Tanja Aitamurto

Tanja Aitamurto was a visiting researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In her PhD project she examined how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation, impacts incumbent processes in journalism, public policy making and design process. Her work has been published in several academic publications, such as the New Media and Society. Related to her studies, she advises the Government and the Parliament of Finland about Open Government principles, for example about how open data and crowdsourcing can serve democratic processes. Aitamurto now works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford.

Aitamurto has previously studied at the Center for Design Research and at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford University. She is a PhD Student at the Center for Journalism, Media and Communication Research at Tampere University in Finland, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in Humanities. Prior to returning to academia, she made a career in journalism in Finland specializing in foreign affairs, reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Uganda. She has also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, in Lusaka, and worked at the Namibia Press Agency, Windhoek.

She also actively participates in the developments she is studying; she crowdfunded a reporting and research trip to Egypt in 2011 to investigate crowdsourcing in public deliberation. She also practices social entrepreneurship in the Virtual SafeBox (http://designinglibtech.tumblr.com/), a project, which sprang from Designing Liberation Technologies class at Stanford. Tanja blogs on the Huffington Post and writes about her research at PBS MediaShift. More about Tanja’s work at www.tanjaaitamurto.com and on Twitter @tanjaaita.

Publications:

• Aitamurto, Tanja. (2012). Crowdsourcing for Democracy: New Era In Policy–Making. Publications of the Committee for the Future, Parliament of Finland, 1/2012. ISBN 978-951-53-3459-6 (Paperback), ISBN 978-951-53-3460-2 (PDF). Accessible online here. 
• Aitamurto, T. &Lewis, S. (2012) “Open Innovation in Digital Journalism: Examining the Impact of Open APIs at Four News Organizations.” New Media&Society, July 2012, online first.
• Aitamurto, Tanja. (2011) The Impact of Crowdfunding on Journalism, Journalism Practice 5 (4):  429-445 http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rjop
• Aitamurto, Tanja (2011) The new role of nonprofit organizations: From middleman to a platform organization, 40-41. In National Civic Review. 100 (1). 
• Aitamurto, Tanja & Lewis, Seth. (2011) “Open APIs and news organizations: A study of openinnovation in online journalism” Presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism, Austin, Texas. 
• Aitamurto, Tanja. (2011) “New ecosystem in journalism: Decentralized newsrooms empowered by self-organized crowds.” Knowledge Federation 2010: Self-Organizing Collective Mind
• Aitamurto, Tanja&Könkkölä, Saara. (2011) “Value in Co-Created Content Production in Magazine Publishing: Case Study of Co-Creation in Three Scandinavian Magazine Brands.” The World Conference on Mass Customization, Personalization, and Co-Creation: Bridging Mass Customization & Open Innovation.
• Aitamurto, Tanja; Leiponen, Aija & Tee, Richard. (2011). “The Promise of Idea Crowdsourcing -Benefits, Contexts, Limitations.” Whitepaper. Accessible at IdeasProject by Nokia