Berkman@10 - User contributions [en]

The Internet: Issues at the Frontiers

2010-02-22T11:10:44Z

Tak0o:

Moved to http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/iif/Main_Page
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Agenda

2010-02-22T11:10:36Z

Tak0o:

The Berkman@10 Future of the Internet conference will be held on May15-16, 2008. As we approach, we will be giving more shape to the agenda.

'''May 15, 2007'''

The first day of the conference will consist of plenary sessions with big thinkers in the Internet field including Esther Dyson and the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, among others.

During the evening of the 15th, we will be holding a cocktail reception for attendees which will include a keynote address.

'''May 16, 2007'''

The second day of the conference will consist of more intimate break-out sessions led by specialists in certain areas including security, censorship, intellectual property, and innovation. The purpose of these breakouts will be to address the specific issues facing the Internet over the next ten years and how we can address them to preserve the values upon which the Web was founded. There will be four concurrent tracks with plenary sessions at the beginning and end of the day.

'''Berkman Center 10th Anniversary Gala Dinner'''

On the evening of May 16, the Berkman Center is hosting a gala dinner at which we will present the first annual Berkman Award. The Berkman Award will be presented to innovators in our field who have made a significant contribution to the Internet in 2007. Tables of ten and individual plates are available. Please contact Catherine Bracy (cbracy at cyber.law.harvard.edu) for more information.
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Politics Session

2010-02-22T11:09:06Z

Tak0o:

[[Main Page]]

'''Introduction'''
The impact of the Internet on democracy and politics is one area of inquiry which is still largely unsettled, constantly evolving, and in need of thoughtful and skeptical analysis. During the Internet and Politics session of the Berkman@10 conference, John Palfrey will lead the groupâdrawing heavily on the expertise of conference participantsâthrough three themes that draw out some of the most important arguments, best examples, and debatable hypotheses about the lasting impact of the Internet on free speech, individual autonomy, and organization.

== Argument 1 ==
The Internet allows more free speech from more people than ever before, but states are finding ways to filter and limit that speech.

'''Hypotheses:'''
* According to the theory of the networked public sphere, the old media model has been inverted thanks to the Internet. Instead of the old hub and spoke information and communications architecture of the past, the Internetâs peer-to-peer architecture allows us to hear more voices, from more places, and about more issues than ever before.
* This new information architecture also means that costs are high for regimes that want to try to control Internet speech; it is no longer as simple as shutting down a TV or radio station.
* Free speech online is more valuable, and the need for regimes to control it more critical.

== Argument 2 ==
There is greater autonomy of the individual because of the Internet.

'''Hypotheses:'''
* The Internet and the emergence of the networked public sphere have the potential to increase individual autonomy. It increases the range and diversity of things that individuals can do for and by themselves and places the tools necessary for effective action in the hands of individuals, instead of corporations or government. Further, we are no longer passive consumers of informationâwe are active producers and propagators of ideas, culture, news, and policy.
* Questions around how a society produces information and allow access to it go to the heart of the meaning of freedom. Those questions determine what is understood to be open for debate, what possible goals for collective action are, and what the paths for that action are.
* The theory of semiotic democracy is also instructive: We no longer rely on institutions or corporations to create culture and meaning for us. Instead, the Internet allows us to create, manipulate, mash up and make our own meaning from cultural and political icons and images. This means we are less reliant on political parties, corporations, or political consultants to tell us what we think of a political candidate or policy issue; we can now decide for ourselves and share it virally.

== Argument 3 ==
The Internet enables new types of groups to form around interests and causes. The formation of online groups will alter the form and function of existing organizations and institutions with unknown impacts on democracy and governance.

