Oxford Internet Institute

Development and Broadband Internet in East Africa

East Africa was the last major region on Earth without fibre-optic broadband Internet access. This project investigated three sectors--agriculture, tourism, and business process outsourcing--to provide a much needed empirical look at the effects of broadband in the Global South. The final reports are now available, and all the related blog posts. This work is now being extended in the ERC-funded Geonet project, which is examining the effects of broadband through a much broader sample of economic actors across East Africa, focusing on mapping, microwork and innovation hubs.

Graham, M. (2015) Contradictory Connectivity: Spatial Imaginaries and Techno-Mediated Positionalities in Kenya's Outsourcing Sector. Environment and Planning A.

Graham, M., Andersen, C., and Mann, L. (2015) Geographies of Connectivity in East Africa: Trains, Telecommunications, and Technological Teleologies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Graham, Mark, and Mann, Laura (2013) Imagining a Silicon Savannah? Technological and Conceptual Connectivity in Kenya's BPO and Software Development Sectors. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries 56 (2) 1-19.

Policy Impact

Over the past nine months it's been difficult to avoid media coverage discussing the implications of the European Court of Justice ruling regarding the 'right to be forgotten'. The OII's Luciano Floridi featured in many of those articles, in his capacity as one of the members of Google's Advisory Council on this issue. After seven public consultations, the Council's report was released in early February, and you can read Luciano's reflections on the process and outcomes in the Huffington Post. Closer to home, Rebecca Eynon recently convened a policy workshop in London to share and discuss the practical implications of her research into what motivates individuals from less well-off backgrounds to overcome barriers to using the Internet -- an important refocusing of the debate away from the factors that explain non-use.

A report is also now available from the recent NATO CCD COE Workshop on Ethics and Policies for Cyber Warfare (Magdalen College, Oxford), written by OII MSc student Corinne Cath, Ludovica Glorioso, and OII Researcher Maria Rosaria Taddeo. The workshop was designed to allow speakers from three interacting fields -- politics, law and cyber security -- to develop their views about the existing regulatory gaps in cyber warfare and its ethical underpinnings (read Rosaria's blog post). Last but not least, we are calling for chapters for a new OII-edited book on the ethics of biomedical big data.

Recent Webcasts

The OII's Newest Doctors!

Congratulations to the latest doctors to have emerged (happy and exhausted) at the other end of our doctoral programme: Dr Amanda Clarke, and Dr Roy Nyberg. Amanda's thesis examined government-citizen relations on the social web, and Roy's examined institutional entrepreneurship, comparing the case of mobile health in England and Finland. We wish them every success in their future careers.

In the Press

Our researchers are in demand by the world's press to comment, give opinions and write articles. Recent interest has focused on cybercrime and privacy issues, and fears about online gaming. Joss Wright showed Sky News' Tom Cheshire how anonymised medical records aren't as anonymous as might be wished, Andy Przybylski reassured Newsweek that fears about Minecraft are groundless, and Ian Brown was an expert witness on the World Service looking at ways of policing the web to counteract online child exploitation. Der Spiegel ran a major interview with Luciano Floridi about cyberwar, and his work as a member of the Google Advisory Panel on the Right to be Forgotten was documented in a six-part series in the Guardian. Mark Graham's work was the subject of a Guardian podcast on how the geographies of the Internet have reconfigured how people engage with the city, and DPhil student Elizabeth Dubois wrote an insightful report for the Globe and Mail on the use of Twitter by party leaders in her native Canada.

Finally, we are extremely happy to be welcoming the Economist's Tom Standage to the OII (on 20 May) to discuss what history can tell us about the future of the Internet. Tom is an acclaimed author and technology writer who will draw on his particular interests in the antecedents of the Internet -- from papyrus scrolls to coffee houses to pneumatic tubes: make sure to register now, for what promises to be a fascinating talk.

Forthcoming Events

Wednesday 20 May:
Tom Standage: What can history tell us about the future of the Internet?

26 - 29 May:
The 9th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

We are calling for presenters for Connected Life 2015: a conference run by MSc and DPhil students at the OII, which takes place at Balliol College Oxford on 4 June 2015.