In ten days, I’ll be part of a panel at the Media, Communication and Democracy: Global and National Environments Conference at RMIT discussing WikiLeaks. My paper is titled Vigilance to Vigilantes and back Again: Designing Radical Transparency in the Digital World.

Abstractly, From Wiki to Anon to Open leaks, the paper evaluates democratic benefits and harms afforded in the evolving designs to conclude that each iteration deforms ideal types of democracy, or pure transparency, to inform unique empirical instances and effects. WikiLeaks phases are evaluated against critical democratic positions of online democracy to conclude that although ‘affordance’ offers descriptive power in categorising online democracy, explanatory power is held in the conjunction of online democracy’s elements, available relationships and constituting design – an apparatus of new media that performs each ‘leak’ as a relational act of discipline.