O avanço das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação e a capacidade de mobilização proporcionada por seu uso têm mostrado ao mundo que o futuro está em transformação: regimes políticos são contestados no Oriente Médio a partir de movimentos digitais; governos questionados no mundo todo sofrem ataques de grupos hackers anônimos; pessoas de todo o globo se comunicam em tempo real e interagem por meio de jogos eletrônicos online, movimentando expressivas somas de dinheiro em microtransações. Considerando esse novo meio digital de interações, a proposta desta tese é investigar a prática da Democracia Digital (subsidiariamente, do Governo Eletrônico), com foco na ação estruturante do Estado nesse campo, como modo de facilitar a participação da Sociedade Civil nos rumos da democracia. Igualmente há – aqui – o interesse de conhecermos a preocupação e a ação (ou a ausência dela) por parte do Estado, com relação à possível ocorrência de um efeito de ampliação da exclusão social na participação democrática – a partir do uso reiterado do meio virtual para manifestações de interesse e vontade, já que, em tese, tal espaço tem uma população substancialmente menor do que o campo físico – offline. O caso de estudo que propicia as discussões é o GD do Rio Grande do Sul, devido à sua relevância e o reconhecimento como uma das experiências recentes mais prolíficas dentro da temática da Democracia Digital. Este estudo se deu a partir de dados primários e secundários. Foram realizadas entrevistas com atores-chave para o GD do Rio Grande do Sul, no intuito de conhecer suas motivações, conceitos e ações à época do projeto. Dentre os resultados das reflexões desta tese, chegou-se a uma série de ações que os estados poderiam empreender; assim como precauções que poderiam ser tomadas, de modo a estruturar seu campo democrático digital e, ao mesmo tempo, reduzir o risco da ciberelitização. Finalmente, como sugestão para futuras pesquisas a partir dessa temática, e considerando a complexidade envolvida num trabalho dessa natureza, indica-se aos futuros pesquisadores que investiguem as ações do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul em termos de inclusão social. Além disso, nos parece relevante conhecer em pesquisas vindouras as opiniões e as experiências dos usuários do GD, a fim de compreender a sua visão sobre o que foi atingido. / The advance of Information and Communications Technology and the mobilization capacity provided by its use has shown to the world that the future is changing: political regimes have been defied in the Middle East by digital movements; unpopular government have been suffering digital attacks by anonymous hackers groups in the whole world; people around the world have been chatting in real time and interacting through games online, with the circulation of a great amount of money in micro transactions. Considering this new digital way of interactions, the proposal of this study is to investigate the practices of Digital Democracy (subsidiarily to e-Government), focusing on the State structural actions in this field, and to allow the participation of the Civil Society in the government’s decision making and democracy. Also, is here the interest of knowing the conception and actions (or the lack of) by the State, in relation to the possible occurrence of Social Exclusion and CyberElitism on democratic participation process through the Internet. The case study selected here, the Digital Office of Rio Grande do Sul, is recognized as one of the most prolific of the recent experiences within the subject of Digital Democracy in Brazil. This study used from primary and secondary data. Interviews were conducted with key actors of the Digital Office of Rio Grande do Sul, in order to know their motivations, concepts and actions at the time of the project. Among the results of this study, a series of actions that states must undertake emerged, and also precautions that need to be taken in order to structure their digital democratic fields and, at the same time, to avoid the risk of cyberelitization. Considering the complexity of the issue, we suggest as guidelines for future researchers to continue this investigation seeking for the actions of the State of Rio Grande do Sul in terms of Social Inclusion. It would be equally relevant to investigate the views and experiences of the users of the Digital Office, i. e. the population.

