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Jack Cushman, Berkman fellow who works on Perma.cc to support digital preservation at university libraries.
Erhardt Graeff, Berkman fellow, member of MIT Center for Civic Media and MIT Media Lab, civic media researcher, technologist, and entrepreneur
Greg Leppert, Berkman affiliate whose work explores social collecting and our interactions with technology
Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Berkman faculty associate and faculty at NYU Stern who studies innovation in business during the digital revolution
James Losey, Berkman affiliate who studies internet freedom and the tensions between states and internet companies
Lauren McCarthy, Berkman affiliate and faculty at NYU ITP whose work as an artist, academic, and software developer explores the ways that technology affects social relationship and personal identity
Emy Tseng, a Berkman fellow from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, who studies the sharing economy in marginalized and developing communities.
Josephine Wolff, Berkman fellow and PhD candidate in the Engineering Systems Division at MIT studying cybersecurity and Internet policy

Tell us about the work you've been doing at MIT and what your plans are for your research moving forward.

The research I'm doing at MIT is focused on understanding how the different components of computer security fit together and interact. There are lots of tools and techniques we use to defend computer systems - everything from encryption software and antivirus programs to firewalls and passwords—but it can be difficult to look across all the layers and functions of a system to say what they all add up to, what they collectively do (and don't) defend against. I'm interested in how we characterize these different classes of defense and say something about the ways they relate to each other, the ways they can be most (and least) effectively combined. People in computer security sometimes talk about "defense-in-depth" or the idea that you want to construct multiple layers of defense so that an attacker has to breach all of them and each individual defense is reinforced by the others. It's an idea that's often invoked with an analogy to the defenses used to protect medieval castles—the moat, the stone walls, the archers poised on the towers - but it can be difficult to translate the relationships between those physical protections to the virtual world where it can be harder both to dictate the order in which an attacker will encounter the defenses you set up and to ensure that the weaknesses of one defense are reinforced by the strengths of others. My research is on how different forms of defense for computer systems can be combined to achieve both of those aims.

It sounds like you are not only interested in studying how cybersecurity works (or fails to work), you are also working on defensive designs yourself. Is it ever difficult to balance the more theoretical aspects of your work with the practical side of it?

It can definitely be challenging to mesh theoretical frameworks for computer defense with more practical examples. For instance, one of the things I've looked at recently is how MIT has been changing the security of its network: what motivated those changes, how they designed the new set of security measures, and the impact those changes had. That has been great in terms of giving me a chance to think really concretely about how different types of defenses are combined in practice, but I'm still working out the different possible ways to tie it in with the more theoretical work I've done on what defense-in-depth means in the context of computer systems. One thing that practical examples often reinforce is that people tend to purchase or implement individual security measures without regard for how those measures fit into a larger strategy and relate to the other defenses already in place. So in some sense, they help motivate my more theoretical research questions by illustrating the gaps in existing frameworks for computer defense.

Having worked in policy, industry, and academic environments in the past, how do the workplaces compare when it comes to thinking about, talking about, and interacting with your research/areas of interest and with the technology itself?

There are elements I really like about all three perspectives on and approaches to computer security. Policy-makers and private companies tend to be more focused on what's happening right now and how to address it, which means you may get to work on ten different things at once, or over a relatively short period, while academic research often has a longer timeline and allows for a slower, deeper dive into a particular topic. Tech companies also tend to be more action-oriented than academics when it comes to computer security. They're interested in what they themselves can directly do to improve security, and that sense of agency can be tremendously motivating and exciting. But it can also be interesting to take a broader view of all the different players involved in and their respective roles as an academic researcher or policy-maker. I think what really stands out for me about the policy environment is the emphasis on mitigating harm, something which of course underlies a lot of industry and academic computer security work as well but is really front and center in the policy community. So there are aspects of all of them that I enjoy, and I've been extremely lucky in getting to work with academic and industry groups who are interested in policy, and vice-versa.

What projects or people at the Berkman Center are you especially excited about? Whose work (in or out of Berkman) do you find particularly provocative or interesting? 

Because I've been thinking a lot about computer security at MIT recently, I've been particularly interested to follow Berkman's Student Privacy Initiative and the work they've been doing around the use of technology in educational environments and how to make different trade-offs in that context. I'm also very excited about the Internet robustness project at Berkman and its potential to serve as a model for a new kind of Internet defense.

