Syllabus
The Future of Copyright and Entertainment
The Future of Copyright and Entertainment
Old Laws/New Media
Topic Owners: Matt Sanchez, Debbie Rosenbaum, Shubham Mukherjee
The Internet and Publication
Free and 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.
What are the forces that drive hackers to contribute to open source projects? What, if anything, can we learn from applying theories of gift economies to open source projects? Should we read Lewis Hyde's The Gift? (n.b. i may be motivated by my own desire to read the book -- dulles)
- Eric Raymond/OSI ?
- PJ/Groklaw
- Strategies and indemnities (e.g. SCO v. IBM)
- Questioning the foundations of the free software movement (i.e. the "four freedoms")[1] -- how much does access to the source code really matter anymore? Are there alternative theories (e.g. "generativity") that better capture the values at stake? Affero License? (Eben Moglen?)
- The organization/groups/cooperation questions: how do free software projects organize and govern themselves, and what broader lessons might be learned from it? (e.g. debian, IETF)
(This marks my initial claim to the topic, though I would be overjoyed to work with others - dulles)
All Together Now For Great Justice Dot Org
Presenters: Rainer + Elana + Mchua
Precis
How to effectively design an online drive/event/project to get participation in your cause
Examples:
- Pledgebank
- Facebook Causes
- www.zoosa.org
- Citizenbase
Guest wish list
- Prof. Yochai Benkler
- Tom Steinberg
- Sean Parker and Joe Green, founders of Project Agape, the start-up that created Facebook Causes
- Joe Rospars, New Media Director, Obama for America (Elana)
- Ken Banks, FrontlineSMS (Elana)
- Sebastian Benthall, TOPP
- Joshua Gay, FSF
- Kathy Paur, ActBlue
Readings
We have three types of readings for this session:
Historical resources that come directly from our guests and their experiences.
- Guests will be asked to email the class beforehand with a short version of the kinds of things they'd say in a speech to the class, so people know who they'd want to ask for advice during the workshop portion. (Rationale: The time we're together should be spent interacting, there's always plenty of time outside of class for reading.)
- Guests will also be asked to send the class a link to their favorite resource/article on their project, or something that has informed their own work on their project.
Techniques and tools resources, mainly business books that focus on corporate use of the social web, online communities and marketing, etc. This will be pages and chapters from books like this (used as examples, not a final list):
- Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business
- Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
- Smart Start-Ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities
Theory on activism, focusing on cyberactivism. This will consist mainly of scholarly books and papers like the following (used as examples, not a final list):
- (Paper) Technologies of Protest: Insurgent Social Movements and the First Amendment in the Era of the Internet, by the law professor Seth Kreimer. It has some pretty interesting bits -- and some funny moments -- like refrences to John McCain's staff using digital activism in 2001 during his campaign around campaign finance reform. Elana has the PDF.
- (Selection from) A Review of Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, edited by Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers.
- Philanthropy on the Commons
- Mining the wealth of networks with Yochai Benkler
- Foundations and New Media
- Netsquared
- Benkler: The Wealth of Networks
Concrete question(s) of the week
- What makes online campaigning successful? What makes online fundraising successful? What makes online activism/mobilization successful? What makes online collaboration for good causes successful?
- What actually spurs people up the ladder of engagement or into offline activism and waht does not? Which online structures, tools, networks get people how high up the ladder? Which one's should you use for which "height"? What are their individual costs?
- Is there a generalizable model here? If yes, has this model different success factors from the business world?
- What are cutting-edge examples of successful campaigning/fundraising/mobilization/collaboration? How do they harness different channels and media (www, email, SMS, etc.)?
Anything else material towards planning your topic
Session design
Our current idea for session design is structured as a workshop (and discussion afterwards). Each participant will spend the week working on a cause that they are personally interested in, applying the techniques from readings and class to their own project. Key components of this week:
- 2-3 readings will be sent out beforehand, selected from the above.
