The News about Networks 2: Making Issues into Rights?

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21-24 June 2004
de Balie Center for Culture and Politics
Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10 (Leidseplein)
Amsterdam

A Govcom.org co-production with de Balie, with support from the Media, Arts & Culture Unit within the Ford Foundation's Knowledge, Creativity & Freedom Program.

A limited number of Ford Fellowships available (see below).

Workshop Introduction

The Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam is organising a workshop for public interest groups, advocates, activists as well as academics researching media justice as well as communications and information rights. The workshop is dedicated to exploratory analysis into the depth of the communication between and among these networks.

The Govcom.org Foundation creates and hosts political tools for the Web.

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.

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.

Some of the questions one may ask are:

• What are my networks? What is my relative standing within these networks?
• Which types of organisations, agendas and terms dominate these networks?
• Do the organisations in these networks recognise each other's work and issues?
• 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 organisations?

Workshop Substance

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.

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?

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' organising new networks or destabilising current networks?

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?

News about Networks Workshop series

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 mobilise other organizations and key players to act on important social issues of the day? In short, can NGOs do without news?

The workshop proceedings, entitled "All-American Issues: Seven Stories from the Homeland," are available at http://www.issuenetwork.org/node.php?id=46.

De Balie's workshop URL: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?articleid=4473&podiumid=media%3Cbr%20/%3E.

The News about Networks is part of a larger workshop program, "The Life of Issues," at http://www.govcom.org/workshops.html.

Workshop Format

The format of the workshop intersperses the following:

1) Introduction and Software Training
2) Talks and Demonstrations by the Participants and Analysts
3) Software Use and Feedback on Findings
4) Designer Map-making
5) Individual Analysis and Presentations of Results
6) Discussions of texts from the Reader

Workshop Key words

• Alternative media
• Communications rights
• Community media
• Democratic media
• Freedom of expression
• Freedom of information
• Independent media
• Information commons
• Information justice
• Information rights
• Media and democracy
• Media and globalization
• Media justice
• Media regulation
• Mission-driven media
• Privacy
• Radical media
• Software patents
• Technology standards

The media laboratory has facility for laptops with wireless and cabled Internet connectivity. Bring your computer.

The workshop begins promptly on Monday, 21 June at 10am.
The workshop concludes with a public presentation on Thursday, 24 June at 8pm.

The workshop organiser is Richard Rogers.