You've been writing about a variety of issues relating to technology, policy, and society for Slate's Future Tense, a collaboration with the New America Foundation and Arizona State University. What motivates you to publish articles in the popular press as well as more scholarly journals?

 I've always enjoyed both reading and writing journalism. I like the relevance - reporting on things that are happening right now and talking to people who are directly involved - as well as the writing style, with its emphasis on clarity and engaging the reader. Initially, in both high school and college, I worked for my school newspapers just writing news stories, and then my junior year of college a very indulgent editor let me write a tech column and that turned out to be a really fun way to blend my academic interests with my journalism hobby. It's also a nice contrast to more scholarly styles of writing and, especially given the extent to which cybersecurity stories have been all over the news lately, writing for Slate has been a great way to force myself to think about how the ideas I think about in an academic context play out in the real world and to try to articulate some of those ideas in an accessible and engaging way.

If you could demonstrate one piece of modern technology for one historical figure, who and what would you pick?

GPS for Christopher Columbus since I'm an adventurous person without a great innate sense of direction.

Q&A with Erhardt Graeff

Berkman Fellow and member of MIT Center for Civic Media and MIT Media Lab
@erhardt
interviewed in summer 2014 by Berktern Ebru Boyaci

Before this fellowship, how had you been involved with the Berkman Center?

One of my first jobs in the Boston area after moving here five years ago was at the Berkman Center. I was a research assistant on the Industrial Cooperation Project managed by Carolina Rossini during her fellowship. I focused on mapping the landscape of open educational resources. Later, I moved on to a research position at the Harvard Project Zero studying youth and digital technology use, which coincided with the start of Berkman's Youth and Media project. Sandra Cortesi asked me to serve on the mentorship team during the inaugural year. More recently as part of my graduate studies at the MIT Media Lab and Center for Civic Media, I've been working with the Media Cloud team on Controversy Mapper.

What drew you to work on civic media and technologies? What was the landscape of civic technology when you first became interested in the field?

I came to what is now called civic media / civic technology when I was in college at RIT. I had several great mentors and transformative experiences there. Professor Liz Lawley introduced me to the burgeoning field of social computing, where I started to see the intersection and interplay between social systems and technological systems. Professor Amit Ray asked me to help him study the role of authorship on Wikipedia, which gave me my first taste of critical academic research connecting social theory to an online community and essentially civic enterprise. At the same time, I rose to editor in chief of the student newsmagazine, Reporter, which gave me a taste of the practical side of media and politics.

The landscape of civic technology back in the early to mid-2000s was dominated by the promise of e-government. I studied the successes of Estonia in that space. But it didn't fully bridge back to my interest in social computing and what was happening during the "Web 2.0" moment. I did an MPhil in Sociology at the University of Cambridge in 2007–08, investigating how to connect these questions to social capital and online/offline community building. I was inspired by Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks and the just published paper by Henry Jenkins' research team outlining what he called "the participation gap." I've been doing research in this area ever since.

Your most recent project, Action Path, is a mobile app enabling civic engagement and reflection for its users. What’s happening with the project currently, and what are your expectations for it?

I am writing up the early phase of the Action Path project right now, which focuses on the design of the tool and feedback from potential partners and alpha users. This fall I'm planning to conduct a couple of test deployments in Boston Area communities to see whether my theory holds up in practice with the real goals for citizen feedback on contemporary issues.

It's important to me that the location-based mobile survey tool I'm building reflects a realistic view of both municipal planning processes and everyday user behaviors. This is important for my larger goal of investigating design principles for civic technologies in order to foster civic learning. You could think of this in terms of a ladder of engagement common to community and political organizing. How do we design technologies that scaffold civic engagement for both youth and adults in ways that are appropriate and efficacious? That's the big question.

With Action Path, you are aiming to get citizen feedback on contemporary issues. Does being a good citizen necessarily require taking action? What would your description of "the good citizen" be? Does he/she have particular duties?

I'm open to a pretty broad and multi-faceted definition of what makes a good citizen. The debate my advisor and long-time Berkmanite Ethan Zuckerman and I have been engaging in, however, is less about what is a good citizen and more about what makes for an effective citizen. If there is a duty we keep coming back to, it's monitoring.

