Topics

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Topic guidance

  • Are you excited about it?
  • Does it relate to law (not entirely necessary)
  • Does it relate to tech (not entirely necessary)
    • To be sure, these are rebuttable presumptions :)

Q: Are there any circumstances in which we can do a team of three?

Topics

This page is for topics that we have not yet scheduled (but potentially should). Please add suggestions to the bottom of this page, and feel free to modify the descriptions for topics already listed.

Discourse theory

We should do a survey overview of the topic.

Discursive tools and practices

We should do a survey overview of the topic!

Prediction markets

intrade, etc.

Interactive Education

Building on the work of MWesch (video here: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o) think about innovation in the classroom beyond the blackboard. How can we better interact in the classroom and how can technology help?

Anonymity

"on the internet, nobody knows that you're a dog." Or tall, or 12 years old, or a hairdresser by day, or a lesbian, or in India, or with a harelip, or... but also: now that we can't filter by that by default, what do we filter by? Do we now bias towards good writers - and what of people who communicate best non-verbally?

Sources

Where does the information for/during discussions come from? Interfaces/ease-of-access/digestibility of information affects how quickly it can get injected into conversations? (examples: hitting wikipedia in the middle of a dinner discussion, calling an expert friend or hitting another IRC channel to answer a quick question, etc). How does this affect how people prepare for conversations? (If you can easily look up notes during the meeting, why take them down beforehand?) Trying to apply some thoughts about info access in libraries to this.

Identity and expertise

How are participants in an internet dialog identified and credentialed? What gives weight to a participants' arguments - or phrased another way, what type of participants and arguments have weight, and what determines this for each discussion, participant, and discussion point?

Socio-technical gap

Problems encountered in the act of discoursing itself are sometimes addressed via social means, technological means, or both. It has been suggested that technological tools should support social processes, but there is an adaptation of each realm to the other - how does this back-and-forth take place in the design of a successful technology-enabled discussion?

Meta-Public Policy

See, e.g., Larry Lessig's Change Congress movement: http://change-congress.org/about/. Being Larry Lessig, the whole thing is tech-friendly.

Online Activism

Of course there are a lot of custom-built tools for mobilizing people online to get things done in the real world. On the other hand, what about more general tools? We've all been invited, via Facebook, to join groups and attend events (the Obama campaign certainly made good use of this); is there a generalizable model here?

Meta-Pundit

Conor Kennedy

PREMISE

During the 2008 Presidential Campaign, web-only advertisements helped to shape the talking points of media personalities like Chris Matthews , Keith Olbermann, Greta Van Susteren, and Joe Scarborough, and sometimes even individuals who try to operate "above the fray" of punditry like Jon Stewart, Jay Leno, and David Letterman (See "Web-only campaign advertisements flood presidential race" "In a study released last summer....the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found most Americans heard about the most famous viral videos because they saw them replayed on TV").

Because a large and increasing number of Americans get their news from media personalities rather than from traditional broadcast or print media sources, these individuals have significant power to shape the national political discussion. Still, beyond campaigns' web-only ads, there hasn't yet been a concerted effort to use the Internet to directly influence these personalities and their television shows.

PROPOSAL

This void can be filled by a website that publishes a rating system that gauges/grades each of these media personalities (over multiple periods of time: daily [i.e., per episode], monthly, etc.) on a variety of social-science-esque metrics.

Ideally, such metrics would focus on process rather than substance (e.g., unique material that avoids explicit mention of either party's talking-points-of-the-day; active, fair in-show dialogue with guests of opposing perspectives). Some metrics would be controlled by the site's designers while others would be generated and selected (i.e., voted on) by the site's users. A team of social-science coders would code each media personality's episodes for (1) the site designers' metrics and (2) any given metric a critical mass the website's users select.

This website would ultimately be most influential as a source for audience feedback beyond bare headcounts (i.e., network viewer ratings). For some media hosts, that feedback will act as a friendly nudge that helps them improve their shows. For others, the ultimate message might sound more like the quantitative-analytical equivalent of Jon Stewart on Crossfire.

