Making Issues into Rights?
Exploring the depth of "Rights" and "Justice" networks.
Author: redactie redactie
The Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam is organizing a workshop for advocates, activists and academics in the field of communications rights and media justice. The workshop is dedicated to exploratory analysis into the depth of the communication rights and media justice networks.
The workshop is combined with a public debate and presentation on Thursday June 24.
Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2004 18:15:39 +0100 <br />
From: Richard Rogers
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*Preliminary Announcement*
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Making Issues into Rights? <br />
Exploring the depth of "Rights" and "Justice" networks.
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The News about Networks workshop by the Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam.
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21-24 June 2004 <br />
de Balie Center for Culture and Politics
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All queries: Catherine Somzé, govcom.org workshop producer,<br /> catherineATissuenetwork.org
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A Govcom.org co-production with de Balie, with support from the Ford Foundation's Knowledge, Creativity & Freedom Program.
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<b>Workshop Introduction </b> <br />
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The Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam is organizing a workshop for advocates, activists and academics in the field of communications rights and media justice. The workshop is dedicated to exploratory analysis into the depth of the communication rights and media justice networks.
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The Govcom.org Foundation creates and hosts political tools for the Web.
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Over a four-day period, the workshop will provide an immersion experience in Govcom.org's work in the specially constructed media laboratory at de Balie Center for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam. All participants will be invited to use state of the art information tools created by govcom.org and its collaborators. The participants also are invited to present and share their own tools and information.
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Much of the workshop will revolve around using the Issue Crawler, server-side software, developed with OneWorld International (London), Aguidel (Paris) and Recognos (Cluj-Napoca) that locates, analyses and visualises networks on the Web. We also will make use of novel techniques to monitor and analyse the news through Google News and RSS readers. Textual, semantic and other data analyses may be undertaken.
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Some of the questions one may ask are:
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- What are my networks? What is my relative standing within these networks? <br />
- Which types of organizations, agendas and terms dominate these networks? <br />
- Do the organizations in these networks recognize each other's work and issues? <br />
- Which parts of the networks hold together if one takes out funders? Do they hold together if one takes out other agenda-setters, be it (big) media or intergovernmental organizations?
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<b>Workshop Substance </b>
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The migration of 'rights' into more and more issue spaces may be attributed to the roominess of the Universal Declaration, the successes of the human rights field as well as the urgent issue re-formatting work occurring regularly in NGO networks. NGOs, instead of getting their issues from the news, are continually migrating across issue networks, forming partnerships with other actors and terms. "Justice" and "rights" are two of the more recent issue reformulations, with the coinage of such notions as communication rights, information rights, Internet rights, media justice and information justice.
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The health of an issue, and the network forming around it, could well be gauged by an issue's migratory patterns. When and why do NGOs reformulate and attach themselves to issues?
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In particular, we are interested in the implications of making issues into rights issues. What are the consequences for NGOs and their issues by choosing the rights frame? Is such issue work temporary, context-specific, or opportunistic? Are 'rights' organizing new networks or destabilizing current networks?
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Movements of issues across networks may have further consequences. Do issues decline without specific terminological innovation? Does the movement towards 'rights', in particular, prompt human rights to defend its issue space against intruders? When is an organization taken seriously by the issue space it wishes to join? Can new rights and justice networks prosper without the human rights network?
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<b>News about Networks Workshop series </b>
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The Communication Rights and Media Justice workshop is the second in series. The first News about Networks workshop has been dedicated to understanding whether NGOs may operate effectively without a commercial press strategy. Does the rise of NGO Internet-based networks, in particular, imply an end to the reliance on the press to resonate the message? Can networks alone mobilize other organizations and key players to act on important social issues of the day? In short, can NGOs do without news?
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The workshop proceedings, entitled "All-American Issues: Seven Stories from the Homeland," are available at: <br /> http://www.issuenetwork.org/node.php?id=46.
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The News about Networks is part of a larger workshop program, "The Life of Issues," at: <br />
http://www.govcom.org/workshops.html.
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<b>Workshop Format </b>
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The format of the workshop intersperses the following:
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1) Introduction and Software Training <br />
2) Talks and Demonstrations by the Participants and Analysts <br />
3) Software Use and Feedback on Findings <br />
4) Designer Map-making <br />
5) Individual Analysis and Presentations of Results <br />
6) Discussions of texts from the Reader
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The media laboratory has facility for laptops with wireless and cabled Internet connectivity. Bring your computer.
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The workshop begins promptly on Monday, 21 June at 10am. <br />
The workshop concludes with a <b>public presentation </b> on Thursday, 24 June at 8pm.
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The workshop organizer is Richard Rogers.
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<b>Workshop Key words </b>
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Mission-driven media <br />
Alternative media <br />
Community media <br />
Radical media <br />
Independent media <br />
Information commons <br />
Information justice <br />
Communications rights <br />
Freedom of expression <br />
Privacy <br />
Software patents <br />
Media regulation <br />
Media and democracy <br />
Democratic media <br />
Media justice <br />
Information rights <br />
Freedom of information <br />
Media and globalization <br />
Technology standards <br />
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<b>About Govcom.org </b>
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The Govcom.org Foundation hosts the Issue Crawler, the Web Issue Index of Civil Society as well as the Election Issue Tracker.
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Issue Crawler: http://issuecrawler.net (ask for a password) <br />
Issue Crawler scenarios of use: http://www.govcom.org/scenarios_use.htm
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Web Issue Index of Civil Society: http://www.infoid.org
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Election Issue Tracker (Dutch): http://eig.politiekdigitaal.nl/
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<b>Principal Govcom.org URLs </b>
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http://www.govcom.org (projects and papers) <br />
http://www.issuenetwork.org (workshops and reports) <br />
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<b>The well-tempered crawler. </b><br />
" <i> [Respectful crawlers] have multiple threads running in parallel, each requesting a page from a different host (to guarantee equitable distribution of requests across hosts, whilst maximizing through-put and avoiding the overloading any single server), and wait >= 10 seconds between downloads from the same server.</i>"
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- Erik Borra, Issue Crawler sysadmin.