Abstract
Social movements need to coordinate their political activities. They are often characterized by a fragile organizational structure, and sparse personnel, financial and technical resources. In this paper we describe how a transnational networks of social activists, the European Social Forum (ESF), uses a central mailing list as a major communication tool. By means of a long-term field study, we analyzed the work practices of this network and observed the usage of the mailing list. The empirical findings highlight how the mailing list is used for a variety of different activities such as collaborative work, decision making, coordination and information sharing. We discuss the finding with regard to the discourse on cooperative work and come up with implications for design.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Cogburn, D.L.: Diversity Matters, Even at a Distance: Evaluating the Impact of Computer-Mediated Communication on Civil Society Participation in the World Summit on the Information Society. Information Technologies and International Development 1(3-4), 15–40 (2004)
Kavada, A.: The European Social Forum and the Internet: A Case Study of Communication Networks and Collective Action. Ph.D Thesis, University of Westminster, UK (2007)
Saeed, S., Rohde, M., Wulf, V.: An Empirical Study of IT Use in Pakistani Civil Society Organizations. In: Lytras, M.D., Ordonez De Pablos, P., Ziderman, A., Roulstone, A., Maurer, H., Imber, J.B. (eds.) WSKS 2010. CCIS, vol. 111, pp. 521–527. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Saeed, S., Rohde, M., Wulf, V.: Technologies within Transnational social activist communities: An Ethnographic Study of the European Social Forum. In: 4th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, pp. 85–94. ACM Press, New York (2009)
Saeed, S., Rohde, M.: Computer Enabled Social Movements? Usage of a collaborative web platform within the European Social Forum. In: 9th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, pp. 245–264. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Saeed, S., Pipek, V., Rohde, M., Wulf, V.: Managing nomadic knowledge: a case study of the European Social Forum. In: 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 537–546. ACM Press, New York (2010)
Strauss, A.L., Corbin, J.M.: Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks (1998)
Mackay, W.: Diversity in the Use of Electronic Mail: A Preliminary Inquiry Transactions on Office Information Systems 6(4), 380–397 (1988)
Mathieson, K.: Factors influencing intentions to maintain web content in voluntary organizations. In: 2006 SIGMIS CPR Conference, Pomona, California, pp. 169–171 (2006)
Reichling, T., Veith, M., Wulf, V.: Expert Recommender: Designing for a Network Organization. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing (JCSCW) 16(4-5), 431–465 (2007)
Rohall, S., Gruen, D., Moody, P., Kellerman, S.: Email visualizations to aid communications. In: IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, pp. 12–15. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2001)
Yamashita, N., Ishida, T.: Effects of Machine Translation on Collaborative Work. In: International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 515–523. ACM Press, New York (2006)
Whittaker, S., Sidner, C.: Email overload: Exploring personal information management of email. In: 1996 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 276–283. ACM Press, New York (1996)
Davis, M.: eVote adds elections to mailing lists. Linux J. 107(1) (2003)
Schmitz, J., Fulk, J.: Organizational colleagues, media richness, and electronic mail. Communication Research 18, 487–523 (1991)
Markus, M.L.: Electronic Mail As the Medium of Managerial Choice. Organization Science 5(4), 502–527 (1994)
Takkinen, J., Shahmehri, N.: Delegation of tasks and dissemination of information in organizations: Restructuring internet e-mail for doing things. In: AIS 1998 American Information Society Americas Conference (1998)
Mills, S.: Caring through technology: Using e-mail for Christian pastoral care. Interacting with Computers 23(2), 106–116 (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Saeed, S., Rohde, M., Wulf, V. (2011). Communicating in a Transnational Network of Social Activists: The Crucial Importance of Mailing List Usage. In: Vivacqua, A.S., Gutwin, C., Borges, M.R.S. (eds) Collaboration and Technology. CRIWG 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6969. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23801-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23801-7_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23800-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23801-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)