Critonian Michael Jensen will be spending the next six months in Barcelona at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya working at their Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. He will be working directly with a group of researchers engaged in a Spanish Ministry of Education and Science funded project studying online participatory initiatives between community groups and local governments in Spain This research group has also scheduled a nationwide survey of political participation and the Internet in Spain for Spring 2008. Mike is coordinating a similar survey effort in the U.S. by CRITO's Project POINT (People, Organizations, and Information Technology), an NSF funded project under the direction of James Danziger and Alladi Venkatesh. The surveys conducted in Spain and the U.S. will enable him to investigate the interplay between cultural and social factors and ICTs in the political process. He will be focusing primarily on how use of the Internet and other ICTs are changing political participation and the relationship between government actors and citizens in the United States and Spain.

This research opportunity emerged when Mike met a graduate student visiting UCI who was from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She was working on a dissertation very similar to his own. He learned she was submitting a proposal to the Spanish government to do a nation-wide survey of Spain on this subject. Last spring he gave a talk at a local research center in Barcelona, and after a series of events he was invited to come as a visiting research professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Mike, whose research interests are in political informatics, has been a part of CRITO since 2002 when he started as a graduate research student with Project POINT and assisted the researchers in the analysis of how information technology transforms people's lives in such areas as the home, work, and civil life. Involvement in Project POINT really sparked his interest in the topic that eventually became his dissertation in 2007, “Electronic Democracy in America: The Internet and Participation in American Local Politics.” The dissertation, which used Project POINT data, is an inquiry into how residents use the Internet to interact with their communities and local governments.

Mike is very excited about his project and before he left he recounted George Orwell’s quote from his Homage to Catalonia, "I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!"