'''Hypotheses:'''
* The networked public sphere increases the ability of individuals to form loose groups with more individuals and to be part of more causes than ever before. We now have the freedom and tools to collaborate more effectively with others.
* Online collaboration is lighter, more issue specific, and more time-bound than the previous generation of offline organizations.
* It is not clear how online groups will influence existing organizations and whether they will strengthen and complement, weaken, or replace them
* Money may become less important to a causeâs success with light collaboration by a large number of individuals with a common purpose and clear vision of âsuccess.â

== Comments? Responses? Countervailing Theories? ==

* Patrick Meier, [http://irevolution.wordpress.com/bio/ PhD Candidate & iRevolution]. I am writing a [http://irevolution.wordpress.com/dissertation/ dissertation] on this topic.

Is this open to just attendees at the conference?

doesn't look that way...

* Vicki Nash, [http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/ OII]
This was a great session, beautifully chaired by John to highlight the range of thinking on some of these issues. The two related questions that are engaging us in Oxford at the moment are:

1. (Re. hypothesis 1) The Internet does seem to enable more people to have a voice but does this mean that more voices are actually being heard?

Here, we're interested in testing the hypotheses posed by Cass Sunstein - that when faced with the immense variety of news and information sources online we just stick to the familiar 'Daily me' - and [http://www.matthewhindman.com/ Matthew Hindman's] concept of 'Googlearchy' - that whilst we need search engines to play a gate-keeping role online, their search algorithms favour large, well-resourced established information providers rather than Joe Bloggs' blog.

2. (Re. hypothesis 2) The Internet does seem to offer people the promise of more political autonomy, but is this only the result of participation in political practice or information-seeking?

Here we're wondering whether the potential for civic engagement might be enhanced not just by the development of new tools and new information sources, but by the fact that we increasingly get a little bit of politics with our entertainment and a little bit of entertainment with our politics. So we might wonder whether Youtube videos or Facebook groups engage those who would never sign up through a party website.

We don't have any results yet but hope to start a study on this soon.

==Resources==
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The Language of Openness

2010-02-22T11:08:57Z

Tak0o:

Nothing matters more than what the Net is. Yet when we call it a "space" or a "stage" or "pipes," we frame it with metaphors that yield very different purposes, laws and business modelsâalso different futures. What different laws and regulation do we get by framing the Net in terms of real estate ("domains," "sites," "commons"), transport ("packets," "content," "pipes") or theater ("audience," "experience")? How do these different frames guide debate over net neutrality, open infrastructure, governance, regulation, public good and business opportunity? Are there other ways of framing the Net that are more useful?
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Global problem solving

2010-02-22T00:36:49Z

Tak0o:

== Global problem solving ==

'''Session topic: Let's think collectively about collective problem solving'''

[http://www.marktovey.ca Mark Tovey]

(Austin West 3:15-4:15)

We live in a world where tough problems, especially around sustainability and resource shortages, seem to be multiplying by the minute. Mass collaboration, peer production, and open source hardware, among others, would seem to be apt tools to develop credible solutions and spur social entrepreneurship.

An interactive session inviting participants to think together about the power and limitations of these ideas, as well as possible points of leverage, to address significant global concerns.

The session will be framed with examples from the handout below, and from my new edited volume, [http://www.marktovey.ca/book Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace], to suggest places to start. I will then follow this with an open discussion of some questions that currently engage me, questions which I only have very partial answers to--questions that I think we'll have to answer if we want to translate solutions into policy.

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----

Session handout: [http://chat.carleton.ca/~mtovey/abstracts/ToveyMark_ManyMindsPoster.pdf Many Minds Make might work: mass collaboration, open source, and global change]

IRC Log

2010-02-22T00:36:38Z

Tak0o:

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The Battle for the Internet

2010-02-22T00:35:35Z

Tak0o:

The session was intended to be a discussion of who would be fighting for the soul of the internet and where. I was thinking of fleshing out Zittrain's framework of generativity vs. security. The martial title, however, brought in relatively militant discussants, so we mostly talked about government, control, crime, and openness.

