[publication] Discussing Public Voting in the Web as a Measure to Democratize Award Decisions

Our publication for this year Social Media Conference in HongKong about „Discussing Public Voting in the Web as a Measure to Democratize Award Decisions“ is now online available. The slides were already published here.
Abstract:

As active and innovative e-learning researchers, we had been part of the voting crowd but also were applicants to public voting contents on the Web. L3T, a project delivering an open textbook about learning and teaching with technologies, was applicant at three public voting contests on the Web: at the ‘Neue Deutsche Buchpreis” (2011), at the podcast competition of the MMKH (2011) as well as at the MOOC Production Fellowship (2013). According to our experiences made, we got the impression, that there is a need to re-name ‘public voting” to ‘social voting”, as it is not ‘the public” (i.e. the crowd) that decides who wins. In fact, we found out social aspects, i.e. strong and weak ties in so- cial communities to dictate the voting results. Therefore the publication ad- dresses the research question, whether public voting on the Web is a democratic process at all.

Reference: Ebner, M., Schön, S., Stocker, A., Rothe, H., Tsang, P. (2013) Discussing Public Voting in the Web as a Measure to Democratize Award Decisions. In: Tsang,P., Eustace K. Tsoi, R, & Tse, S.(eds) Proceedings of Social Media 2013, pp. 51-59, City University press, ISBN 978 988-19712-1-0