Informing the Good Society (InGSoc): New Directions in Information Policy

Information policy has become a field of great national and international importance. We live in the Information Age, and our culture is being transformed in numerous ways by high technology and the explosive growth of communications. Good decisions need to be made about the role of information in society and that is what the information policy specialism addresses. InGSoc, short for Informing the Good Society: New Directions in Information Policy, aims to make information policy ready to face the challenges of this century.

InGSoc has been designed as a three-part programme of research. The first component is a population census project, to be conducted by a PhD student. The widespread practice of regular national population surveys may have interested statisticians and social scientists but it has been neglected by the arts and humanities. InGSoc intends to shed a new type of light on this key information institution, asking about its origins, rationale, ethics, interface, and future. It will be particularly interested in what the migration (already partially implemented in the 2011 UK census) from print formats to online might mean for public policy. This represents a bold new direction for information policy research.

The second part is an 'epunditry' project. Everything seems to be going 'e', from electronic publishing to egovernment, and political commentary and punditry are no exception. This project, to be carried out on a part-time basis by an experienced researcher, will examine the emergence of bloggers and other online experts, or would-be experts, against the backdrop of rapidly declining newspaper circulations. Are they up to the job of replacing the 'fourth estate'? Do we even need pundits in this age of access? These important yet still unanswered questions are ultimately about how to secure a healthy flow of information in society.

The third InGSoc project will dig down into the theoretical foundations of information policy. It will revisit some of the great British thinkers of the past, people like T. H. Green, Edward Caird and John Stuart Mill, and ask what their social philosophies imply for key information issues facing the world today. Those issues include freedom of information, the digital divide, the defence of personal privacy, intellectual property, and internet regulation and governance. This foundational study, which will be covered by the principal investigator for one day a week alongside oversight of the programme a whole, will make sure that InGSoc research is both 'deep and wide'.

InGSoc will be based at the Centre for Social Informatics, Edinburgh Napier University's leading research centre according to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. Its goal is to produce a substantial body of new and important work, including a book, a dissertation and a series of major research articles, singly- and jointly-authored. The team will also disseminate their findings through national and international conference presentations, aiming not just at information policy specialists but at the wider academic community. Experts from a range of disciplines, and journalists and others from outside the academy, will give guest talks at the University. The 36-month programme will conclude on a high note with a multidisciplinary symposium. All this should help to ensure that the information policy field gains the recognition that it deserves.

InGSoc's key findings will be also be aggressively promoted to policy-makers and the public through a dynamic website, newspaper articles, and, when available, public debates and radio and television appearances. In these practical ways, InGSoc can be relied upon to result in a wider appreciation of the value of information policy in the development of what the famous American columnist-cum-social philosopher Walter Lippmann called 'the good society' (An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, Little, Brown & Co., 1937).

Informing the Good Society (InGSoc): New Directions in Information Policy is driven by the conviction that the field of information policy is of vital importance far beyond the walls of the academy. Information is the new 'Kapital', the real source of a nation's wealth and power, and InGSoc's aim is to make a palpable impact on some of the great policy issues confronting this Information Age.

Policy-makers, especially politicians, legislators and their advisors, are therefore viewed as key stakeholders in the InGSoc programme. In the medium and long terms, policy thinking at local, national and international level will be enhanced by the availability of a new peer-reviewed published corpus of relevant knowledge. A precedent is the inclusion of Dr Alistair Duff's Information Society Studies (Routledge, 2000) in the official UN reading list for the World Summit on the Information Society. Yet short term, direct impacts will also be energetically pursued through the tested media of political influence and agenda-building. Recent experience in mass-media appearances, including national television and radio interviews on the 2011 population census and a feature article in The Independent about Britain's leading political columnists, constitutes a sound basis for InGSoc's claim that the policy world will feel the effects of the proposed research well within the three-year project frame.

Other vital agencies within the public sector also stand to gain from this research, for example the General Register Office, responsible for the future of the population census, and the Scottish Information Commissioner and his opposite numbers in the rest of the UK and abroad. Responses to formal consultations as well as interactions in the media will ensure that InGSoc's innovative, humanities-based, messages are heard.

Knowledge transfer to a multiplicity of civil society organisations can also be expected. InGSoc research will interest policy 'think tanks' such as the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. InGSoc will also reach pressure groups active in information policy issues, such as the Edinburgh-based EthicalCensus. It will do this directly through press releases.

InGSoc findings will also inform professional and industry bodies. The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and the Association for Journalism Education are among the many organisations which stand to gain from new thinking in information policy, broadly conceived. By means of meetings, media communications and an interactive web-site, the InGSoc programme should make tangible contributions to the calibre of their policy positions.

However, the single most important potential impact is that it will brighten the coinage of public opinion on key contemporary dilemmas. InGSoc will not be lost in vague abstractions and will pursue lucid, accessible expression even of its most erudite advances. Two of its components, the population census project and the 'epunditry' (electronic commentary) project, should be of immediate interest to every thinking person. The social philosophy project, by strengthening the theoretical foundations of information policy, will ensure that InGSoc's contribution to public knowledge will be deep as well as wide.

By media discussions, open seminars, letters to newspapers, and other methods detailed in the accompanying Pathways to Impact, the InGSoc programme will endeavour to engage the public itself in the building of a better information society.