O que buscamos mapear nesta tese de doutorado é de que forma as narrativas hipertextuais estão mudando a democracia digital. Ao detectarmos tais mudanças, ocorridas nas narrativas mediadas por computador, com a elaboração de um experimento coletivo de trocas de narrativas, o Remix Narrativo, procuramos correlacionar algumas escrituras, sejam elas em formato texto (poesias, contos, folhetins, histórias cotidianas, urbanidades), formato imagético (fotografias, ilustrações, vídeos, recortes), formato sonoro ou formato comunitário, como listas de discussão e comunidade no Orkut. O participante pode alterar uma narrativa existente a partir do desenrolar da trama; alterar os personagens ou mudar de formato, ou seja, continuar o conto com inserção de imagem, áudio ou vídeo. A cada bloco temático é possível espiar, participar, modificar ou iniciar uma nova narrativa apropriando-se do formato existente ou escolhendo outro numa brincadeira entre formatos multimidiáticos. Com esse experimento, pretende-se apresentar uma reflexão conceitual acerca do processo de narrar, além de promover o questionamento sobre a morte do autor, já proposto por Barthes em 1967. O anônimo ganha poder de emergente. E a aventura segue um roteiro não-linear, bem aos moldes propostos por Borges. / What we intend to investigate in this doctorate thesis is how the hypertextual narratives are changing digital democracy. As we detect those changes, which happened through computer mediated narratives, we created a colective experiment to exchange narratives, called Narrative Remix. We intended to collect writing materials (be it poetry, short stories, day to day stories, urbanities), imagetic format (pictures, ilustrations, videos, paper clips), sound formats or community formats, such as forums and Orkut groups. The participant can alter an existing narrative as the story unfolds, change a character or change the format. That means, keep telling the story by inserting images, audio or video. Each thematic bloc allows the user to see, participate, change or start a new narrative by taking the pre-existent format or choosing another one, in a array of multimedia formats. With this experiment, the idea is to present a conceptual reflection about the narrative process, and to promote the questioning about the death of the author, already raised by Barthes in 1967. The anonimous gains the emergent power. And the adventure gains a non-linear sequence plot, in the terms proposed by Borges.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The theme of this research includes two main theoretical notions: public communication and digital democracy, delimited to the study of the digital public communication strategies in the government portals of the municipalities from RS State with a population exceeding one hundred thousand inhabitants. The issue of the research is structured around the following question: what are the strategies that the portals of municipalities of RS State, with a population exceeding one hundred thousand, contain and how are they established facing the theoretical assumptions of public communication and digital democracy in the mediatized context of society¿ The overall objective is the analysis of communicative strategies on the government portals of the municipalities from Rio Grande do Sul State, with a population exceeding one hundred thousand, under the theoretical assumptions of public communication and digital democracy and; the specific objectives are: a) identify the theoretical thought on the relationship between the topics: mediatization, internet, public communication and digital democracy; b) verify how (and if) the municipal governments of RS work the communicative potential of the internet for public communication; c) identify regulative evidences of digital democracy of each portal; d) analyze, tangentially, in the portals, the use of the public communication strategies for purposes related to the visibility of politic agents. The assumptions considered are: incorporating the mediatized logic, the portals are the stage to the politic visibility of mayors and other political actors of the administrative sphere, valuing the shape and the image over the relevant public content; the informative and unilateral emphasis is prevalent, accountable as Constitutional required and the other contents published are defined by the rulers, according to what they judge to be important for the citizens; the possibilities of bilateral flows of information between governments and civil society are scarce; the opinions, questions, and criticals are not published in the portals; and finally, the contents are not segmented and the access is difficult, ignoring the inequality of access to digital technologies. The methodological approach includes: definition of empirical corpus; literature review on the subject addressed; data collection and municipal portals in the classification of each portal ranks of digital democracy, according to the Silva s (2005b) spreadsheet. Finally, and comparing the data with the theories studied. The results point to the most elementary levels of digital democracy, whichever the informative emphasis, with few opportunities for discussion and debate about the topics of civil interest; and the portals are the stage to the politic visibility of mayors and other political actors and their accomplishments, to achieve recognition; furthermore, the results suggest that the communication portals needs to converge with the theoretical assumptions of public communication and digital democracy. / A temática da pesquisa contempla duas noções teóricas centrais: comunicação pública e democracia digital, delimitando-se ao estudo das estratégias de comunicação pública digital nos portais governamentais dos municípios gaúchos com população superior a cem mil habitantes. A problemática de pesquisa é representada pela questão: Quais estratégias os portais dos municípios gaúchos, com mais de cem mil habitantes, contêm e como se estabelecem diante dos pressupostos teóricos de comunicação pública e de democracia digital no contexto social midiatizado? O