Working with European academics #2

At Google, whether you're in engineering, product marketing, accounting or public policy, we all try to be as innovative as possible in our work. So it was a real pleasure for us last week to work together with the University of Glasgow and co-host a meeting that took a new and innovative approach to debating and mapping "the impact of online information in the political, economic and social sphere". Too often, public policy is made on the back of politics rather than deep research and evidence - and we're keen to help reduce the gap between policy and research by bringing together some of the people in the UK for whom robust evidence is a way of life.

Academics from 13 different institutions across the UK gathered recently at the Google office in London to discuss their work. The new and innovative approach, according to several of the participants, was that the meeting brought together Googlers with academics from many different disciplines - social scientists, engineers and computer scientists - to debate each other's work. Although everyone brought different perspectives to the discussion, the common themes and areas of research were striking. Freedom of expression was one common area of research, examining whether new technology was really challenging traditional power bases or not.

Other big questions tackled included what values people attach to their personal data, the right level of Government intervention in improving digital inclusion and whether online campaigning is doing anything to change the nature of politics. We also uncovered a great deal of common ground between the academics and the Googlers about how we do our jobs. At Google we analyse data patterns to understand how to improve our search algorithims: at universities, data crunching is also at the heart of good research. We discovered we had more in common than we at first realised.

Professor Sarah Oates from the Politics Department at the University of Glasgow curated the programme and invited the participants. Professor Rachel Gibson (University of Manchester) spoke about the Online Electorate and Web 2.0, Ashley Lloyd (Edinburgh Business School) presented on Bridging Technological Gaps and Professor Angus Laing (Loughborough) and Dr Debbie Keeling (Manchester) on how patients seek health information online.

As you'd hope from a gathering of Britain's top academics, the day generated much food for thought. For example, the research on health and the internet challenged many assumptions about how people use technology. We sometimes assume that technology offers people an emotionless, inhuman way of interacting, especially when compared with the 'real world' alternatives of doctors and nurses. But the research that Professor Laing and Dr Keeling presented suggests that people attribute all kinds of human characteristics to the technology tools they use when diagnosing and treating their own illnesses. Users often grow very attached, for example, to the chatrooms and online support groups they visit when they are ill. We shouldn't be too quick to dismiss technology as 'second best' when it comes to helping people cope with their conditions.

Of course, with only a day's discussion, we didn't manage to solve all the tricky questions raised. As everyone who thinks deeply about the future of the internet knows, the answers to the big policy questions are not easy. But we think proper, robust research has a crucial role to play in helping Governments and regulators try to find answers - and we look forward to hosting more multi-discipline academic debates in the future.

Posted by Sarah Hunter, UK Senior Policy Manager