In Michael Schudson's book The Good Citizen, he introduces the monitorial citizen as one type of citizen demanded by the practice of contemporary democracy. There are different ways to look at monitoring, which Ethan and I are exploring. Without getting into the weeds too much, experiments like Action Path are about trying to see what types of activities citizens can engage in to produce substantial change and how technology can support those efforts. Just like there is no single category of a good citizen, there isn't a single category of an effective citizen.

That said, we should be able to evaluate the efficacy of a citizen's efforts against what they had hoped to change. This is part of my larger research goal in developing design principles connected to civic learning because ultimately it's not about prescribing duties for good citizens, but identifying a range of tools and approaches that have proven effective for others. Voting and volunteerism have their place here, as do much maligned e-petitions, but social movements and now civic technologists are constantly innovating in this space. The question is: How do we make all of these options accessible to citizens?

What are the main tools and platforms that are being used by you and others for civic technology?

 I believe just about everything within the broad category of information and communication technologies has civic technology potential. If it connects you to others or to information, then it can serve a civic role. Mobile technology is fast becoming a key civic technology because of its increasingly widespread distribution and its growing position as a primary computing platform for many users. There is a huge spike right now in the development of original civic technology platforms and apps like Action Path. But I believe the most important civic technologies are the ones used by the most people.

Facebook is a key civic technology. It's being used in explicitly political ways by activists around the world, such as those in Myanmar campaigning for lower SIM card prices. I'm really interested in how we transfer explicit civic technology design into broad consumer technology design; I've started arguing (like Nick Grossman does) that we don't really need more civic apps.  Rather, we need to be making all apps more civic.

Q&A with Lauren McCarthy

Berkman affiliate and faculty at NYU ITP
@laurmccarthy
interviewed in summer 2014 by Berkterns Laura Mitchell and Mayukh Sen

What drew you to Berkman, and what specifically do you hope to work on or participate in as a Berkman affiliate?

I had been following the work at Berkman for a while. I was particularly drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of the community and research. As a Berkman affiliate I hope to continue to explore questions of surveillance, identity, and networked relationships. Specifically, I would like to focus on developments in the computational tracking, analysis, and interpretation of human activity, emotion, and communication - and the questions these raise around privacy, data ethics, and how we see ourselves in the world in relation to others.

Your projects engage with many of the big issues surrounding "internet and society" from a highly personal angle. How does this vantage point shape your approach to art, teaching, and research?

Each project I do really begins with something personal I am trying to understand. I take the aspect of my life that is most confusing to me at the moment and try to experiment with it using technology. I'm not trying to make any broad statements about the decisions others should make, but rather, hoping that some might see my experiments and be moved to question and reflect more deeply on the way we're living and the world we're building.

What’s one tech trend that particularly excites (or scares) you?

The tools we use to automate our lives and relationships simultaneously excite and terrify me. Every tool, every API, every technology is embedded with assumptions and biases, yet we don't often question them. And where is the line between what is acceptable to automate or not? If you use a script to oversee and regulate your relationships, and it makes you and the people around you happier, is that okay? The most novel thing about Google Glass for me is not the wearable camera aspect, but the fact that you don't know when the person you're interacting with is looking at a screen and what information they may be getting. They quite literally have another context (or many) superimposed on the one you are currently sharing with them. This opens up a space for all kinds of automation and networked living. I am curious to see which direction we head with it, and whether we can find a way to make this a positive experience.

Facebook drew criticism for allowing a study that was secretly filtering the content users saw and measuring how it affected their moods. Your latest project, the Facebook Mood Manipulator, is an extension that allows users to set their own parameters for filtering content. What implications do these experiments have on how we use our technologies?

I am fascinated by this programmatic interpretation and control of human emotion. Most interesting to me are the studies finding instances where computers can understand humans better than we can ourselves. The question of what should be done with these findings is up for debate, but my goal as an artist is to provide a perspective perhaps not represented in the corporations and institutions building new technologies. There was a lot of backlash to the Facebook study, and we have seen similar outright rejection of other innovations - Google Glass, for example. But these things aren't black and white; they are gray areas, and the ambiguity is the interesting and important part. For real progress to be made, it's necessary to consider both the positive and negative effects of new ideas, be able to tease them apart, and synthesize next iterations that move toward the future we actually want.

Much has been said about social media's virtues – and shortcomings – in terms of being able to curate what we want and don't want to see. How is what you're getting at with the Facebook Mood Manipulator different from this curatorial aspect?

