Main Page

Welcome to Berkman Center Google Summer of Code 2011

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.

Idea Pages by Project

The opportunities at Berkman break down into several projects.

Sub-Projects:

• APN_on_rails Gem Upgrade: APN on Rails is a Ruby on Rails gem that allows you to easily add Apple Push Notification (iPhone) support to your Rails application.
• Check-in Check-out Asset Tracker: A plugin to Redmine and an extensible Ruby-on-Rails project management tool. This plugin gets used to track physical assets found within any organization. The plugin tracks an asset much like a library book indicating who the asset has been assigned to, when it is due back, and other asset specific traits like warranty expirations.
• Cohort: We'd like to continue the work on our tag-based CRM, where the C means "community" more than "customer" or "client".
• Data Portraits: Data portraits depict their subjects’ accumulated data rather than their faces. they can be visualizations of discussion contributions, browsing histories, social networks, travel patterns, etc. they are subjective renderings that mediate between the artist’s vision, the subject’s self-presentation, and the audience’s interest. Designed to evocatively depict an individual, a data portrait can be a decorative object or be used as an avatar, one’s information body for an online space.
• Fair Use Tool: The Fair Use Tool is an interactive online system that guides users through fair use principles in a playful way, enabling students to determine whether their reuses of copyrighted content are plausibly fair use. or if they would be more likely to be deemed copyright infringements by a judge. The tool provides sample court cases, relevant inputs based on court cases, and feedback. With practice, the goal is that both teachers and students will build an understanding of how fair use principles work in practice, creating a knowledgeable public informed of their rights and thereby supporting the online content creation culture of mash-ups and remixing.
• H2O: H2O is a suite of tools for teaching online.
• Library Innovation Lab: The Library Innovation Lab is a small group within the Harvard University Library system that implements in software ideas about how libraries can be ever more valuable.
• MediaCloud: MediaCloud is a project that crawls and analyzes on-line media content. It collects, tags, and analyzes the full stream of news stories from a wide variety of traditional and new media sources. It aims to track news content comprehensively and provide free, open, and flexible tools to allow researchers to perform their own analysis.
• ONI Tester: The Berkman Center's Open Network Initiative does testing to determine the openness of the internet with respect to filtering. These tests have historically been done on the ground in the country where the filtering is suspected of being done with specialized software carried around on portable media (diskette, cdrom, usb drives). The software is hard to update, hard to guarantee secure and sometimes not intuitive to use for testers in various countries.
• 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: Sirikata is an open-source 3d platform that is currently being used to support a project for creating virtual communities of teenage cancer patients.
• URL Metadata Parser: We are looking to create a reusable tool to gather information related to URLs.
• Zeega HTML5 Plugin: Zeega is an open-source HTML5 platform for collaboratively producing, curating and publishing immersive multimedia projects on web, tablet and mobile devices.

Berkman Google Summer of Code 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, etc. PLEASE READ!