hostile neighbors on state authority.

Speaker Bio:

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ABSTRACT

The anger against corruption in India has led to many new experiments at fighting it and technology is increasingly a part of such experiments – be it in the form of large e-governance projects or a small grassroots mobilization. Some of these initiatives have led to substantial improvement in performance whereas others remain highly contested. In this talk, Vivek will discuss a few experiments by governments and by civil society and the debate around impact of technology in fighting corruption.

SPEAKER BIO

I joined the Liberation Technology Program as the Manager in February 2011 after completing my Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prior to this, I worked with campaigns on various socio-economic rights in India, including the right to food, education and the right to information. Based on these experiences I have written (and co-authored) extensively on issues surrounding the right to food, including Notes from the right to food campaign: people's movement for the right to food (2003), Rights based approach and human development: An introduction (2008), Gender and the right to food: A critical re-examination (2006), Food Policy and Social Movements: Reflections on the Right to Food Campaign in India (2007).

In working with these campaigns, I realized the widespread disparities in the provision of basic public services in India. This led me examine how Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, developed extensive commitment to providing such services to all its residents in my doctoral dissertation. Oxford University Press will shortly publish my book based on the dissertation entitled, "Delivering services effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond".

As a full-time activist, I also experimented with various IT platforms to make the campaigns effective. This interest brought me to the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford. I am currently leading a research project entitled "Combating corruption with mobile phones" that is in currently on a pilot mode in 5 states of India.

ABSTRACT

How can and how should we govern a global resource like the online space? How can stakeholders (governments, businesses and civil society) participate on equal footing and “in their respective roles”? And how can democratic values inform all governance practices, when the constituency is potentially everybody, most decisions are highly complex and interdependent and when the shared resource is a conglomerate of private and public assets? These are the questions scholars and practitioners in the internet governance field explore and experiment with since the UN World Summit of the Information Society in 2003 brought internet governance to the attention of diplomates and governments around the world. In this seminar Max Senges will review the historic development of internet governance as well as discuss current challenges and opportunities in building an effective governance ecosystem for the transnational digital space.

SPEAKER BIO

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More recently he has published “Internet Governance as our shared responsibility” and “Ensuring that Forum Follows Function” in “The Roadmap for Institutional Improvements to the Global Internet Governance Ecosystem” jointly with Vint Cerf, Patrick Ryan and Rick Whitt.

Senges holds a PhD in philosophy from the Information and Knowledge Society Program at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Barcelona as well as a Masters in Business Information Systems from the University of Applied Sciences Wildau (Berlin).

ABSTRACT

Mr. Price will discuss finding from the recent publication Citizen Participation and Technology: An NDI Study, which was initiated in the wake of the recent, rapid rise in the use of digital technology among citizens and civil society organizations offers the possibility of strengthening citizens’ voice in politics, carving out new political space for activism and promoting more government accountability. It is clear that these technologies are increasingly complementing citizens’ political participation, changing interrelationships between citizens, organizations, and public institutions, and expanding notions of political behavior and participation. NDI understands how to identify and support the types of citizen participation that contribute to democratization, but the exact role and results of technology use in this process are less clear. The rising use of technology to increase citizens’ access to information and provide avenues of communication to public officials in hopes that this will transform how politics is practiced seems driven by apparently underlying, yet largely untested, assumptions about technology’s ability to increase the quantity, quality, and democratizing influence of citizen participation. Despite the exuberance for new technologies, there is not enough data available on the impacts they have had on the political processes and institutions they are intended to influence in emerging democracies. This creates additional challenges in designing and implementing programs.

SPEAKER BIO

Koebel Price is NDI’s Senior Advisor for Citizen Participation. He has 20 years’ experience in leading programs that promote transparency and accountability in government, citizen participation and civil society development, political party strengthening and free and fair elections. Mr. Price has worked in over 30 countries, served as chief of party for U.S. government-funded programs in the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa and managed the democracy and governance portfolios of international development organizations. Domestically, he has served as a Political and Legislative Director with the Minnesota AFL-CIO, part of America’s largest trade union confederation. Prior to that, he was trained in community organizing at the Midwest Academy and led grassroots advocacy campaigns for issue – based civil society organizations. In his current role, he supports NDI’s civil society strengthening efforts globally, providing strategies, tools, techniques and training to NDI’s staff members and partner organizations to support and strengthen citizen organizing and political activism in new and emerging democracies. Mr. Price authored the recent publication Citizen Participation and Technology: An NDI Study, which examines the role technologies are playing in democratization programs

ABSTRACT
We are familiar with "information technology" and with “liberation technology" but perhaps still need to ask ourselves to what extent information and liberation make natural partners. This primarily theoretical talk will explore why it is tempting to champion information and its technologies in the cause of liberation, yet why it may also be problematic.