My framing of the extension as a way to ‘take back control’ was sort of tongue in cheek. Are you reclaiming control by willingly giving it over to an algorithm, even one you set the targets for? Facebook is unlikely to give us this kind of explicit control, but it allows us to think more broadly about the systems we are building—what if we could have an interface for our emotions? What if it went beyond just Facebook, but filtered all the content of our lives? Would we want it? How would we use it? Is it wrong to turn down the volume on your friends’ depressing feelings on the days when you just really need a good mood? Is it wrong to want to be happy and to use technology to augment your ability to do this? And maybe our emotions aren’t as simple as unhappy <–-> happy. How do you begin thinking about what you really want to feel?

Are there other artists, academics, or thinkers working in this same intersection between art practice and technology who particularly inspire you?

My frequent collaborator, Kyle McDonald, is a large inspiration to me, his People Staring at Computers piece really made me rethink what an artist could be. The work of art collective F.A.T. Lab has an energy and humor that has opened me to new tactics of engaging with social/tech issues. Jill Magid's Evidence Locker was an early inspiration that has stuck with me; I admire the way she engages with and subverts existing systems in a way that is critical, thoughtful, and personal. There are many more, but I will leave it there.

Along those same lines, do you ever find the "art and technology" binary frustrating, or do you feel that it's a useful distinction that informs your work?

People bring their own interpretations to every designation or title, and my goal as an artist has always been to challenge the boundaries of these boxes, and to realize that everything is much more malleable than it may initially appear.

Q&A with Greg Leppert

Berkman affiliate
@leppert
interviewed in summer 2014 by Berktern Calum Bowden

What do you do?

Mostly I’m interested in fun ideas and working with talented folks. My roles and experiences have largely been the result of trying to get out of the way of those talented folks and fill in the gaps to glue it all together. I’m the rice in sushi. I’m the egg in a cake. I’m a food ingredient that holds a food product together.

Svpply.com was a social shopping site acquired by eBay. Reading.am is a place to share links. How did you come to create these two sites?

Svpply was born in 2009 when my partner, Ben, realized there wasn’t a great place to window shop for products online. I started working on it after moving to Cambridge to join the Media Lab, at which point I got hooked and decided to forego grad school in order to help move the company to NYC. Reading.am started out as an internal tool at Svpply. We were constantly sharing links but it wasn’t exactly what I’d call “bookmarking” which, for me, has connotations of archiving and retention. Links in the context of Reading are simply a quick, easy and ephemeral way to share knowledge or news.

How would you describe these different approaches to online curation?

Svpply and Reading, as they relate to curation, are really antitheses of each other. Svpply guided users to build a profile of products—mostly apparel and lifestyle goods—that represented their tastes and painted a picture of each user. Reading, on the other hand, is largely anti-curation. It’s about the ephemeral. It’s about providing a platform for users to share content on the web without endorsing it. It’s actually pretty hard to find spaces on the web to share content without the expectation that you’re endorsing it or that you’ll issue an opinion about that content. Sometimes media is just something we pass by on our way to new ideas. Not everything is a landmark. But I find it useful to see the routes other people are taking.

What led you to focus on tools for collecting socially?

They’re easy to build and fun if you can get the right crowd to show up. The Internet is, in many ways, still a mass of buried information and content. Tools for social collection are like tools for an archaeological dig. But, like, an archaeological dig combined with a pizza party.

Do you have an overarching vision of the kinds of things you work on, when you collect domain names like listening.am, watching.am and elephantsho.es? Or is your vision constantly changing and evolving?

Always evolving! Buying domain names is like bookmarking for ideas.

Your personal site lists some links to more experimental projects, like Eavesdropper, an app that adds context to real time conversations. How do they fit in with Web tools you’ve created?

Most of my work revolves around communication in one form or another. The cores of Eavesdropper and Reading are essentially the same—using technology to help people connect through ideas—but of course they go about it quite differently. Ultimately most of my work is the result of a desire to establish relationships with strangers, in the same way writing music and touring in bands did earlier in my career.

Is blending technology and art important for your work?

Absolutely! Tech and art are massive disciplines and most of the delineations within them, that I’ve found, are the result of gaps in my own knowledge.

What do you plan to work on during your affiliation?

That's on the DL for the moment. Let’s just say it rhymes with the word zobots.