objetivo geral é analisar as estratégias dos portais governamentais dos municípios do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul, com população superior a cem mil, sob os pressupostos teóricos de comunicação pública e de democracia digital e; os objetivos específicos são: a) identificar os referenciais teóricos sobre a relação entre os temas: midiatização, internet, comunicação pública e democracia digital; b) verificar como (e se) os governos municipais do RS empregam as potencialidades comunicativas da internet para a comunicação pública; c) identificar indícios graduantes de democracia digital de cada portal; d) analisar, tangencialmente, o uso das estratégias de comunicação pública nos portais para fins ligados à visibilidade dos agentes políticos. Consideramos como pressupostos: incorporando a lógica midiatizada, os portais são palco para a visibilidade política dos prefeitos e demais atores políticos da esfera administrativa municipal, valorizando-se a forma e a imagem em detrimento do conteúdo de relevância pública; há a prevalência da ênfase informativa e unilateral, prestando contas conforme exigência constitucional e os demais conteúdos publicados são definidos pelos próprios governantes, a partir das impressões que têm sobre o que os munícipes querem receber; são escassas as possibilidades de fluxos bilaterais entre município e sociedade civil; as opiniões, questionamentos e críticas não são publicados nos portais; e, por fim, os conteúdos não são segmentados e o acesso não é facilitado, desconsiderando-se a desigualdade de acesso às tecnologias digitais. O percurso metodológico contempla: delimitação do corpus empírico; revisão bibliográfica sobre a temática abordada; coleta de dados nos portais municipais e classificação de cada portal em graduações de democracia digital, conforme a planilha de Silva (2005b). Por fim, é realizada a análise crítica interpretativa dos dados a partir das teorias estudadas. Os resultados indicam a predominância da ênfase informativa, com escassas possibilidades de discussão e debate acerca das temáticas de interesse civil e que os portais se constituem em palco mais autônomo para a visibilidade de atores políticos e suas realizações, na busca por reconhecimento; além disto, sugerem que a comunicação dos portais analisados carece de convergência com os pressupostos teóricos de comunicação pública e de democracia digital.

Research into the citizen political participation via social media is dominated by two grand narratives. In the first, new media are seen as empowering society, while the second portrays the Internet as the State’s ultimate tool for manipulating citizens. This research employed content analysis, critical discourse analysis and interview to compare and contrast the nature of political participation and deliberation on Weibo in [Hong Kong and mainland] and by [VIPs and causal users] on 2012 Hong Kong Chief Executive Election, and how the online censorship shaped their political participation and deliberation regarding this case. Mixed methods used with theoretical framework (e.g. democracy, digital democracy, deliberative democracy, e-participation and citizenship) in this research has demonstrated the role of Weibo both ‘tool’ ‘forum’ and ‘object’ to understand deliberative democracy while citizens used for political participation and deliberation. Dynamic forms of self-censorship demonstrated how the online censorship shaped the citizens’ political participation and deliberation through dynamic explicit or implicit ways on Weibo in this case.

O presente trabalho se insere no campo sobre Democracia Digital e procura compreender o funcionamento das iniciativas de participação digitais que visam incidir na decisão política. Será argumentado que, na ausência de ferramentas de agregação e de níveis de representação, é através de um processo de tradução que o Estado é capaz de lidar com os grandes volumes de informação difusa provenientes dessas iniciativas. Ao longo do trabalho, serão explorados os aspectos que compõem o processo de tradução e será utilizado como exemplo empírico o estudo de caso sobre o Marco Civil da Internet. / This work falls within the field of Digital Democracy and intents to understand the functioning of digital participation initiatives seeking to produce effects on political decision. I argue that in the absence of aggregation- and representation-level tools, it is through a translation process that the state is able to handle the large volumes of scattered information from these initiatives. Throughout the work, the aspects that constitute the translation process and the empirical example will be a case study on the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet

As most dedicated observers of voting bodies like the U.S. Supreme Court can attest, it is possible to guess vote outcomes based on statements made during deliberations or questioning by the voting members. In most forms of representative democracy, citizens can actively petition or lobby their representatives, and that often means understanding their intentions to vote for or against an issue of interest. In some U.S. state legislators, professional lobby groups and dedicated press members are highly informed and engaged, but the process is basically closed to ordinary citizens because they do not have enough background and familiarity with the issue, the legislator or the entire process. Our working hypothesis is that verbal utterances made during the legislative process by elected representatives can indicate their intent on a future vote, and therefore can be used to automatically predict said vote to a significant degree. In this research, we examine thousands of hours of legislative deliberations from the California state legislature’s 2015-2016 session to form models of voting behavior for each legislator and use them to train classifiers and predict the votes that occur subsequently. We can achieve legislator vote prediction accuracies as high as 83%. For bill vote prediction, our model can achieve 76% accuracy with an F1 score of 0.83 for balanced bill training data.