QUESTIONS (each followed by potential answers)

  • (1) How should this kind of a site be funded, and by whom?
    • Non-partisan journalism NGOs through a project grant
    • The Berkman Center (see "Donations" link in navigation pane in left frame)
  • (2) What kind of knowledge workers would the daily operations require?
    • College research assistants as coders
  • (3) What kind of goals should such a website pursue?
    • Active dialogue
    • More informed discussion
    • Sophistication of television personalities
    • Honesty
    • Bipartisanship
    • Dedication to truth
    • Fighting the political class's elitism
    • Fighting prejudices/smears
    • Deconstructing euphemistic language/political correctness
    • Strengthening/Weakening political parties' control of the national political dialogue
    • Expansion of the national political dialogue to include new and unique perspectives
  • (4) How else could a pundit-centric website serve to channel the widespread complaints of "Media Bias" into a polished online platform?
    • Hall of Shame for self-proclaimed one-time guest "Analysts" and "Experts" who actually have no rightful claim to either title.
    • Sponsor and/or Host Op-Eds, Blogs, Vlogs, "Blogologues", and "Diavlogs" by premier Media/Journalism academics.
    • Work to immediately uncover the original sources of stories in order (1) to get a sense of who is already influencing media personalities (and their writers) and (2) to push back against rushed vetting of unsubstantiated stories (a la Martin Eisenstadt)
    • Highlight stories/angles the traditional anchors are broadcasting that these hosts are ignoring/purposely passing on.
  • (5) How much footage of actual shows can such a website legally use under Fair Use?

--CKennedy 01:42, 25 November 2008 (EST)

The first USA CTO

President-elect Obama's promise to appoint the first USA CTO has turned many heads, and discussions on what the (as of yet unappointed) CTO should do have started up, notably at http://obamacto.org/. Several other related links not purely focused on "US CTO" issues:

Unconferences

Unconferences represent a form of event-based discourse that seems chaotic but is actually organized around a set of well-codified rules intended to encourage initiative-taking by participants and ensure that the event is truly community-run and ad-hoc. Also known as "Open Space" events, they take several different forms, including Barcamps (which have been expanded to podcamps, etc.)

Open Source Software

How can a dispersed, multilingual collection of coders working for free assemble something as complicated as a web browser, let alone an entire operating system? Open-source projects are famously free-wheeling, but different organizational models and tools have sprung up to solve these obstacles.

Internet Governance

Much like open-source software, the Internet can be considered a collection of servers, pipes, and users spread all over the world. How does it keep working? One easy answer is that the United States (through actors public and private) just sort of gets its way. This isn't really a satisfying answer descriptively or normatively, though. With the rest of the world contributing more and more to the Internet as a whole, is it time for a change?

The Semantic Web

What has become of this idea? Are we already there? Is it yet to come? Or has it died along the way? [Rainer]

Deliberative polling literature

In a nutshell, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_opinion_poll

Deliberation Day

The paper on the study, and where similar effects re: citizen participation may be seen.

Peer-to-Patent

See http://www.peertopatent.org/

Systran

One Laptop Per Child

Collaborative Textbooks

Maybe also Harvard's new open access policy for academic work?

Net Neutrality

Recording Harvard Law School Classes and Posting Them on iTunes U

Law schools tend not to post free class recordings on iTunes U. Should HLS take the opportunity to trailblaze? What are the law-school-specific challenges and the legal issues surrounding publishing audio recordings of HLS classes? What are the benefits? What about recording classes just for the benefit of the students (posted, as on religious holidays, solely on enrolled students' MyHLS pages)

Chillingeffects.org

And other, similar layman-focused legal projects

Internet and Power

Which inequalities are created or strengthened due the increasing reliance on technology and the differences in the ability to access the Internet? (e.g. global and socio-economic differences).

Does the net actually re-distributes and decentralized power and influence, or does it also reinforce the existing political and economic hierarchies?

In short - is the Internet really a good thing for everybody?

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