- A questionnaire will be sent out beforehand to all class participants so they can frame the most important aspects of their cause. (For instance: What are the aims of your cause? What technologies do you prefer to use while working on activism for your cause, and why? How many people do you want to mobilize? How deep should their involvement be?) Participants will use the questionnaire to write a very rough draft of a non-profit online participation project for their cause.
- The role of our guest experts will be to come in as workshop aides; it will be interesting to hear from them what they thinks the most important rules for success are. They'll get to give a short (<10min) intro speech.
- The session will kick off with a workshop where the students will work on their project. It should be an online project designed to raise and deepen involvement and/or awareness for their cause. For instance, they might contribute to the planning of a conference, create an email-blast marketing campaign, host a party that is heavily advertised online, create or spread viral media, compile statistics on online membership for their cause, etc.
- We will follow that with a debriefing to discuss how things went and the theories and best practices that apply.
Old discussion
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?
Facebook groups dedicated to particular causes remind me of the online petitions that began circulating widely via email about ten years ago: their effectiveness in accomplishing real world change--and even their visibility to individuals capable of affecting the desired changes--are dubious. Is the real purpose of these movements simply to make participants feel like they are being active and involved? What percentage of those who signed email petitions in the 1990s were aware that their signatures were unverifiable and that the widely-distributed emails were unlikely to be collated and submitted to an official authority? What expectations do participants in facebook group causes have for their involvement and its consequences? The facebook group causes are certainly more centralized and visible than the old email petitions, and they provide a better tool for identifying and communicating with supporters in order to mobilize them in an organized fashion. How often is such mobilization attempted, and with what degree of success? As a tool of online activism, is facebook a step forward from chain emails, is it a step in a different direction, or does it just serve the same old functions but in newer packaging? --Gwen 08:26, 29 November 2008 (EST)
Maybe we can invite some of the leaders of the various social networking sites or Jascha Franklin-Hodge, who was an architect of the Obama campaign's use of social technology.
Might also be worth considering SMS applications that interface with the internet in this context especially since cell phones will presumably be the nexus of tech activism in the developing world. See FrontlineSMS or Ushahidi, a web crisis mapping project that let any user with a cell phone text in reports of violence in post-election Kenya as a way to geographically report real-time citizen reporting. (ELANA)
The Internet and Societal Inequity
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?
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-distribute and decentralize 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?
- A solutions-focused question here might be: what tools might encourage a more egalitarian internet, both nationally and internationally? How can online applications be designed to encourage social equality? (Berkman Fellow Eszter Hargittai has worked on some related questions, focusing on research about how people actually use the internet.) --G 12:12, 28 November 2008 (EST)
One Laptop Per Child
Happy to help this group with info as I can. Mchua
Environmental Concerns
To what extent is the hardware upon which the Internet exists damaging the environment? Where does old tech go when it dies? What distributive impact does the "recycling" of old tech have. Was the Internet build with principles of physical sustainbility in mind? Is it too late to change? How do individual companies, like Google, view their own practices? Does the cost of a server internalize the cost of disposal? Why has it been cheaper to just keep throwing on new machines? What of the electricity necessary to run these machines? What does it say about society that we are so willing to pollute our own communities to create a second life? Has technological innovation and advancement dislocated the true impact of non-zero cost transactions? --Megerman 19:36, 29 November 2008 (EST)
Prediction Markets
Presenters: Matthew, Elisabeth
Some more helpful material:
- A primer on the legal status of prediction markets.
- The CTFC wants to know if it should regulate them.
- If they can be regulated, could they be taxed as well?
- Our very own Prof. Sunstein gives his comments on prediction markets and group deliberation.
Intrade, etc.