'''The players'''
I've arranged them from Left to Right, depending upon their commitment to the past and control, Top to Bottom, based upon their praiseworthiness. (This is a wiki, feel free to revise my opinions.)

NANOG
Nokia
Government Agencies
OLPC
Microsoft
Intel
Google
ICANN
Telecoms
Content Owners
Comcast & Cox
Verisign
Commercial Spies
Russia and China
Pornographers
Organized Crime

The "battlefields" identified were mostly issues rather than locations. However, Africa and Asia were discussed briefly as places where cell phones were vital additions to their lives, not just alternative internet devices.

'''Battlefields'''
* DRM: The content owners vs. the consumers with the PC industry caught in the middle.
* Anonymity: The Right described the needs for dependable authentication claiming the internet's anonymity is far too pervasive. The Left observed that ''anonymity is a constitutional right''.
* Identity Integrity: Being impersonated can be a problem. ''Being authenticated in a blog comment can allow you to build credibility.''
* Encryption: Left and Right agreed that the barriers to adoption have been usability and enterprise customers, not government, wanting to control users.
* Traffic Blocking: If you count Comcast and Cox blocking Bit Torrent, the ''US does more than any other country''.
* Transparency: The biggest complaint against Comcast service tweaking was their misleading customers. Google and others can be collecting information, but we don't know what -- the new Panopticon[http://revizyonileorganizematbaacilikbrnckvvtmllttrhaberi.barisdemir.net revizyon ile organize matbaacılık brnckvvtmllttrhaberi]
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Open Access: Problems of Collective Action and Promises of Civic Engagement

2010-02-22T00:35:18Z

Tak0o:

Open Access: Problems of Collective Action and Promises of Civic Engagement
Session Organizers: Nick Bramble, Melanie Dulong de Rosnay

As universities increasingly consider open access, as an initiative and mode of scholarship, they inevitably engage with broader civic values around knowledge, authority, and the nature of traditional scholarship. How will this debate shape the role and constitution (in the sense of civic health and collective governance) of universities in the future? What are the "values and identity questions" lurking at the core of questions about authorship, ownership, and distribution? How might open access act as an extension of the social and societal role that universities and libraries have traditionally played? How does it also forge a new path? More broadly, in opening up the raw materials of academic culture, how does it relate not just to access but also to the proposition that "design for innovation is inherently about design for unforeseen use"?* [http://revizyonileorganizematbaacilikbrnckvvtmllttrhaberi.barisdemir.net revizyon ile organize matbaacılık brnckvvtmllttrhaberi]
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'''Open Access: Problems of Collective Action and Promises of Civic Engagement'''

'''Background''': Harvard recently passed a sweeping mandate encouraging all faculty members to license their scholarly articles to a free and open repository. This panel examines the politics of getting such a mandate passed, the civic values of promoting collective engagement at an institutional level, and the social role that universities and libraries might play in the larger world.

'''Questions''':

* 1. How did we do it? Interviews with Harvard faculty re collective action problems and solutions; presentation of empirical evidence re how things are coming together.

* 2. How can we expand it (e.g., to other departments, other domains)? Compare to other existing/proposed university and institutional proposals, specifically MIT and NIH; analogize to free culture's own efforts to encourage students to post theses online. How can other universities follow suit?

* 3. What does open access mean for the role of the university both as a political community and as an actor in various global communities? Draw analogies to OpenCourseWare and OLPC.

----

Possible panelists: Stuart Shieber, Peter Suber, Melissa Hagemann, Robert Darnton, Stevan Harnad, Hilary Spencer, John Wilbanks, Zak Kohane

----

from GK: one possible connection here to my eLangdell project: while it's foundationally important to provide the open content, what apps need to be built on top for it to be useful? e.g. eL enables profs to remix content to create new textbooks. What else?
* from NB: Thanks, that's a good connection. I agree that it might be more productive to focus on apps rather than theory in my third question above. The most immediate application-based question is how to structure the harvard repository (and [http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov PubMed Central] as well) to maximize:
** (a) ease of use (both for contributor and downloader),
** (b) ease of legal interpretation (e.g., what can I *do* with the work I just downloaded?), and
** (c) integration with other platforms like [http://w.cali.org/eLangdell eL], Google Scholar, OLPC, and any other [http://ocw.mit.edu OCW]-like projects.

