[Commlist] CfP: The First Annual Conference of a Platform Governance Research Network

*CfP: The First Annual Conference of a Platform Governance Research 
Network, March 24-26, 2021*

This call is an open invite to researchers and institutions (especially 
those outside of North America and Europe) to join our efforts in 
building a new research network that aims to coalesce a global 
conversation about platform governance, while highlighting 
underrepresented groups and disciplines.

*Context*

The discussions around platform governance can be traced back to 
long-standing debates on the legal, social, and material structures that 
constitute the Internet’s ordering. For over 20 years, scholars from 
multiple fields have sought to decipher this sprawling web of power 
struggles. However, the consolidation of a few digital platforms as 
central global spaces of interaction and consumption has re-oriented 
many of these endeavours, making them more specific but not less 
complex. How platforms create, enforce, and enact rules and technologies 
that affect billions of people around the world — and the ways in which 
different actors seek to affect those structures — is now a major focus 
of public and governmental attention. As a scholarly area, platform 
governance can be understood as a part of a longer-term project to 
explore the logics behind, and the consequences of, the “private 
mediation between Internet content and the humans who provide and access 
this content” (DeNardis, 2012).

Work on this topic now is increasingly featured at various disciplinary 
conferences ranging across communication, public policy, computer 
science, human-computer interaction, law and technology, and science and 
technology studies, as well as interdisciplinary platforms like COCONET 
<https://coconet.social/about/> and conferences like AoIR 
<https://aoir.org/conferences/>, FAccT <http://facctconference.org/>, or 
GIGANET <https://www.giga-net.org/giganet-annual-symposium/>. However, 
there still is no single venue that tries to bring together these 
broader communities into a more focused and global conversation, looking 
more specifically at the multifaceted and increasingly complex role that 
online intermediaries play in today’s platformized societies (Van Dijck 
et al., 2018), and research by the most affected communities often 
remains excluded (Costanza-Chock, 2020).

In an effort to help foster this conversation and potentially spur new 
forms of collaboration, we are creating the Platform Governance Research 
Network. Building upon the success of a few workshops held online in the 
past year, including the ‘Empirical Approaches to Platform Governance 
Research 
<https://www.hiig.de/events/workshop-on-empirical-approaches-in-platform-governance-research/>’ 
workshop at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and the 
recent ‘Against Platform Determinism 
<https://datasociety.net/announcements/2020/09/15/call-for-participants-against-platform-determinism/>’ 
workshop at Data and Society, we are happy to announce a three-day 
online conference in late March 2021 seeking to bring together an 
interdisciplinary group of researchers who produce work on platform 
governance across a variety of methods and fields.

*Research Track: March 24 and March 25, 2021*

For the first two days of the conference, we welcome abstracts of 
250-500 words for papers that use different theoretical or empirical 
methods to answer research questions related to:

Empirical studies of platform governance in all of its forms, from the 
micro to the macro, utilizing a range of qualitative as well as 
quantitative, experimental, and/or computational methods. Suitable 
topics might include, but not be limited to, analyses of the practices 
of commercial or community platform rule-making and norm-setting, 
systems-based studies of automated decision-making across various types 
of platforms, or more focused explorations of specific topical issues 
such as political advertising, disinformation, or copyright.

Policy oriented analyses of private and governmental efforts to regulate 
platforms across the broad categories of online content, competition 
policy, and data protection. Proposals might include comparative policy 
analyses or detailed case studies of specific regulatory frameworks and 
approaches, and work that focuses on under-examined cases, regulatory 
episodes, or regions is especially welcome.

Normative, conceptual, or theoretical insights into aspects of platform 
governance that highlight gaps in current public or scholarly 
conceptions of platform governance. Submissions might evaluate various 
aspects of the current status quo from critical perspectives across a 
range of scholarly traditions, from science and technology studies to 
postcolonial and critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, and 
Marxist political economy.

The meta-aspects of scholarly work as it relates to major technology 
platforms, and the relations between policy, academia, and civil society 
in the emerging platform governance research and policy landscape. 
Possible submissions might include work on the best ethical practices 
for collaborating (or not) with industry, ways to secure 
privacy-preserving data access for researchers, or strategies used by 
civil society advocates to push industry and governments in more just 
directions.

Our goal will be to not only highlight the state of the research 
landscape as it exists at the moment, but also to identify the major 
limitations facing researchers from different subfields, sparking 
collaborations that strive to move beyond extant limitations and silos. 
We encourage submissions from underrepresented groups and from a diverse 
range of cultural and geographic backgrounds. We are especially 
interested in perspectives outside of U.S. and European contexts.