Five things from around the Web to share with the Berkman Community:

Monsterkillers
OUR COMRADE THE ELECTRON
George and Jonathan
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response
Aeropress

Interview with Hila Lifshitz-Assaf

Berkman faculty associate and faculty at NYU Stern
@HLifshitz
interviewed in summer 2014 by Berktern Stefan Kulk

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf grew up in startup-nation Israel and developed a fascination for scientific and technological innovation. As a young child, she wanted to be an astronaut and explore faraway stars and planets. She now is an Assistant Professor at NYU Stern Business School, developing an in-depth empirical and theoretical understanding of the social fabric of innovation and knowledge creation. In particular, she investigates how the ability to innovate is being transformed by the web and the information age, as well as the challenges and opportunities represented by this transformation. Part of her childhood dream did come true as she undertook a longitudinal field study at the NASA space agency for about three years. There, she studied how experimenting with open innovation platforms and communities can aid in solving challenging scientific problems and in turn, influence the organization, its professionals and their knowledge work processes.

Hila describes her research as driven by the bigger question of how to organize for innovation in the digital era. She notes that from the time of the Industrial Revolution, the production of innovation has been mostly led by large private and public organizations. However, now that we are in the midst of another “revolution - this one digital - Hila’s research examines how digital technologies influence, shift, and change the process of technological and scientific innovation.    

The open source model was the first important illustration of the power of digital technologies in producing innovation beyond traditional organizational boundaries. In this model, thousands of independent individuals design, develop, distribute, and support complex products that are as good as, or sometimes even better than, the products of the leading companies. This model has since spilled over into many fields beyond software and is usually named “open innovation” or “peer production”. During her field study at NASA, Hila witnessed its power in generating scientific innovation. By posting their strategic R&D challenges on online open innovation platforms such as Innocentive, Yet2.com and TopCoder, NASA’s scientists and engineers were able to find solutions to their challenges more quickly and cheaply. It was a great surprise, in particular, when a retired radio frequency engineer from New Hampshire came up with a solution for forecasting dangerous solar storms with unprecedented accuracy, a result far beyond NASA’s hopes.

However, as Hila explains, the use of these new forms of innovation challenges many of the accepted and well-rooted processes, roles, and norms for conducting R&D in large organizations. From many years of consulting for and working in large organizations herself, Hila knows how difficult it can be to implement open innovation processes and change long-standing practices. In particular, the open model undermines long-held assumptions about the role of the expert R&D professional, trained for years to be able to solve challenging problems. In contrast, in the open model, anyone and everyone can solve these problems. This challenges the role of scientists and engineers and might lead them to reject this method and great solutions and knowledge out there.

In her dissertation, Hila rigorously describes the opportunities and challenges such open methods entail. She documents and theorizes the deep transformation that took place at NASA and that is required for R&D professional to fully adopt these models.Hila’s cross-disciplinary work breathes innovation; in order to investigate the transformation to open models she not only builds on the existing organizational theory literature but also questions its underlying assumptions. As a faculty associate, she continues that type of research and is looking forward to collaborating with the many wonderful researchers in the Berkman community.

Q&A with James Losey

Berkman affiliate and PhD candidate at Stockholm University
@jameslosey
interviewed in summer 2014 by Berktern Ben Sobel

What was your career arc, and how did it lead you to your current graduate study at Stockholm University in Sweden?

I think, like many people that graduated my generation in university and ended up spending our first moments outside of school working on the Obama campaign, my real interest was policy work. From my vantage, there wasn’t a real opportunity to do that through the campaign. So when I found the opportunity, I ended up moving to DC. It’s a crazy story: I just wanted to live in DC and to do public policy work. Everybody tells you it’s about connections—I had none. I hardly had any money; I sold a few musical instruments and some furniture. I ended up living in a hostel for a few days. I didn’t have any friends, a place to stay, or a job. I then crashed in a punk warehouse up in Brooklyn for a couple months until I got an internship on Capitol Hill, which I got essentially by putting on the one nice outfit I had, printing up résumés and cover letters to each chief of staff of the offices I wanted to visit, knocking on doors, and asking if there were any openings.

That’s amazing.

Yeah, it was great. I started interning on the Hill for a new congressman out of Louisiana, just to get a different experience from the politics I was exposed to in the Bay Area of California. And then, about a year after I started working on the Hill, I spent some time with a congressional watchdog organization, CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington).