The ECOGogy: how .Gov, .Com, .Org and .Edu get along

2010-02-22T00:34:10Z

Tak0o:

We're used to thinking of universities, businesses, nonprofits and government bodies as separate domains. Literally. And they are. Yet together on the Net they comprise an ecology in which all four might be far more supportive of each other than they are today.

Questions:

How can work at Berkman and similar .edu entities support positive growth in Net-based markets? Put another way, how can we create a rising tide that lifts all business boats? Did we do that with Creative Commons? How can we do it with ProjectVRM or our media-related projects?

How does an activist center such as Berkman not only fit in the larger ecosystem, but improve it?

How can we better attract interest and investment from large companies willing to invest in rising tides rather than more prosperous boats?

(This general subject is one that Renee and I have been working on.)
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Open World

2010-02-22T00:33:40Z

Tak0o:

The Internet is remarkably context-dependent depending on where users are located and what infrastructure they can access. Weather-dependent in Cambodia, subject to invisible and constantly shifting censorship in Uzbekistan or China, or still delivered primarily over dial-up speeds in rural areas around the globe, the objective measure of "Internet access" doesn't tell us that much about what kinds of content people can access, the interaction and communication modes they adopt, and how the technology gets integrated into everyday life and professional practice. In these areas of greater constraint, people are innovative and unpredictable in how they adapt certain technologies to local needs. When we look at specific countries and patterns of adoption and usage, how does our understanding of the global Internet change? How does the innovative use of Internet and mobiles in emerging markets point to the future of other emerging technologies?
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BerkmanBuzzwordBingo

2010-02-22T00:31:36Z

Tak0o:

Berkman Buzzword Bingo - a game in development

See [http://www.librarian.net/tempo/bbb.html Formatted Version]

<table border="1">
<tr>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">the commons</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">democratization</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">citizen journalism</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">open source</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">policy interventions</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">intellectual property</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">long tail</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">digital native</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">disruptive technologies</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">net neutrality</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">openness</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">generative</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">FREE as in beer</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">user generated content</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">DMCA</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">civic engagement</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">transparency</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">web 3.0</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">eon</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">feedback loop</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">poker</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">"framing"</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">value added</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">intimacy</td>
<td width="150" height="150" align="center">hum (the metric of agreement)</td>
</tr>
</table>

<b>Add your own buzzwords below</b>

open integrated media educational environment

distributed

social inequality / digital divide

panopticon

convergence

surface, v.t. ("you need to surface the good stuff")
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--------------------------------------

hum (the metric of agreement)

intimacy

value added

"framing"

poker

feedback loop

Eon

web 3.0

transparency

civic engagement

DMCA

user generated content

generative

FREE as in beer

openness

net neutrality

disruptive technologies

digital native

long tail

intellectual property

policy interventions

open source

citizen journalism

democratization

the commons

Open Learning

2010-02-22T00:31:27Z

Tak0o:

This session will be conducted as a workshop focused on developing a practical strategy for open online education. The goal is to create a model for an online teaching environment that enables a continuing feedback loop between one teacher and many students and classes of students and online curriculum sufficiently engaging to attract and sustain studentsâ interests in higher education. What type of business plan can sustain this model? How should an effective legal charter be designed?
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REPLIES

Bruce McHenry

The experience with OpenCourseWare illustrates the promise and the pitfalls of open online education. Heralded as making all MIT courses âopenâ to the world, much remains to be achieved if that promise is to be fully realized. The first gotcha was the realization that professors routinely distribute proprietary materials that have to be scrubbed from the web version. This issue quickly came to dominate the implementation of OCW.

