Diplo joins Global Network of Internet and Society Research Centers

DiploFoundation has joined the Global Network of Internet and Society Research Centers as an affiliated participant.

The Network of Centers (NoC) is a collaborative initiative among academic institutions with a focus on interdisciplinary research on the development, social impact, policy implications, and legal issues concerning the Internet. This collective aims to increase interoperability between participating centers in order to stimulate the creation of new cross-national, cross-disciplinary conversation, debate, teaching, learning, and engagement regarding the most pressing questions around new technologies, social change, and related policy and regulatory developments.

The NOC encompasses two types of participants: participating centers and affiliated participants. Participating centers are academic research centers whose agenda is primarily focused on Internet and Society topics. Centers which have also just joined the NOC are the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) at the Central Europe University in Hungary, the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the New Research on Digital Societies (NeRDS) group at Kozminski University in Poland, the Swedish Institute for Legal Informatics (IRI) at Stockholm University in Sweden, and the Web Science Institute (WSI) at the University of Southampton, UK.

Affiliated participants are institutions working in Internet & Society open threads, and include non-academic research centres, policy-support entities, and think tanks. In addition to DiploFoundation, newly affiliated participants include Chatham House, UK, the Internet Policy Observatory Pakistan (iPOP) in Pakistan, the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Germany, and the Nesta Innovation Lab on digital technologies and future Internet in the UK.

NoC currently gathers 44 centers. In its first two years, NoC has been coordinated by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. As from October 2014, coordination is in the hands of the Nexa Center for Internet & Society at Politecnico di Torino.

For more details, visit the NoC website.