Facial recognition is a powerful tool for identifying people visually. Yet, when the end goal is more specific than merely identifying the person in a picture problems can arise. Speaker identification is one such task which expects more predictive power out of a facial recognition system than can be provided on its own. Speaker identification is the task of identifying who is speaking in video not simply who is present in the video. This extra requirement introduces numerous false positives into the facial recognition system largely due to one main scenario. The person speaking is not on camera. This paper investigates a solution to this problem by incorporating information from a new system which indicates whether or not the person on camera is speaking. This information can then be combined with an existing facial recognition to boost its predictive capabilities in this instance. We propose a speaker detection system to visually detect when someone in a given video is speaking. The system relies strictly on visual information and is not reliant on audio information. By relying strictly on visual information to detect when someone is speaker the system can be synced with an existing facial recognition system and extend its predictive power. We use a two-stream convolutional neural network to accomplish the speaker detection. The neural network is trained and tested using data extracted from Digital Democracy’s large database of transcribed political hearings [4]. We show that the system is capable of accurately detecting when someone on camera is speaking with an accuracy of 87% on a dataset of legislators. Furthermore we demonstrate how this information can benefit a facial recognition system with the end goal of identifying the speaker. The system increased the precision of a existing facial recognition system by up to 5% at the cost of a large drop in recall.

Committee meetings are a fundamental part of the legislative process in whichconstituents, lobbyists, and legislators alike can speak on proposed bills at thelocal and state level. Oftentimes, unspoken “rules” or standards are at play inpolitical processes that can influence the trajectory of a bill, leaving constituentswithout a political background at an inherent disadvantage when engaging withthe legislative process. The work done in this thesis aims to explore the extent towhich the language and phraseology of a general public testimony can influence avote, and examine how this information can be used to promote civic engagement. The Digital Democracy database contains digital records for over 40,000 realtestimonies by non-legislator public persons presented at California Legislaturecommittee meetings 2015-2018, along with the speakers’ desired vote outcomeand individual legislator votes in that discussion. With this data, we conduct alinguistic analysis that is then leveraged by the Constituent phraseology AnalysisTool (CPAT) to generate a user-based intelligent statistical comparison betweena proposed testimony and language patterns that have previously been successful. The following questions are at the core of this research: Which (if any) lan-guage features are correlated with persuasive success in a legislative context?Does the committee’s topic of discussion impact the language features that canlend to a testimony’s success? Can mirroring a legislator’s speech patterns changethe probability of the vote going your way? How can this information be used tolevel the playing field for constituents who want their voices heard? Given the 33 linguistic features developed in this research, supervised classifi-cation models were able to predict testimonial success with up to 85.1% accuracy,indicating that the new features had a significant impact on the prediction ofsuccess. Adding these features to the 16 baseline linguistic features developedin Gundala’s [18] research improved the prediction accuracy by up to 2.6%. Wealso found that balancing the dataset of testimonies drastically impacted theprediction performance metrics, with 93% accuracy achieved for the imbalanceddataset and 60% accuracy after balancing. The Constituent Phraseology AnalysisTool showed promise in the generation of linguistic analysis based on previouslysuccessful language patterns, but requires further development before achievingtrue usability. Additionally, predicting success based on linguistic similarity to alegislator on the committee produced contradictory results. Experiments yieldeda 4% increase in predictive accuracy when adding comparative language featuresto the feature set, but further experimentation with weight distributions revealedonly marginal impacts from comparative features.

[pt] Esta é uma pesquisa inserida no campo da Internet e Democracia que propõe analisar os impactos da comunicação política nas redes sociais durante campanhas eleitorais no Brasil ao lançar um olhar empírico e conceitual sobre a forma como políticos em campanha utilizam o Facebook, o impacto viral de suas publicações e o uso da comunicação política digital como instrumento de campanha nas eleições de 2014. Para tal, é objeto específico deste trabalho observar o conteúdo publicado nas fanpages de oito candidatos à reeleição como deputado federal pelo Rio de Janeiro nas últimas eleições durante os 33 últimos dias de propaganda eleitoral na web, de 1 de setembro a 3 de outubro de 2014. Com base em métodos qualitativos e quantitativos aplicados sobre as 840 publicações coletadas nos 8 perfis, ficou claro observar que: a) não há relação entre a incidência de postagens e número de ações de interação; b) há relações significativas entre os temas plataforma de campanha e registro de atividades com o número de compartilhamentos e comentários; c) no ambiente eleitoral contemporâneo, um candidato com muitos votos tende a ser, também, eficiente nas mídias sociais. / [en] This is a research in the field of Internet and Democracy which aims to analyze the impact of political communication in social media during election campaigns in Brazil launching a conceptual and empirical view about how politicians in campaign are using Facebook, the viral impact of their content and the digital political communication as a campaign tool in 2014 elections Therefore, the object of this research intend to observe all the publishers at eight candidates for re-election as a federal deputy for Rio de Janeiro fanpages on Facebook at 33 days. Based on qualitative and quantitative methods applied on 840 publications, collected in 8 different profiles, it s easy to observer that: a) there s no relationship between the incidence of posts and the number of interactive activities; b) There is a relation between campaign platform and activity log posts and the possibility of shares and comments c) in a contemporary electoral environment, a candidate may tend to be more efficient on the web, especially on social media to be successful in terms of votes.

