My year as Berkman Center Fellow 2011-2012

This academic year I have been a postdoctoral research (with the Beatriu de Pinos program) at the Berkman center for Internet & Society (Harvard University). I am part of a fellowship program of the center. It has been a very intense and productive year. Here you have the report I did on my activities during this year of fellowship for the Berkman center annual report.

Mayo Fuster Morell – 2011/2012 Fellowship Berkman center annual report

During her Berkman fellowship from 2011-2012, Mayo has been working on two main areas of research: how the adoption of ICTs contributed to shape the organizational forms of social movements and policy networks, through the empirical analysis of the free culture movement and the 15M/indignados mobilization in Spain. In this regard, she has written (with J. Subirats) a book (in Catalan), and published an article in the journal Social Movements Studies (The Free Culture and 15M movements in Spain: Composition, social networks and synergies), published four book chapters, and edited a special issue on the 2011 revolutions for “Interface: a journal for and about social movements”. She also co-organized  an international workshop on “Understanding the New Wave of Social Cooperation: A Triangulation of the Arab Revolutions, European Mobilizations and the American Occupy Movement” at the Berkman center. She continues to follow up her recent doctoral thesis on the Governance of commons-based peer production and models of infrastructure provision for the building of digital commons, which she is preparing for a book; and co-organized the first international forum on digital commons (www.digital-commons.net). In addition she has been an active member of the Cooperation working group at the Berkman center and has published an article on “Rethinking government in the light of the emerging organisational principles of online collective action” in the European Journal of ePractice, co-published a paper on Wikipedia and Emotions for the Wikisym conference, and edited a special issue on the Wikipedia case for the Digithum journal. She continues to explore and research methodological innovations connected to ICTs and has published a paper on “Advantages, Challenges and New Frontiers in Using Information Communication Technologies in Societal and Social Movement Research” in the Journal tripleC i(i): Cognition, communication, co-operation, and a book chapter on “E-Research Collaboration of International Scope in Social and Political Sciences: Scale and Complexity Linkage with the Requirement of Physical Encounters” with IGI Global press. Finally, she designed a new research project with Yochai Benkler from the Berkman center,  the Institute of Government and Public Policies of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and Shasa Constanza-Schock of the MIT Civic media which aims to cross and further connect findings to her main areas of research, that is: commons based peer production and social movements/public policy