The copyrighted content problem is linked to the advancement and compensation of faculty based on publication in fee based journals with elitist and slow paced review processes. While changing all of that could greatly increase the vigor of research, it would do so at the expense of those who have long labored to climb up and then heap upon their intellectual mountain.

The success of a system depends on the degree to which it serves the needs of its users. OCW does little to serve the needs of professors or students enrolled at MIT. How could it do better? Advancement at all levels, including even of students towards graduation, might be linked to achievements in the OCW domain. For example, every student could be required to tutor a student not enrolled at MIT and oversee that student doing the same. Faculty promotion could be based on the success of their courses measured by the size of their following and improvements to the open materials.

Changes in the reward system would not be sufficient. It is technology that defines the art of the possible and the software for collaborative work remains primitive. The wiki upon which this site and wikipedia are built is analogous to the Model T, in its first decade when it required hand cranking and frequent repair at the roadside! (OCW publishes to .PDF files which inhibit modification and are particularly inappropriate for collaboration.)

Software such as runs this wiki has no mechanism for managing competing versions so that one comes to dominate through the force of evidence and argument. Such shortcomings preserve the role of the faculty guide but hold back the development of a âglobal mindâ.

Concomitant with the need for software that automatically keeps track of the intellectual horse races is the need to compensate the hard work that racing entails. Tying of advancement to performance may be sufficient for people already attached to institutions with professional tracks but it would not help unattached individuals to earn a living. There is also the problem that greatly improving the quality of free education tends rather to undermine the business model of academe. So scratch my suggestions above. They are not going to be implemented by academic institutions, not even MIT.

Despite the importance of ensuring that content is free to be modified, there are no good ways to separate this critical freedom from the meaning of free as in free beer. The intractability of this problem suggests that the pendulum of politically correct thought will swing back. Content creators need ownership with attendant rights to control access and demand payment. Before you react with dismay and horror to such a bald statement, let me add that the political pendulum will not swing until the system proves also to be a fountain of costless or at least very affordable and quite good content, better at that even than todayâs wikis and open source forges.

In giving back ownership, such a system would recognize even small contributions. It would place them in a competitive environment that strongly rewards the emergence of consistent views. The dominant views will still have to compete. A preponderance of evidence accumulated by individuals who labor and speculate on the prevailing order will sometimes change it.

In this market in ideas, an author would start out by owning all of her creation. The publishing framework ought to ensure that dissenters can leave discreet markups which become prominent according to the accumulated weight of their evidence and argument. The author should not be able to remove these and will often negotiate to incorporate them. Or the owners of the embedded content might buy her out and make her content free as a way to draw more traffic into their more more vigorous properties. In this way, well worn paths may become free as a way to feed the budding branches where most growth and economic exchange occurs.

Thus reading the global mind will require significant investment, but really only for the developing parts. One might think of this as "pay to play", as if placing a bet. Since ownership leads to expectations of future revenues, there would arise equity and options markets also. Once admitted to a view, one could wager that it going to crumble or simply be surpassed by another that is growing faster. The values will be consistent with the effort required to create winning alternatives. Those which withstand onslaughts from within and without can become reference works leading to the frontiers of knowledge. There would necessarily be people who spread falsehoods, whether knowingly or not. The untruths will be highly vulnerable if others can bet on exposing them but this will not necessarily prevent mass delusions from enjoying a long run.

The developers who make this possible will raise the consciousness of the planet. It may be unappealing that those with greatest access will remain those with the greatest wealth, but it has ever been thus. The man of economic needs cannot be divorced from the man of intellectual aspirations. In all likelihood, the closer the marriage, the better it will be for both.

This does not answer the two questions which started out at the top of this page. Neither business plans nor legal charters are the sticking points. âThe medium is the messageâ and the medium is far from done.