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Welcome to Berkman Center Google Summer of Code 2015
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University 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.
Our faculty, fellows, students, and affiliates engage with a wide spectrum of Net issues, including governance, privacy, intellectual property, antitrust, content control, and electronic commerce. Our diverse research interests cohere in a common understanding of the Internet as a social and political space where constraints upon inhabitants are determined not only through the traditional application of law, but, more subtly, through technical architecture ("code").
As part of our active research mission, we build, use, and freely share open software platforms for free online lectures and discussions. We also sponsor gatherings, ranging from informal lunches to international conferences, that bring together members of our diverse network of participants to swap insights – and sometimes barbs – as they stake out their respective visions for what the Net can become. We also teach, seeking out online and global opportunities, as well as supporting the traditional Harvard Law School curriculum, often in conjunction with other Harvard schools and MIT.
Read more about the Berkman Center.
Read more about GSoC.
Contact Us
IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/berkman-gsoc IRC logs here
Email: berkmancenterharvard@gmail.com
Idea Page by Project
Opportunities at Berkman for GSoC 2015 break down into several projects:
Loosely Defined
Time Capsule
TBA
Docksr
We're looking to build a slick GUI for managing document relationships and versions. We want to write an overlay for Google Drive that allows us to keep track of dependencies between documents. This GUI would show how documents are related (document A is a superclass of document B) and allow on-click access to these documents (via either Google Docs or Word). It will also enable document versioning (define document B to be a new version of document A) to allow us keep track of versions in a non-destructive way.
Some of this functionality already exists, so a big part of it this project would be to identify existing open source options and then customize it to run on top of Google Drive and our existing project management interface (Redmine).
Project background
Why do we want to do this? The Berkman Center writes a lot of reports and academic papers. And when we write these reports, we then often generate a lot of other materials based on the original report (press releases, e-mails, websites, executive summaries, shorter versions of the report, etc.). When we write these smaller documents, we often need to use consistent language across all of the forms, which then creates significant problems when people make edits to a subsidiary documents. We need a way to keep track of documents and make sure that when changes occur in one, we know to also check all co-dependent documents.
Tighter Defined
Chilling Effects
Chilling Effects is a website, database and research project studying cease and desist letters concerning online content.
Curarium
Curarium is a platform for exploring, analyzing, and making arguments about collections and the objects they comprise.
TagTeam
Tag Team is a versatile, open-source social-tagging platform and feed aggregator.
Vis(ualization) Wizard
TBA
Application Template
Application template for GSoC 2015. This is the preferred template for submitting your application to work on a Berkman Center project.
FAQ
Answers to commonly asked questions. This includes a set of requirements around working hours, who can apply, other commitments you might have for the summer. Please read!