The precise format for presentations and panels will be determined 
depending on the amount of submissions received. We welcome 
contributions from researchers located all around the world, and will 
work to accommodate multiple participant timezones.

*Network Building Track: March 26, 2021*

On the final day of the conference, we will discuss how best to 
structure and grow a platform governance research network as well as how 
to make global inclusion and diversity explicit in its aims. Digital and 
human rights organizations have long conducted research and advocacy; 
yet those conversations too often occur in spaces siloed from scholarly 
discussions, which themselves frequently focus on Europe or North 
America. How could a new research network explicitly seek to remedy 
these issues? What are the possibilities of a stronger connection 
between scholarship and civil society (re: research and advocacy) on 
platform governance? We will host a set of conversations about how to 
create a robust network with staying power, how it should be organized 
and governed, as well as how this network could best serve the community.

For this reason, we kindly ask all participants in the conference 
(presenters as well as attendees) to fill out a community survey 
<https://forms.gle/oicLPfcJ1JroKD8j6>. Your responses will help us 
organize and structure the discussion for the forward- looking and 
community building component of the conference.

If you are interested in being part of and shaping the network going 
forward, we invite you to attend this third day of sessions. We welcome 
adding more individual and institutional partners and are actively 
working to include them in the planning of this network and conference. 
If you are interested, please contact us <mailto:(conference /at/ platgov.net)>.

*Submission and Participation Information*

This conference is open to all interested researchers and members of 
civil society and has no registration fee. We ask all prospective 
attendees to fill out our online participation and registration form 
<https://forms.gle/oicLPfcJ1JroKD8j6>, through which 250-500 word 
abstracts and survey responses can be submitted.

Please contact (conference /at/ platgov.net) 
<mailto:(conference /at/ platgov.net)> with any questions.

*Key Dates*

Deadline for Abstract Submissions: Midnight (anywhere on earth 
<https://time.is/Anywhere_on_Earth>), February 22, 2021

Conference Program and Acceptances Announced: March 8, 2021

Conference: March 24-26, 2021 (Half-Days, exact timing TBA)

*Organizers*

*Research Track*

Sana Ahmad <https://www.wzb.eu/en/personen/sana-ahmad>

Robert Gorwa <https://www.cigionline.org/person/robert-gorwa>

Tomiwa Ilori 
<https://www.chr.up.ac.za/centre-staff/15-about/1491-tomiwa-ilori>

Clara Iglesias Keller <https://www.wzb.eu/en/persons/clara-iglesias-keller>

Daniel Kreiss <https://danielkreiss.com/>

João Magalhães <https://www.hiig.de/joao-magalhaes/>

Shannon McGregor <http://www.shannoncmcgregor.com/>

Eugenia Mitchelstein <http://meso.com.ar/en/bio/eugenia-mitchelstein-2/>

Sonja Solomun <https://www.mediatechdemocracy.com/people>

Marcelo Thompson 
<https://www.law.hku.hk/academic_staff/dr-marcelo-thompson/>

*Network building track*

Deepti Bharthur <https://itforchange.net/team>

Robyn Caplan <https://datasociety.net/people/caplan-robyn/>

Anita Gurumurthy <https://itforchange.net/Anita>

Ivar Hartmann <https://direitorio.fgv.br/corpo-docente/ivar-a-hartmann>

Amélie Heldt <https://leibniz-hbi.de/en/staff/amelie-pia-heldt>

Ashnah Kalemera <https://cipesa.org/about-us/people/>

Christian Katzenbach <https://www.hiig.de/en/christian-katzenbach/>

Dia Kayyali <https://mnemonic.org/en/team>

Taylor Owen <https://www.mediatechdemocracy.com/people>

Heidi Tworek <https://www.cigionline.org/person/heidi-tworek>

*Collaborating Institutions*

Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) 
<https://citap.unc.edu/>, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) 
<https://www.cigionline.org/>, Waterloo
Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy (MTD) 
<https://www.mediatechdemocracy.com/>, McGill University, Montreal
Center for Technology and Society (CTS) <https://direitorio.fgv.br/cts>, 
FGV School of Law, Rio de Janeiro
Center for the Study of Media and Society (MESO) <http://meso.com.ar/>, 
Buenos Aires
Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa 
(CIPESA) <https://cipesa.org/>, Kampala
Data and Society Research Institute <https://datasociety.net/>, New York
Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) 
<https://www.hiig.de/>, Berlin
IT For Change <https://itforchange.net/aboutus>, Bangalore
Mnemonic <https://mnemonic.org/>


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