Abstract: 
While the debate rages on regarding the role of social media technologies within the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and more generally the larger wave of ‘Arab Spring’ protests, the more relevant question of today is whether the 18 days of revolt may have done more for social media than vice versa. In different manners, social media technologies appear to be central to this discussion. From the Muslim Brotherhood’s use of technology to engage global publics, to activist uses of social media to build grassroots networks which bypass the barriers of infrastructure and access, or blogger uses of social media to impact older top-down media, social media technologies represent critical sites for analysis and critique. Building on two years of ethnographies and interviews, this paper identifies three key themes by which social media technologies shape political power: 1. Moving Past Bubbles, 2. Linking Older and Newer Media, and 3. Digital Subversion.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

Abstract
Ever since we started to organize ourselves socially, we have thought hard and long about how to ensure that we can develop checks on the power that we entrust to some in our organization, and how we can ensure that this power is not abused or misused in different ways. There are several different ways to accomplish this goal - from balancing power between different institutions to limiting it in time. One particularly effective and interesting way to accomplish this goal has always been transparency. If we as members of an organization, citizens in a state or just human beings gain insight into how power is used, and how decisions are made, we can review the exercise of power and act on what we find.

But designing transparency is hard, and requires careful thought. As in all institutional design, the end result needs to reflect the set of relationships in the society we live in, and it needs to change when our circumstances materially change as well. In this essay I will argue that we need to examine what it would mean to change from passive access as the goal of our transparency design to active disclosure, and what new institutional challenges that will present us with.

Nicklas Lundblad is senior policy counsel and head of public policy for Google in Mountain View where he leads a small team of policy experts in analyzing and advising on public policy. He has worked with tech policy since he wrote his first article on the politics of crypto in 1994. Prior to joining Google he was senior executive vice president of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and co-founded Swedishcurrent affairs magazine Neo.. He currently serves on the Swedish ICT-council, advising the Swedish ICT-minister, works as a member of Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt's reference group on Internet Freedom and has been a member of several corporate and organizational boards. Nicklas was recently elected member of the Royal Engineering Academy in Sweden and is an Eisenhower fellow. In 2009 he was recognized as ICT-person of the year by the two largest computer and business publications in Sweden. He holds a B.A. in philosophy, a L.LM and a PhD in applied information technology. He has served on the e-Europe Advisory Board advising then-ICT-commissioner Reding on i2010 as well as represented Google in the OECD, ICC and WTO.

Abstract
Each week brings new stories of how people use digital media to break the rules of political power. Or more accurately, each week brings new stories about how people have used digital media to upset powerful elites, demand political freedoms, and look for justice. Activists armed only with mobile phones take breathtaking risks because they feel empowered by the supporting social networks they have been able to build and nurture for themselves. Yet sometimes digital media also gets used for evil, and we find drug lords, holy thugs, and rogue generals using the latest information technologies to oppress the communities they rule. So how do we add up the impact of such technologies on international politics? If digital media is so important to revolutionaries, dictators and corporate interests around the world, what are the new rules of engagement in global power politics? We are entering a period of global political life I call the Pax Technica that is made possible because of new information technologies. This peace is not so much the absence of war but the presence of transparent governments, empowered citizens, open information systems, and shared norms of information access. Governments don’t always want to be opened up for scrutiny, and activists don’t always use social media very well. But it is clear that the rules of global power politics have changed.

Philip N. Howard is professor of communication, information and international studies at the University of Washington. Currently, he is a fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. His latest book is Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring.  His writings appear at http://philhoward.org and tweets from @pnhoward.

Speaker Bio:

Greg Distelhorst is a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Department of Political Science and a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His dissertation addresses public accountability under authoritarian rule, focusing on official responsiveness and citizen activism in contemporary China. This work shows how citizens can marshal negative media coverage to discipline unelected officials, or "publicity-driven accountability." These findings result from two years of fieldwork in mainland China, including a survey experiment on tax and regulatory officials. A forthcoming second study measures the effects of citizen ethnic identity on government responsiveness in a national field experiment. His dissertation research has been funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Boren Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation. A second area of research is labor governance under globalization, where he has examined private initiatives to improve working conditions in the global garment, toy, and electronics supply chains.

For more on Greg's research, please visit:

http://web.mit.edu/polisci/people/gradstudents/greg-distelhorst.html

Abstract:
This discussion will focus on the potential utility of innovative technology to address the governance obstacles to the provision of critical public services.  Using the challenge of maternal and child mortality reduction as an illustrative example, this discussion will outline the role political forces and governance failures play in shaping the public infrastructure of service provision and opportunities for reform.  Of special focus will be the potential role of technology to create and address these opportunities.  While there are numerous efforts underway to use new technologies to enhance the breadth and efficiency of health services in low-income settings, this discussion will focus on how these technologies could be “liberating” by being designed and used to address the political determinants of inadequate public service commitments and capacity. 

Dr. Paul Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society, Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.  He is Director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention and a core faculty of the Centers for Health Policy and Primary Care Outcomes Research, at Stanford University.  Dr. Wise has served as Chair of the Steering Committee of the NIH Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health, a member of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Service’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health and Society and currently serves on the National Advisory Council of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, NIH.  Dr. Wise’s research focuses on U.S and international child health policy, particularly the provision of technical innovation in resource-poor areas of
the world. 

Abstract:

Political parties that represent old regime interests in moments of democratization are normally thought exclusively to play a "negative" role, blocking democracy and only conceding it when sufficiently challenged. Summarizing research for a book on the historical rise of democracy in Europe, this presentation will focus on British and German democratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make the case that under certain conditions, old regime conservative parties play a decisive and counter-intuitive role that makes democratization more settled over the long run.

Speaker Bio:

Daniel Ziblatt is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has been named a Sage Publications Fellow for a project on "Conservative Political Parties and Democratization in Europe" and in 2012-2013 is on leave at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

His research and teaching interests include democratization, state-building, development, comparative politics and comparative historical analysis, with a particular interest in Europe. He is the author of Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006), the winner of three prizes from the American Political Science Association, including the 2007 Prize for the Best Book published on European Politics. He is co-editor of a 2010 special double issue of Comparative Political Studies entitled "The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies." Recent papers have appeared in American Poiltical Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, and World Politics.  His most recent papers have received APSA's 2011 Mary Parker Follett Prize from the Politics and History Section of APSA, APSA's  2009 Luebbert Prize for the best paper published  in comparative politics, the 2008 Sage prize for best paper presented in comparative politics at the APSA meeting, and two  prizes in 2010 from the Comparative Democratization Section of APSA.  Ziblatt has been a DAAD Fellow in Berlin, an Alexander von Humboldt visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne and the University of Konstanz, Germany, and visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris in 2010. He is currently completing a new book entitled Conservative Political Parties and the Birth of Modern Democracy in Europe, 1848-1950 (Cambridge University Press) that offers a new interpretation of the historical democratization of Europe.