Tradesports announced last week that it will cease operations at the end of this month. Does fallout from the current economic crisis include regulatory changes that spell doom for online prediction markets? Or is something else going on here? --Gwen 11:05, 26 November 2008 (EST)
Could prediction markets transform how we govern ourselves? Robin Hanson proposes Futarchy. The idea in brief:
"Democracies often fail to aggregate information, while speculative markets excel at this task. We consider a new form of governance, wherein voters would say what we want, but speculators would say how to get it. Elected representatives would oversee the after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare. Those who recommend policies that regressions suggest will raise GDP should be willing to endorse similar market advice."
Some general and tentative questions
- To what extent should the government be engaged in the regulation of prediction markets; should it and how might it change current structures to be more accommodating?
- To what extent should government be involved in administering or using prediction markets (e.g., a la Hanson's suggestions)?
- For ethical or other reasons, should we be skeptical about using prediction markets for purposes such as predicting terrorist attacks and the like? What about for predicting regular crime (see this proposal)?
- More generally, if we think prediction markets are a useful tool, and yet it seems clear that they generate a considerable amount of unease, can we think about why and how policymakers might respond? Can design of the markets (reducing inaccuracy, or reducing concerns about rewarding misbehavior that might crop up if we have terrorism or crime futures) solve these problems or are some more fundamental?
Some tentative guest ideas
- Michael Abramowicz
- Justin Wolfers
- Bo Cowgill, Hal Varian: Google prediction markets
- Robin Hanson
Possible Readings
- academic literature on prediction markets, either generally or focusing on particular applications
- relevant chapters from Professor Sunstein's Infotopia
- Michael Abramowicz's book Predictocracy
Other ideas
One obvious thought is to see whether the class can play around with using prediction markets, though more thought needed on what we'd want to predict. Incentives for accurate predictions like t-shirts?
Will Harvard give us some small amount of money to invest for the semester? We could have an auction to determine whose investment ideas we use. The incentives would work so that you would only bid more to control the investment if you actually thought your investment idea would generate more net return to you (minus what you spent on the auction), despite it being divided up among the class.
Anonymity and privacy
Title
OpenId and Internet Governance
Precis
- Internet Regulation (as it relates specifically to online safety and security)
- Privacy and anonymity as they relate to structures of control on the Internet
Guest wish list (if any)
- As an academic, you couldn't do better than Daniel Solove. If we do hone in on a very specific topic, though, we could go for someone with more specialized experience. Dan Ray 22:39, 7 December 2008 (UTC)
- Although government is subject to all sorts of special legal provisos that the private sector doesn't have to manage, the privacy counsel at DHS, Hugo Teufel, is pretty on top of his game. If we're looking for practitioners, Ron Lee of Arnold & Porter does work with private industry.
- If we do OpenID, options for guests might include Bill Washburn of the OpenID Foundation and DeWitt Clinton of Google.
- Also, since Passport has foundered, Facebook Connect looks like the hot new thing on the proprietary side. Whoever runs that for Facebook would be a natural invite as well. (see Dan's links below (?))
- And I still think the potential for the mobile phone to become the heretofore mythical convergence device and thus to become a necessary adjunct to personal identity is worth talking over.
Perhaps a bloggingheads.tv-style video conference call between someone from an electronic privacy nonprofit and a representative from Microsoft or Facebook?
Readings
James Grimmelmann, Facebook and The Social Dyanmics of Privacy
Solove, Daniel J. "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy"
Links
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/125/how-to-fix-the-web.html
http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_connect_vs_open_id.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_connect_readies.php
http://chrissaad.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/facebook-connect-aka-hailstorm-20/
http://wiki.openid.net/Lobbying
Concrete question(s) of the week
Anything else material towards planning your topic
- Facebook + google people?
- another way to look at it is as a matter of cybercrime and such - new surveillence methods (also relevant in regards to child pornography, for example). i wander if these are too different topics or not. Ayelet
- I'd like to see a segment on what "privacy" actually means in law and in culture. This would probably attach well to any other, more applied segment. Dan Ray 16:38, 3 December 2008 (EST)
- Creating a series of Privacy Certification Marks
The Future of News
Internet/network Security
Internet Governance & Regulation
Internet Governance & Regulation