The Carbon Footprint of Travelling to International Academic Conferences and Options to Minimise It

This chapter focuses on the carbon footprint of travelling to academic conferences. The cases I present are the last seven General Conferences of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), which are the biggest European conferences in political science, with up to 2000 participants. My estimations show that the travel-induced carbon footprint of a single conference can amount to more than 2000 tons of greenhouse gases—as much as approximately 270 UK citizens emit in a whole year. The average participant produces between 500 and 1500 kg of CO2-eq per conference round-trip. However, by applying three measures (more centrally located conference venues, the promotion of more land-bound travel and the introduction of online participation for attendees from distant locations), the carbon footprint could be reduced by 78–97 per cent. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a general shift towards online conferences—the ECPR switched to a virtual event as well. Estimating the carbon footprint of this online-only conference in a more detailed manner shows that the travel-induced carbon emissions—if the event had taken place in physical attendance as originally intended—would have been between 250 and 530 times higher than those from the online conference.

Conference report: Doctors in performance, Tallinn, 1-3 September 2021

This report chronicles the author’s participation in the Doctors in Performance (DiP) Festival Conference, September 2021, at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Tallinn. It is the fourth edition of DiP since its inauguration in 2014 at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe in early 2020, most conferenceshave been either postponed, cancelled or held online. This Conference is one of the first to be held as an in-person event as Europe starts to move towards a post-pandemic period. Some participants gathered in person (including the author), while parallel online participation was also enabled as a hybrid event. This report records the conference events as DiP enters into maturity with a focus on artistic research and music performance. It also describes the author’s impressions regarding issues of ‘liveness’ in varied categories, including spoken presentations, music performances, their online equivalents, live or prerecorded presentations and online or live participations.

Predicting online participation through Bayesian network analysis

Despite the fact that preconditions of political participation were thoroughly examined before, there is still not enough understanding of which factors directly affect political participation and which factors correlate with participation due to common background variables. This article scrutinises the causal relations between the variables associated with participation in online activism and introduces a three-step approach in learning a reliable structure of the participation preconditions’ network to predict political participation. Using Bayesian network analysis and structural equation modeling to stabilise the structure of the causal relations, the analysis showed that only age, political interest, internal political efficacy and no other factors, highlighted by the previous political participation research, have direct effects on participation in online activism. Moreover, the direct effect of political interest is mediated by the indirect effects of internal political efficacy and age via political interest. After fitting the parameters of the Bayesian network dependent on the received structure, it became evident that given prior knowledge of the explanatory factors that proved to be most important in terms of direct effects, the predictive performance of the model increases significantly. Despite this fact, there is still uncertainty when it comes to predicting online participation. This result suggests that there remains a lot to be done in participation research when it comes to identifying and distinguishing factors that stimulate new types of political activities.

Improving On-Line Debates by Aggregating Citizen Support1

Currently, Digital Democracy is gaining momentum thanks to online participation platforms, which have emerged as innovative tools that enable citizens to participate in decision making processes. Through these tools, participants can issue proposals and engage into debates by both stating arguments in favour or against and/or by supporting other people’s arguments. In this paper we propose a new support aggregation method derived from the combination of two complementary aggregation methods previously introduced. Additionally, we propose a resilience metric for measuring the quality of the aggregated opinion. We apply our contributions to debates conducted in the Decidim participatory platform.

Impacts of the internet on perceptions of governance at the community level: the case of Jiangqiao Township in Shanghai, China

PurposeThe rate of urbanisation in China has accelerated community heterogeneity, and yet it has also led to challenges and problems in community governance. This trend has been accompanied by the rapid expansion of information and communication technology (ICT) and online activities. Based on the example of Jiangqiao Township in Shanghai, this paper aims to probe the link between online participation using the internet and its impacts on social capital formation and community development.Design/methodology/approachA literature review was conducted, and a case study method based on quantitative data was applied to test the theoretical framework in the interactions of users’ online participation and perceptions of community governance.FindingsParticipation in an online community through the internet was found to foster new social capital. Distributed social capital had a positive impact on perceptions of governance at the community level, which was due to the resulting network density and social trust of the locality.Originality/valueThis study offers an expanded perspective on the impact of the internet on the behaviour of netizens in China in the context of community governance in new settlements and townships. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it is interesting to investigate how the use of mass communication channels, such as the internet and other digital platforms, affects social behaviour and generates new social norms. This study offers quantitative evidence from China to support the theory of Putnam (1993; 1995a). It thus extends beyond the field of sociology to the fields of public administration and urban development.

Game Changer

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused such an unprecedented disturbance to the world, particularly on the economy, and caused significant disruption to the education ecosystem. It has affected school organizations and forced school leaders to adopt alternative ways of learning. The transition to online education posed many challenges in engaging students to participate actively, and one of the solutions is for teachers to create better digital lessons using gamification elements. But despite the prevalence of technology, educators lack the knowledge and skills to captivate students' interest to participate actively in online learning. At present, there is a dearth of studies on the application of gamification to teachers' online lessons during the COVID-19 pandemic. Educators must capitalize on new engaging technological trends as a form of techno-structural OD intervention to complement their pedagogies, teaching processes and encourage students' online participation. This concept paper highlights the benefits of applying gamification to education, particularly on how teachers can utilize game elements in creating, managing, and updating digitalized lessons to motivate students amidst the pandemic. The paper also explores fostering a healthy culture for students' heightened level of motivation, increased acquisition of knowledge, and learning new skills. It encourages schools to adopt the appropriate type of gamification and suggests future researchers on the various types and elements of gamification that can be adapted by selected schools.

Exploring the learning potential of online gaming communities: An application of the Game Communities of Inquiry Scale

Online gaming is becoming increasingly social and interconnected. Millions of players learn from each other in game-related communities on platforms like Reddit and Twitch.tv. However, few studies have been conducted to examine socially constructed learning in such environments. The purpose of this study was to explore learning in game-related communities using the Game Community of Inquiry Scale (GCoIS). GCoIS is a validated instrument inspired by the community of inquiry framework and developed for measuring constructed learning in these outlets. Over 1000 participants completed an online questionnaire that included the GCoIS and additional variables (e.g. demographics, gaming habits, and gaming metacognition) for measuring possible associations. Results pointed to gender, age, online participation, and metacognition about gaming as significant predictors of GCoIS. Findings suggest that gaming communities can serve as opportunities for meaningful learning when novice members are welcomed and assisted by experts and support is given to older and female gamers.