Congratulations to Centre for Social Informatics colleagues Dr Ella Taylor-Smith and Dr Colin Smith on the publication of their article ‘Investigating the online and offline contexts of day-to-day democracy as participation spaces’ in Information, Communication and Society.

The main theme of the article is citizen-led participation in democracy, and the online and offline spaces – introduced as ‘participation space’ – in which people work together to influence those in power, and to improve their communities. The findings draw upon a sociotechnical analysis of data from three case studies to expose the relationship between activities of local, grassroots democracy and the characteristics of the online and offline spaces in which it occurs.

My co-authored article with Peter Cruickshank and Bruce Ryan ‘Long-term community development within a researcher network: a social network analysis of the DREaM project cadre’ is now available from Emerald as an EarlyCite paper for Journal of Documentation. Those with subscription access can download the full pdf. There is also a full text version available to view free of charge.

In the article we present the results from a study that investigated the extent to which an intervention to develop a community of library and information science (LIS) researchers – the Developing Research Excellence and Methods (DREaM) project – was successful in meeting its main objective three years after its implementation. Of particular interest are factors that support or hinder network longevity.

We report that members of the Developing Research Excellence and Methods ‘workshop cadre’ established in 2011 continued to work as a loose, but persistent, network…

I do not use Facebook messenger. I refuse to have this on my phone, and generally ignore the the messaging bit of Facebook in browsers. It may not be logical but I resent being forced to have another app on my phone. Maybe I’m just getting old. If you want to contact me, in my order of preference

1. talk to me, face to face (vastly preferred). You’ll generally find me in room C45 at Napier’s Merchiston Campus, at home, at LifesCycle at a community council meeting or cycling between two of these destinations
2. email me (strongly preferred)
3. comment on one of my WordPress blogs – so it will email me a notification
4. phone me
5. text me
6. tweet me (last resort)

But please bear in mind that my phone is quite often on silent, and I’ve switched off every alert apart from for incoming calls. And don’t even mention Instagram, Pinterest, WhatsApp…