Qual é a internet que queremos? Para o Direito essa pergunta oferece um enorme desafio. Com a expansão comercial da rede, muitos interesses foram afetados e demandam conformação no ambiente digital. Um novo comportamento social emerge, com vistas à produção não mercadológica, baseada na troca e no compartilhamento de arquivos e informações, que se torna interessante para o desenvolvimento econômico e para o surgimento de novas oportunidades de inserção e prosperidade social. Questiona-se se os conceitos e as técnicas jurídicas desenvolvidas para descrever, analisar e regular a dinâmica da economia industrial são aplicáveis ao espaço cibernético ou se as novas tecnologias da informação propiciam inovações e comportamentos que exigem novos conceitos e definições que se moldem à Sociedade da Informação. Os controladores da infraestrutura de conexão e as grandes indústrias de entretenimento demonstram interesse na inspeção do fluxo de dados transmitido pela rede, bem como na restrição de uso e de acesso a conteúdos por dispositivos digitais conectados à internet e transmitidos via redes de compartilhamento de arquivos (redes p2p). Seus argumentos se fundamentam tanto na questão da abertura de modelos econômicos mais rentáveis e necessários à expansão da largura de banda, em resposta à demanda infinitamente crescente por internet de qualidade, quanto na fiscalização e impedimento da troca e do acesso a conteúdos protegidos por direito de propriedade intelectual. O presente trabalho vem demonstrar como as restrições impostas aos usuários poderiam impactar o ambiente competitivo e inovador criado na internet. O Marco Civil da Internet é formulado sobre as novas diretrizes produtivas e vem para definir, diante de um debate aberto e uma construção compartilhada com a sociedade brasileira, os possíveis caminhos a serem perseguidos com a regulação da internet. Os contornos jurídicos que resultarão da legislação a ser aprovada dependerão do posicionamento do Estado em face das demandas apresentadas, em alinhamento com o projeto desenvolvimentista insculpido no art. 3º da Constituição Federal. / Which internet do we want? From the aspect of the Law, this question poses a great challenge. With the commercial expansion of the web, many interests were affected by it, and these interests demand conformity in the digital environment. A new social behavior emerges, not aiming at a non-commercial aspect, but based on exchanging and sharing files and information, which is interesting for the development of the economy and for new opportunities of social insertion and prosperity. What is in question is if the legal concepts and techniques developed to describe, analyze and regulate the industrial economic dynamics are applicable to cyberspace, or if the new technologies of information provide enough innovation and behaviors that demand new concepts and definitions that mold them into the new Information Society. The controllers of connection infrastructure and the big entertainment industries show interest in the inspection of data flow transmitted on the web, as well as the restriction of content use and access through digital devices connected to the internet and transmitted through file sharing networks (p2p networks). Their arguments are based on two ideas: the opening of more profitable and necessary economic models, needed for the expansion of broadband width connection, answering the escalating demand for quality provision of internet use; and the supervision and stoppage of sharing and accessing content that is protected by intellectual property right. Under both ideas stated above, the aim of this work is to show how the restrictions imposed on users could impact the competitive and innovative environment fostered on the internet. The Internet Bill, called Marco Civil da Internet in Brazil, is formulated on the new productive directives and comes to define, with an open debate and a shared construction with all Brazilian society, the possible ways to be followed in regards to the regulation of internet use. The legal framework that will result on the approval of this legislation will depend on the position of the State about the presented demands, in alignment with the development project registered in art. 3rd. of the Federal Constitution