Thoughts on Berkman

After reading Group Genius by R. Keith Sawyer on  his way to Shanghai, Berkman Center executive director John Palfrey took to his blog with ripple thoughts into Berkman's collaborative thrust:

...Urs Gasser, Colin Maclay and I have a long-running series of conversations about collaboration across institutions, interdisciplinarity, and international comparative work in our field. It’s our shared (I think!) view that it would be very, very hard, if not impossible, effectively to study what we study — the implications of changes in information technologies on society, with an emphasis on law and policy — without collaborating with others. The Berkman Center, our shared professional home, works best, in my view, when it makes possible collaboration between creative people, some of whom work at Berkman/HLS and others who are just friends. In a more formal sense, we work deliberately with other institutions, like Urs’s Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen; JZ’s Oxford Internet Institute; Lawrence Lessig’s Stanford Center for Internet & Society; Jack Balkin and Eddan Katz’s Information Society Project at Yale Law School; our partner institutions in the OpenNet Initiative (the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab; University of Cambridge; and OII); and so forth. I am not certain that we are accomplishing “group genius” through any of these collaborations, but I am quite sure that our work would be much less richly rewarding without them. As the Berkman Center morphs from an HLS-based institution to one that draws more formally on the work of others at Harvard in the next year, we hope that our work will continue in this direction of more interdisciplinary, more comparative, and more creative...

He continues on over at his blog.