Chilling Effects

Chilling Effects is a website, database and research project studying cease and desist letters concerning online content. Our goals are to conduct and facilitate research on the notices, to educate the public about the different kinds of cease and desist letters--both legitimate and questionable--that are being sent to Internet publishers, and to provide as much transparency as possible about the “ecology” of such notices, in terms of who is sending them and why, and to what effect.

More information: https://www.chillingeffects.org/.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/berkmancenter/chillingeffects/.

Ideal candidate criteria

Chilling Effects is interested in candidates with coding skills to help Berkman developers work on and improve the project's website and database. An ideal candidate for will have experience with Ruby and/or Ruby On Rails or experience with other MVC frameworks, postgreSQL, and elasticsearch and/or Solr. Experience with large data sets, visualization libraries and/or continuous integration and test suites a plus.

Example sub-projects include:

• a bulk action tool for admins
• a CMS for admins
• automated redaction tools
• improving search for users
• expanding admin filter functions