Then, in 2009, I started working with Sascha Meinrath at the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation. There were a lot of different issues I was covering: questions about the digital divide, questions of how to develop policies to increase broadband access to underserved communities in the US, questions around net neutrality, issues of intellectual property…But I wanted to go more international. Again, moving to DC gave me greater political perspective compared with the Bay Area. Moving to Europe would give me a perspective of how the same debates might be approached with different ideals or different interests.

What continental differences do you see in the way internet governance issues are perceived?

The telecommunications issues in the US are defined by business interests. My experience with these issues in Europe, and particularly in Sweden, is that it’s not necessarily the same way. A lot of the framing of policies in Europe seems more based on providing communications and providing openness, and not about the solicitation of profits in the same way that it is in the US.

Is part of the allure of Europe, then, that you can actually focus on what might seem to be more central issues rather than the business interests that bog things down in the USA? Has this opened up your research horizons at all?

The interesting thing is what potential there is to understand US-Europe relations, how the two economies fit in globally, and how these can be used as leverage points to promote more open, secure communications. A great example of that are the tensions from the revelations of US surveillance, which are leading a number of different countries to look into how to localize data as a response. Localization isn’t a great idea for an open internet, but it does demonstrate the relations between the interests, and how domestic debates do have international consequences.

In the long term, do you see yourself moving more towards academia or more towards making and advising on policy? How might the Berkman Center fit in as an intermediate step to whatever that end vision is for you?

I’ve spent a lot of time bridging different communities. In DC, the interface was between governments and society. When I went to Europe, I stayed to be a fellow at the Open Knowledge Institute, and a lot of my work bridged developer communities and policy communities. I wanted to understand how developers working on technologies for secure and unfettered online communications can be better connected with funding communities, college communities, and government actors. I ended up participating in a number of hackathons on most continents during my time as a master’s student, as well as organizing hackathons for the Swedish Foreign Ministry as part of the annual Stockholm Internet Forum. Coming out of the work on my PhD, my interest is to continue bridging academic and policy communities, and to think about where policy is actually going. I'm thinking about how to take advantage of the sometimes slower cycle of academia to target the research towards where policy debates are moving—and how to be more proactive rather than reactive, which was much of my experience in DC.

Being able to be a part of [Berkman’s] community of tremendous interdisciplinary expertise will help me take these ideas forward. I hope to be able to share my experiences in the trenches of the policy world, but also the experience I’ve had on working on these issues from a European perspective.

Are there any things you can point to as signs of heartening progress on this interdisciplinary dialogue between companies, developers, governments, users, and the like? On the flip side, are there any areas that are still particularly lacking?

Over time, debates have gotten more nuanced. There have been more engineers participating in net neutrality debates, and I think we have a much better understanding of how the internet functions and why it necessarily isn’t always a legal question but a technical question. Even for reports I would disagree with on intellectual property protection—proposals that are too strong and constricting and may do more harm than good—they’re still becoming more technically nuanced…

I don’t think that it’s perfect, and I think that I want to see more federal agencies and even committees on the Hill having on-staff technologists to sort out these questions, rather than just having a wealth of lawyers. But the technological aptitude is increasing in some regard. A lot of issues are still long uphill battles, like net neutrality. Still, what was once a very wonky issue receives a lot of public press and a lot of wide responses—over a million comments handed to the FCC, so that’s positive. What the question comes down to is, are policymakers bought out by companies or are they listening to the American people? And I think that’s an open question when we look at US politics. That’s why you see more leaders on technical issues—Larry Lessig and Tim Wu, to name a few—who are starting to look at questions of money in politics, look at the problems with the political system as something that needs to be targeted, rather than just trying to do better full-on policy.

Interview with Jack Cushman

Berkman fellow working on digital preservation at university libraries
interviewed in summer 2014 by Berktern Nicole Contaxis

Jack Cushman understands that the library is an evolving institution. Students no longer need to wander up and down corridors of books in order to complete their assignments or explore their fields. More and more material is available online, and the nature of research is changing as information technology advances. As such, the responsibilities and designs of the library are also changing, and Cushman’s project at the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab situates itself within this dialogue. As an extension of the Perma.cc and Permabox projects, Cushman is attempting to build a network of preservation technologies owned and operated by libraries.