SPEAKER BIO
Paul Duguid is an adjunct full professor at the School of Information at Berkeley. In recent years he has also held visiting positions at Queen Mary, University of London, Copenhagen Business School, the École Polytechnique in Paris. In the 1990s, he was a consultant to senior management at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). While there he was co-author of The Social Life of Information with John Seely Brown, the director of PARC. Recent work has focused on the multiple conceptions of information and confusions they can give rise to.

ABSTRACT
My presentation will focus on how community-focused nonprofit newsrooms and data providers are reinventing the business model of journalism while focusing on the communities we serve.

SPEAKER BIO
Kevin Davis is CEO and Executive Director of the Investigative News Network (INN), a growing consortium of more than 80 nonprofit newsrooms producing nonpartisan investigative and public interest journalism. Davis oversees INN’s efforts to promote the sustainability of its member organizations, and increase the impact of their reporting through collaboration.

As a former digital publisher, Davis has more than 16 years of experience in strategic development and growth at news and media organizations. He was responsible for operations at Los Angeles-based news organizations Variety.com and TheWrap.com.

Since his appointment to INN, Davis has spoken and lectured about the nonprofit, investigative journalism sector at conferences and institutions across the United States, including the Online News Association, Investigative Reporters & Editors, the National Alliance for Media Arts + Culture, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, USC Annenberg, Syracuse University, Ohio State University and the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was the 2011 Hearst Professional-in-Residence.

ABSTRACT
The result of not preparing people and places to manipulate the productive function of network technology is ‘digital destitution’. As the ability to access the Internet becomes more crucial in daily life, those Americans who are not prepared to function with this technology are excluded and do find themselves in a state of disconnection from the vital economic, social, political, cultural and institutional processes that depend on broadband technology. In this presentation, Dr. Blanca Gordo will outline and ground her theoretical conceptual framework for understanding the impact of being offline.

SPEAKER BIO
Blanca Gordo, Ph.D., is a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California at Berkeley where she is writing her book, Digital Destitution in the Digital Age. Most recently, she was the Academic Coordinator for the Center for Latino Policy Research at the University of California at Berkeley, where she directed public policy initiatives, program development, and the Technology and Development Research Group. Dr. Gordo holds a doctorate in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in regional-local economic development, urban poverty, local technology development processes, organizational analysis and development, public policy, ethnic populations (African Americans and Latinos), demographics, and social inequality structures

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000) with Peter R. Lavoy and James L. Wirtz; the editor of Inside Nuclear South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2009); and co-editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus, On the Global Nuclear Future (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010), with Steven E. Miller. Sagan’s recent publications include “A Call for Global Nuclear Disarmament” in Nature (July 2012); “Atomic Aversion: Experimental Evidence on Taboos, Traditions, and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons” with Daryl G. Press and Benjamin A. Valentino in the American Political Science Review (February 2013); and, with Matthew Bunn, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences occasional paper, “A Worst Practices Guide to Insider Threats: Lessons from Past Mistakes” (2014).

Sagan was the recipient of the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award in 2013. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009. 

ABSTRACT

Collective intelligence is channeled to journalism by crowdsourcing and co-creation. While the crowd contributes to the journalistic process with its knowledge, the crowd also challenges journalistic norms and ideals. In her talk, Dr. Aitamurto shows how collective intelligence impacts knowledge search in journalism, alters power structures in society, and functions as a basis for value creation.

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Tanja Aitamurto is a Brown Fellow and the Deputy Director at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at the School of Engineering at Stanford, as well as a Liberation Technology alumna. Her research focuses on the applications of collective intelligence in journalism, governance, and new product design in media innovations. She is the author of the book "Crowdsourcing for Democracy: New Era in Policy-Making", and she has published in New Media & Society, Digital Journalism and Design Issues.