Michael Zimmer.org

The Special Interest Group on International Information Issues (SIG-III) of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is pleased to announce its eleventh competition for papers to be submitted for the 2010 Annual Meeting, which will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 22-27, 2010. (http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM10/am10cfp.html)
Building from the overall conference theme, the theme for this year’s paper contest is: “Navigating Streams in a Global Information Ecosystem“.
Papers could discuss issues, policies and case studies on specific aspects of the theme from a global and/or international perspective. Topics include, but are …

For those nearby, I’ll be the featured speaker at the Pub Politico gathering on Sunday, March 21, 2:00pm at Brocach Irish Pub in Madison, Wisconsin.
I’ll be speaking, informally, about “Failures in Self-Regulation in Online Privacy”, focusing on recent examples of how Google, Facebook, and other online companies continue to fall short in their attempts to protect user privacy, and whether/how the government should step in to provide additional protections for consumers of online services.
The gathering is co-sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, and is free and open …

From May 2 through May 8, 2010, libraries across the nation will celebrate Choose Privacy Week for the first time. This American Library Association campaign invites library professionals, users, and friends into a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age. The UWM School of Information Studies and UWM Libraries have joined together to provide a venue for local librarians, information professionals, and patrons to discuss the emerging privacy and ethical challenges for libraries in the new “2.0” era, titled:
Emerging Privacy and Ethical Challenges for Libraries in the 2.0 …

Special Topics in Information Science – The Search Engine Society:

Search engines have become the center of gravity of our contemporary information society, providing a powerful interface for accessing the vast amount of information available on the World Wide Web and beyond. The audacious mission of Google, for example, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Attaining such a goal necessarily results in significant changes to the ways in which information is created, stored, retrieved, and used. This course will critically examine the nature of search engines and their role in our information society, and reveal the unique challenges they bring to bear on information institutions, information policy, and information ethics.

This weekend I’m attending the 4th Access to Knowledge conference, A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights, hosted by the Yale Information Society Project (see my original post on the conference here).

With the help of the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies, I organized a workshop on “Identifying Challenges and Opportunities foran African Information Ethics”, featuring Johannes Britz (School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee), Rafael Capurro (International Center for Information Ethics, and School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee) and Dennis Ocholla (University of Zululand), along with a very engaged group of conference participants.

I’m currently in Savannah, GA to participate in a workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research at CSCW 2010.
This is my first time at CSCW, and looking at the set of papers for this workshop, it should be an excellent experience. I’ve submitted a brief analysis of the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook dataset release (my larger paper is going through its final edits for publication). You can download the short analysis here: Subject Privacy and the Release of the “Tastes, …

I am proposing a panel for Internet Research 11.0 titled “On the Philosophy of Facebook”. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has built his social networking empire on the belief that “information wants to be shared”, a particular philosophy of information that directly impacts the values built into the design of Facebook, ranging from its user interface, privacy policies, terms of service, and method of governance. This panel will explore the philosophy of Facebook and its broader implications for norms of privacy, identity, governance, sociability, and online life generally.

The Yale Information Society Project has announced the 4th Access to Knowledge conference: A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights. The event will be held at Yale Law School on February 12-13, 2010, hosted by the Information Society Project, in collaboration with an extensive list of organizing partners, including UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies.
The two-day conference will feature plenary panels as well as breakout sessions of working groups organized around specific issue areas, including a workshop I have organized on “Identifying Challenges and Opportunities for an African Information Ethics”.

On Tuesday, a group of librarians and information professions will be holding a panel discussion on “The Challenges of Implementing Library 2.0 Services” at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).
On the Challenges of Implementing Library 2.0 Services
ASIS&T 2009 Annual Meeting
Tuesday, Nov. 10, 3:30pm PST
Today, many libraries are at a crossroads: several of the services they have traditionally provided within their walls are increasingly made available online, often by non-library, commercial entities. For example, Web search engines provide easy access to millions of …

On the heels of Open Access Day at UW-Milwaukee, held as part of the first international Open Access Week, it was announced that the UWM Libraries has successfully negotiated a contract with the Elsevier publishing company that will provide increased access to scholarly journals and reduce costs to UWM.
From the announcement sent by Rita Cheng, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs:
Library patrons will have access to ScienceDirect, a database providing access to 2,000 full text peer-reviewed journals, with content going back to 1995, published by Elsevier and its partners.   …

The School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is now accepting applications for 2010 enrollment for its PhD program in Information Studies. Details below, and feel free to contact me with any questions or advice.
The School of Information Studies (SOIS) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) is accepting applications for fall of 2010 for its PhD program in Information Studies.
Building on one of the largest and most varied MLIS programs in the United States, the PhD program prepares researchers, educators, and administrators with specializations in three major areas …

Speaking of conferences in November that I am unable to attend, Geert Lovink and Shirley Niemans at the Institute of Network Cultures have organized the Society of the Query conference, November 13-14 in Amsterdam. With the tagline “Stop Searching, Start Questioning!”, this event hopes to critically reflect on the information society and the dominant role of the search engine in our culture:
This two-day Query conference aims to examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and to contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design. …

When I edited a special volume of First Monday on “Critical Perspectives of Web 2.0” I was lucky to have included a contribution by Trebor Scholz, which made an already good collection of papers even better. Scholz’s article, “Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0“, argued that the very notion of “Web 2.0″ represents not a unique socio–technological advance in the World Wide Web, but rather a powerful “framing device of professional elites that define what enters the public discourse about the impact of the Web on society,” resulting …

Next week, October 19 – 23, 2009, will mark the first international Open Access Week, celebrating the international movement working to “throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge.” Encouraging the unrestricted sharing of scholarly and scientific research, the Open Access movement is gaining ever more momentum around the world as growing numbers of research funders, faculties, and libraries are committed to making research available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access …

For the last 353 days, I’ve been part of a team planning Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). My life is about to get back to normal, as an interdisciplinary collection of nearly 400 scholars, researchers and graduate students interested in Internet and new media studies are descending on Milwaukee this week.
The conference program is fantastic, featuring keynote addresses by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Megan Boler. I’ll be presenting an updated version of my paper, “But …