Entrepreneurship & Social Sector Impact; Cyberscholars; Urban Integrated Open Data API; IP Strategy

Interweaving Strategy, Leadership, Web Entrepreneurship and Social Sector Impact

Thursday, November 10, 12:00pm ET, Hauser 104, Hauser Hall, Harvard Law School. Co-sponsored by the Cyberlaw Clinic, Dean's Office at Harvard Law School, Office of Career Services, and Office of Public Interest Advising.

As an established entrepreneur and social innovator, John Williams offers a number of lessons learned over the course of his 32+ year career. How do organizations – both for-profit and not-for-profit -- achieve strategic clarity, and why does it matter? How does one go about re-positioning an iconic product or organization when the market changes? What did it take to launch the first Webby Award-winning online travel business? How do the most sophisticated not-for-profits and philanthropists think about how to maximize their impact on society? John will share his personal career explorations since graduating from Harvard with the JD and MBA in 1979, and offer insight into his most valuable experiences. John Williams is a partner in the Boston office of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit firm that works with mission-driven organizations and philanthropists to scale their impact, enhance their effectiveness, and help strengthen their leadership . RSVP Requested. more information on our website>

Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group

Thursday, November 10, 6:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St.

The "Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group" is a forum for fellows and affiliates of MIT, Yale Law School Information Society Project, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University to discuss their ongoing research. This month's presenters will include: Jia Wang, Berkman Research Fellow on "Empower Public Sphere with ICTs--A Chinese Perspective." RSVP Requested. more information on our website>

Program Your City: Legal and Governance Issues of an Urban Integrated Open Data API

Tuesday, November 15, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

The physical city is covered with an increasing number of layers of digital information. At the same time, there is a significant trend towards incorporating location data into web and mobile applications: The urbanisation of the internet, and the digitisation of the city. Recent ‘Government 2.0’ initiatives have led to the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) on federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) on municipal levels. In most cases, these initiatives produce mere collections of data repositories. However, proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) often limit the full potential that could be achieved by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried. This talk presents the proposal for an information substrate with an integrated open data API. The primary goal is to put intuitively access ible real-time data into the hands of citizens and residents and unleash the creative capacity of programmers and end-users who will be able to create, share (or sell) their own custom-made web and mobile based decision-support tools and applications that take advantage of data mash-ups comprising all three types of data sources and tailored to specific needs. Associate Professor Marcus Foth is the founder and director of the Urban Informatics Research Lab, and Principal Research Fellow with the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Intellectual Property Strategy

Monday, November 21, 6:00PM, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School. Co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Reception to follow.

Entrepreneurs, corporate managers and nonprofit administrators should look at intellectual property as a key strategic asset. Most managers leave intellectual property issues to the legal department, unaware that an organization’s intellectual property can help accomplish a range of management goals, from accessing new markets to improving existing products to generating new revenue streams. In his new book, Intellectual Property Strategy (MIT Press), intellectual property expert, head of the Harvard Law School Library, and Berkman Center faculty co-director John Palfrey offers a short briefing on intellectual property strategy for them. Palfrey argues for strategies that go beyond the traditional highly restrictive “sword and shield” approach, suggesting that flexibility and creativity are essential to a profitable long-term intellectual property strategy--especially in an era of changing attitudes about media. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

The Spanish Revolution & the Internet: From free culture to meta-politics

Tuesday, November 22, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

From Mayo: In the context of multiple crises – ecological, political, financial and geopolitical restructuring – large mobilizations are taking place in several countries. In the Spanish case, we have seen some of the largest demonstrations since the country transitioned to democracy in the 70th with massive occupations of public squares, attempts to prevent parliaments functioning and citizen assemblies of thousands of people taking place in spring and autumn 2011. Furthermore, the free culture movement (FCM) played an important role in the rising and shaping of the mobilization. The campaign agents "Sinde Law" (on Internet regulation) in December 2010 and its afterworld meta-political derivation into "Don't vote them" campaign (referring to do not vote the parties which approved the law) are considered a starting point of the mobilization cycle. Additionally, FCM has influenced the agenda and organizational logic of the protest for a "Tr ue Democracy Now" (particularly in terms of the use of the new technologies); even if the mobilization has also caused an split between two sectors of the FCM itself. The presentation will be based on a qualitative research analysis and aims to open up a debate on the similarities and contrast between the Spanish case and the mobilization that emerged in other places (such as Arab Countries, Iceland, Greece, Portugal, Israel, Chile or New York City). Mayo Fuster Morell has developed research in the field of the Internet and politics; social movements (Global Justice Movement, Free Culture Movement and recent mobilization wave of "indignated" in Spain); online communities; common-base peer production; and public policies. She specializes in online methods and action-participation research. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Jonathan Lazar on Accessible Web Design for People with Disabilities

Despite the existing resources, knowledge, and regulations, many categories of web sites continue to be inaccessible for people with perceptual and motor disabilities. 90% of federal government web sites, many social media tools, many e-commerce web sites, and online employment applications are often inaccessible, denying people with disabilities access to the complete power of the web. In this presentation Dr. Jonathan Lazar — Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University — provides an overview of web accessibility for people with disabilities, including the technical standards and laws, as well as reporting on recent research projects documenting how inaccessible web sites lead to various forms of discrimination against people with disabilities. audio on our website>

Radio Berkman 186: World of Lawcraft

Video games aren't just, well, fun and games. When you pop open a video game — be it Farmville on Facebook for your smartphone or World of Warcraft on your $10,000 gaming setup — you are entering into any number of different terms and conditions agreements about behavior and property that govern your playtime. But questions have started to arise as more and more games build the concept of virtual property into their play. New powers, levels, avatars, privileges — who do those things belong to, and under what jurisdiction do they fall? Greg Lastowka is a professor of law at Rutgers University and author of the book Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds. Lastowka has given a great deal of thought to the virtual worlds of video games, and documented some of the cases where the laws of the game and the laws of real life clash, sometimes violently. audio on our website>

James Cowie on the Geopolitics of Internet Infrastructure

The growth of the global Internet is still determined, in large part, by local factors like geography, politics, and the economics of interconnection and competition. A lot is at stake, especially as the countries that emerge as Middle Eastern regional transit hubs play a significant role in the evolution of the region's post-oil information economy. In this talk James Cowie — Chief Technology Officer at Renesys Corporation — examines the paths along which Internet traffic flows, focusing on the emerging markets of the Middle East and Central Asia, discusses ways in which the evolution of these paths dictates the choices available to information consumers, and the costs they must pay to interconnect with global information markets. audio on our website>