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Jenna Condie, University of Western Sydney, Australia
The previous post in which the authors’ invite you to join the Hydrocitizens online community provides a prime example of how researchers are making use of the ‘participatory web’ (Weller, 2011) to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations and international networks on urban issues and sustainable practices. Hydrocitizens also demonstrates the diversity of our urban interests and the range of voices and perspectives possible from within and outside of academic and social science circles on the same topic. The Hydrocitizens blog, and many other initiatives like it, aim to instigate dialogues around the ways in which we shape the places we inhabit now and in the future. We need to use online platforms to share our research journeys, projects and findings, as well as to create and distribute content and messages about sustainable urbanisation and transitions to urban contexts. New media spaces are places where we can start things, spread things, make things happen, and bring about social action and urban change. This is the era of the ‘digital scholar’ (Weller, 2011).
That said, in putting together this collection of works by researchers across the world, I have been reminded of how ‘traditional’ communication platforms, primarily email and mail lists, prevail. In the digital age where researchers are increasingly moving online and participating in the social web for the scholarly purposes of knowledge sharing, information finding, and research dialogues, the potential contribution of online networks and social media platforms remains to be seen. More could be done. The questions are what can be done, and how can we make it work?
At present, Twitter is one of the most prominent platforms for research dialogues yet the hashtag for this book (#ISSCBookofBlogs) has been sparingly used during the crowdsourcing, curation, and editorial stages of this project. Even as a heavy Twitter user, I have used the hashtag minimally to share this project with others. In contrast, my email account has been buzzing with emails about the book and lots of interesting discussions have happened there. Some of these discussions could have really helped other contributors, particularly those unfamiliar with blogging formats, to write their posts. If we move our electronic communication to more open online spaces, what else could be achieved? What other social connections would form? Who else might have contributed to this collection? Would new initiatives have taken shape?
The ‘traditional’ communication platforms of email and the mail lists of international organisations have realised this book into being. Without those networks, the range of posts would have been narrower and the contributions less varied. Whilst mail lists are great for sharing information, they function less well as dialogical spaces. We need more social online spaces to get to know one another, given that we are located across the world, livin