**** Please forward to interested colleagues and lists. Thanks!

News Break... Early registration extended to May 15!

Just in... Jim Fishkin will present a preview of the rough cut of
"Europe in One Room," a new documentary that chronicles a
major deliberative project involving people from 27
European countries. [More information below]

Tools for Participation:
Collaboration, Deliberation, and Decision Support

http://www.publicsphereproject.org/events/diac08/

Sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and
UC Berkeley School of Information

University of California
Berkeley, California, US

June 26 - 29, 2008

It has been twenty-one years since the DIAC Symposium for exploring
the Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing was first
convened in Seattle.

Now, in the early days of the 21st century humankind faces challenges
of even greater proportions than those perceived in 1987. The ability
of people around the world to discuss, make decisions, and take
action collaboratively is critical to addressing these challenges.
Unfortunately, this fact is rarely acknowledged or promoted by
decision-makers.

Researchers, scholars, activists, advocates, artists, educators,
technologists, designers, students, policy-makers, entrepreneurs,
journalists and citizens are rising to these challenges in many
ways, including the development of new communication technologies
that build on the opportunities afforded by the Internet and other
new (as well as old) media.

DIAC-2008 combines CPSR's 11th DIAC symposium with the third
Conference on Online Deliberation. The joint conference is intended
to provide a platform and a forum for highlighting socio-technological
opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls in the area of community
and civic action.

In addition to the wide range of planned events there will be
extensive opportunities for collegial discussion at the conference.
Register now for an innovative and compelling exploration of the
future of meaningful social participation. We have kept registration
fees low to encourage wide attendance.


Research Papers

Supporting Collaborative Deliberation Using a Large-Scale Argumentation
System: The MIT Collaboratorium
Mark Klein

What Makes a Search Engine Good for Democracy? Public Opinion Polling
and the Evaluation of Software
Jo Ann Sison and Warren Sack

Realism vs. Reality TV in the War on Terror: Artworks as Models of
Interpretation
David Crawford

"Liberating Voices" in South Asia: Case Study of Networked Resistance
in Jharkhand
Justin Smith

CoLPE: Communities of Learning Practice Environment
Santi Caballe and Jerome Feldman

A Two-Room E-Deliberation Environment
Fiorella De Cindio, Cristian Peraboni, Leonardo Sonnante

The KerbabelTM On-Line Deliberation Support Tool
Aurélie Chamaret

On Social Function: New Language for Discussing Technology for
Social Action
Andy Dearden and Ann Light

Privacy Awareness for the Design of Pervasive Home-Based Technology
for Elders
Tonya Thompson

Community Network Analysis: Understanding the Contexts and Content
of Community Communications
Peter Day

Designing a General Architecture to Support eGovernment
Carlos Grima-Izquierdo and David Ríos Insua

Networked Publics: Publicity and Privacy on the Internet
Colin Koopman


Exploratory Papers, Workshops, Technology Demos, Panels, etc.

The exploratory papers will address topics such as collaborative
research work in Arab countries; building research capacity in
community-based organizations; extending electronic public
participation; open-source self-governance; computer, neural, and
social networks; community; trust for online deliberation on wicked
problems; forecasting and frameworks for strategic planning;
integrating online deliberation into transportation investment
decision-making; rethinking local conversations on the web; global
issue metamaps; representing community concerns in agent-based
models; online shopping relationships as collaborative decision
process; tools for participation as a citizen-led grand challenge;
putting social pattern languages to work; and community media and
community development.

There will be a variety of workshops and posters on topics such as
community networking strategies; role challenges in technology and
social action projects; large-scale citizen engagement strategy;
political discourse in non-political spaces and designing social
psychological Incentives for online collective action.

Technology demonstrations include CivicEvolution; knowledge media
tools for capturing deliberation in participatory spatial planning;
discovering conversations in the blogosphere; dialogue mapping;
TransparentDemocracy; and e-Liberate, a web-based system for online
Roberts Rules of Order.

We are planning a variety of presentations and panel discussions
on "What type of software do we need?" and other topics.


Europe in One Room

We are fortunate to have the opportunity to preview the rough cut
of Europe in One Room during the symposium. This new documentary
tells the story of the first European Wide Deliberative Poll in
which a scientific sample of all of Europe gathered in the Parliament
Building in Brussels in October 2007 to deliberate for three days
about the future of Europe. Each of the 27 countries were represented
and the issues were discussed in 22 languages. Told through the
eyes of the participants and organizers, this unprecedented experiment
in transnational democracy shows that dialogue across differences
of language and nationality is possible. This project is based on
the work of Stanford professor Jim Fishkin who will be present at
the showing.


Open Space Session

We're planning an Open Space Technology session on "Towards an
Agenda for Online and Offline Public Participation" as a capstone
event on the last day of the conference, June 29. This event will
be free to the public (although donations are strongly encouraged).
The open space approach may be the best way to spend less structured
time as a collective group to formulate research and action plans.


Berkeley, California

It's generally warm (but not hot) in Berkeley in late June. Berkeley,
California, is known for its higher education and cosmopolitan
culture and is the home of social movements, such as the Free Speech
Movement, as well as innovative technology such as BSD (Berkeley
Unix). The conference hotel is located on the water with a view of
the San Francisco skyline.


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Tools for Participation
Collaboration, Deliberation, and Decision Support
http://www.publicsphereproject.org/events/diac08/

Public Sphere Project (CPSR)
http://www.publicsphereproject.org/

Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution
http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/