Cushman’s connection to Berkman began when he was volunteering on the Perma.cc project, and eventually his co-workers convinced him to apply as a fellow so that he could continue to help full-time. Perma.cc helps scholars provide permanent links to online works cited in their writings and helps prevent link rot. This service allows scholars to cite a wide variety of materials without concerns about how long those materials will be available online. In other words, it provides the permanence and security to digital materials that have long been afforded physical materials in libraries. Permabox helps extend the perma.cc network by helping smaller, perhaps underfunded, libraries and universities participate. Cushman’s project builds on this work and will help provide permanent links to online legal materials referenced in judicial decisions.

As Cushman helps libraries implement a preservation network like this one, he heavily considers the present and future form of libraries. With three over-flowing bookcases at his home, he is connected to the physical manifestation of the library and maintains that it should stick around, at least for as long as he does. And while he understands that it is currently important for libraries to provide access to the internet and technology literacy materials, he believes that this responsibility will shrink as technology becomes cheaper and tablets are given away in cereal boxes.

Yet, when discussing the future of the library, Cushman remains focused on the importance of the “alternate universe” that libraries provide. Unburdened by the expectation of financial transactions, the library has a different set of goals and responsibilities that many businesses and institutions. It maintain an atmosphere that is difficult to define but easy to enjoy. More concretely, it may be the only type of institution where your late fee is just fifty cents, and you can pay it “whenever.” The library is a unique community space, and Cushman believes that it is this quality that is most desirable and most important to preserve during and after these current upheavals.

Cushman’s work with libraries is informed by a diverse set of experiences. With an undergraduate degree in electronic arts, a law degree, and experience in film, Cushman ties his interests together with one overarching concern: how to help people grasp and fulfill their potential. He describes a deep passion for humanism and enhancing the human experience, particularly as it exists and is understood online. Drawing comparisons to the goals and intentions of the Founding Fathers as they drafted the Constitution, he believes that the Internet has provided a new space for the creation and proliferation of tools for human growth.

Yet where the Founding Fathers had a history of legal and governmental action to call upon, the Internet is a space that lacks the same sense of history and seems to lack an analogue. Cushman explains one difference: when the Founding Fathers were writing the Bill of Rights, a safe could be broken into with a considerable amount of effort, but now as “safes” currently exist online, they are either terribly easy or impossible to open. The physical limitations that provided the context for the theory and philosophy behind the Constitution do not exist online, and this is just one of the issues that need to be addressed as the Internet proliferates. Cushman understands his work, as well as the work done at Berkman in general, as a way to bridge a humanistic philosophy and new technological platforms. For Cushman, the future of technology is bright and human-centric.

Interview with Emy Tseng

Berkman Fellow and Senior Communications Program Specialist with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration
Interviewed in summer 2014 by Berktern Sergio Alves Jr.

After years of work in digital inclusion and broadband policy programs with governmental agencies and public interest organizations throughout the country, Emy Tseng joins the Berkman Center to address the world. Emy will explore how the Internet-­enabled sharing economy can be applied to economic development and poverty alleviation in marginalized urban communities in the U.S. and in newly industrialized countries (such as Brazil, Thailand, and other countries in similar stages of development).

According to Emy, sharing strategies for poverty alleviation have been in place for decades, but they are unevenly distributed and funded across different geographical spaces. In the case of microfinance, she wants to examine whether urban areas are affected by the lack of “trust networks”, which are more typically identifiable in rural communities. She also is interested in whether a perceived “lack of need” leads to fewer opportunities of innovative financial solutions in underserved urban zones.

Inspired by the theory of change and online mechanisms that enable people to participate in sharing transactions (resource sharing, bartering and reuse, peer funding and lending services), Emy will investigate how Internet and mobile technologies can strengthen existing local sharing economies to increase local entrepreneurialism, empowerment and asset building in impoverished populations. Emy’s ultimate goal is to design policies and programs focused on technology for social change.

Berkman is a unique place surrounded by curious people with multiple interests and talents. Incoming fellow Emy Tseng takes this to a whole different level; with an accomplished career in software engineering and technology policy, Emy is also a jazz singer with a particular interest in Brazilian jazz. Ask her where her taste for Brazilian music comes from, and the answer arrives in the jazz and bossa nova style: uncountable names, visceral feelings, inspiring places, and occasional encounters, here and there.

Seja bem-vinda, Emy!