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About Us

The Berkman Center was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. We represent a network of faculty, students, fellows, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and virtual architects working to identify and engage with the challenges and opportunities of cyberspace.

We investigate the real and possible boundaries in cyberspace between open and closed systems of code, of commerce, of governance, and of education, and the relationship of law to each. We do this through active rather than passive research, believing that the best way to understand cyberspace is to actually build out into it.

Read more about the Berkman Center.

Check out the GSOC overview page.

Apply to work with Berkman.

Ideas for Google Summer of Code 2010

The opportunities at Berkman break down into several sub-projects.

Sub-Projects:

• Cohort: We'd like to continue the work on our tag-based CRM, where the C means "community" more than "customer" or "client".
• Cooperation: Berkman and others around Harvard have been developing tools for running economics and psychology experiments online, using the internet as a virtual behavioral lab. At Berkman, our particular focus has been on cooperation and generosity, using games such as a the Prisoner's Dilemma to explore what motivates people to help each other.
• Image Captioner: The project will create a piece of software that could automate the production of music videos.
• ListenLog: The VRM ListenLog is a proposed method for integrating simple user-driven functionality into an online audio player device or application.
• LittleVoice: LittleVoice is an open source community discussion platform originally created to host the online community of StopBadware, a former Berkman Center project that has since spun off from the Center. It is now also used by another Berkman project, Herdict, for that project's discussion community.
• Not A Number: The Not-a-Number research platform is a script generation tool to conduct different kinds of empirical data collection and observation online. It allows for researchers and other individuals to dynamically create scripts with reusable question and answer choice objects. It is a flexible, free and open-source web-application currently used by several projects at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and created by Berkman developers Jason Callina and Anita Patel. Not-a-Number is actively being used to administer surveys, experiments, and qualitative content analysis tasks as “scripts” through an online interface. Scripts can be stand alone or can be run against objects such as a website URL, image or embedded video. The application has a registration system to authenticate users or can accept non-authenticated users through an interface with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Distinct from existing survey or experiment software, Not-a-Number facilitates randomized task-object assignment and integrates seamlessly with Amazon Mechanical Turk. The questions, stylesheet information, and data are all stored in a relational database and can then be exported in multiple formats for subsequent analysis, reproduction, or review. Not-a-Number has been under development since Fall, 2008, and can already handle a wide range of research tasks. At present, members of the Law Lab are using it to conduct an experiment on worker motivations in a online crowdsourcing labor market.
• Online Media Legal Network: The Online Media Legal Network (OMLN) is a network of law firms, law school clinics, in-house counsel, and individual lawyers throughout the United States willing to provide pro bono (free) legal assistance to qualifying online journalism ventures and other digital media creators.
• Sirikata Puzzle: An open source platform for deploying 3D multi-user online environments
• Web Crawler: MediaCloud, a Berkman Center project, and StopBadware, a former Berkman Center project that has spun off as an independent organization, have each built systems to crawl websites and save the results into a database.
• Check-in Check-out Asset Tracker: An asset tracking system to help keep track of information technology resources commonly found in institutions. This includes both physical assets like a computer or camera as well as the non-physical such as software licenses. A check-in and check-out system is key for this project as well as auditing capabilities of inventory.

Berkman Google Summer of Code FAQ

The answers to some of the frequently asked questions so far.

General Questions

• If someone is selected as a student coder through the Summer of Code, will they need to be in the Boston area over the summer?
• Is this limited to Harvard and/or Berkman coders?