EINS: the European Network of Excellence in Internet Science

Launched in 2011, the EINS Network of Excellence in Internet Science brings together scholars from a broad range of disciplines, with the aim to kick-start an integrated Internet Science. The network is organized in several thematic areas. The Nexa Center is involved in four joint research threads, related with Internet Regulation and Standards (Open licensing in particular), Evidence and Experimentation (with two main topics: network measurement tools, and data quality), Privacy, and Virtual Communities (case studies). The First EINS Conference on Internet Science was held in Brussels in April 2013, with Juan Carlos De Martin as scientific co-chair. The 2nd International Conference on Internet Science has been held in Brussels, May 27-29, 2015.

EINS carries out Joint Research Activities (JRAs), and supports various types of interaction between its partners and with external stakeholders, including researchers’ mobility and dissemination. Participating in EINS represents an occasion for the Nexa Center to establish new relations with academic centers focused on complementary fields of study, and to improve its research potential by jointly addressing cutting-edge topics related with Internet Science.

• The Nexa Center co-leads the work package related with “Evidence & Experimentation” (JRA3), focusing its contributions on cataloguing methodologies and tools to assess network performance on the one hand, and (open) data quality on the other.
• In the area of “Governance, Regulation and Standards ” (JRA4), EINS aims at expose the regulatory and governance mechanisms that have enabled the development of Internet standards, also drawing lessons from social scientific analysis. The contribution of the Nexa Center is mainly focused on de facto licensing standardisation in the field of Open Contents and Science Commons.
• As far as “Internet Privacy” (JRA5) is concerned, the Nexa Center is engaged in leading a relevant part of the work, by studying in particular Internet Privacy, Identity, Trust and
  Reputation Mechanisms, also in relationship with the evolution of the Data protection regulation the EU.
• In the field of “Virtual Communities” (JRA6), the analysis carried out Nexa Center is particularly focused on the interplay between offline and online political participation.

EINS successfully concluded its activities with the 2nd International Conference on Internet Science, held in Brussels on 27-29 May 2015.

During 2014 and 2015, the Nexa Center contributed to the re-shuffle of JRA3 (“Evidence and Experimentation”). The main JRA3 deliverable is an evidence base for Internet science with auto-classification. The TellMeFirst software is being used to classify network measurement methodologies. The integration of TellMeFirst into the evidence base largely reduces the effort to share datasets/tools/e-infrastructures and provide more metadata. On January 19, 2015, the Nexa Center hosted NNTools2015, a multidisciplinary workshop on network measurement methodologies and tools applied to net neutrality. Moreover, a research thread on Open Data quality has been activated, with a case study on Italian public administrations. In this vein, the workshop ODQ2015 – Open Data Quality: From Theory to Practice was held on March 30, 2015, hosted by TU München, and co-organized by the Nexa Center. Further work is being carried out on top of these to workshops, e.g., in order to publish their results in jointly authored articles.

Tangible effort has been devoted to JRA5, with a steering role by the Nexa Director of Privacy Alessandro Mantelero, on the main deliverable focusing on law & economics of privacy , also covering a discussion on Individual-centric data ecosystems. Between March and June 2013, and during the summer 2014, Alessandro Mantelero spent three months as visiting fellow at Oxford Internet Institute within the EINS mobility programme.

The Nexa contribution to Regulation issues encompassed a review of the implementation process of the Creative Commons 4.0 licenses (and their application to Public Sector Information), as well as the discussion of the pricing principles of open government data.

The Nexa Center carried out set of case studies about on offline and online political participation, focusing on case studies, among which the Se non ora, quando? campaign on gender issues, and the organizational structure of the Pirate Party. The Nexa Fellow Elena Pavan, sociologist, is actively involved in this piece of work, also with respect to the definition of a common framework of analysis. Elena Pavan also spent some time as visitor at the Nexa Center between June and October 2014, and in March 2015.