Press Freedom in an Age of Networked Journalism; Making large volunteer-driven projects sustainable; Interop Book Launch

A Public Right to Hear and Press Freedom in an Age of Networked Journalism

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

What does a public right to hear mean in networked environments and why does it matter? In this talk I’ll describe how a public right to hear has historically and implicitly underpinned the U.S. press’s claims to freedom and, more fundamentally, what we want democracy to be. I’ll trace how this right appears in contemporary news production, show how three networked press organizations have used Application Programming Interfaces to both depend upon and distance themselves from readers, and describe how my research program joins questions of free speech with media infrastructure design. I will argue that a contemporary public right to hear partly depends upon how the press’s technologies and practices mediate among networked actors who construct and contest what Bowker and Star (1999) call “boundary infrastructures.” It is by studying these technosocial, journalistic systems—powerful yet often invisible systems that I call “newsware" — that we might understand how a public right to hear emerges from networked, institutionally situated communication cultures like the online press. Mike Ananny is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and, starting August 2012, will be an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Making large volunteer-driven projects sustainable. Lessons learned from Drupal

Tuesday, May 29, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

In this talk, Dries shares his experiences on how he grew the Drupal community from just one person to over 800,000 members over the past 10 years. Today, the Drupal community is one of the largest and most active Open Source projects in the world, powering 1 out of 50 websites in the world. The concept of major projects growing out of a volunteer, community-based model is not new to the world. Volunteer networks and communities exist in many shapes and sizes. Throughout history there are examples of pure volunteer organizations that were instrumental in the founding and formation of many projects. For example, the first trade routes were ancient trackways which citizens later developed on their own into roads suited for wheeled vehicles in order to improve commerce. Transportation was improved for all citizens, driven by the commercial interest of some. Today, we certainly appreciate that our governments maintain the roads. However, we still see road signs stating that a particular section of a highway is kept clean and trim by volunteers -- at least in some countries. When new ground needs to be broken, it's often volunteer communities that do it. But a full-time, paid infrastructure can be necessary for the preservation and protection of what communities begin. In this presentation, Dries wants to brainstorm about how large communities evolve and how to sustain them over time. Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems

Wednesday, May 30, 6:00pm ET, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA. Reception to follow. Co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library and the Harvard Book Store. Free and open to the public.

The practice of standardization has been facilitating innovation and economic growth for centuries. The standardization of the railroad gauge revolutionized the flow of commodities, the standardization of money revolutionized debt markets and simplified trade, and the standardization of credit networks has allowed for the purchase of goods using money deposited in a bank half a world away. These advancements did not eradicate the different systems they affected; instead, each system has been transformed so that it can interoperate with systems all over the world, while still preserving local diversity. As Palfrey and Gasser show, interoperability is a critical aspect of any successful system—and now it is more important than ever. John Palfrey is Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School. Dr. Urs Gasser is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society's Executive Director. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

James Gleick on "The Information"

James Gleick — author of a half-dozen books on science, technology, and culture — discusses his latest book "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood", with Jonathan Zittrain. His latest bestseller, translated into 20 languages, is "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood", which the NY Times called "ambitious, illuminating, and sexily theoretical." Whatever they meant by that. They also said "Don't make the mistake of reading it quickly." video/audio on our website>

Matthew Battles on Going Feral on the Net: the Qualities of Survival in a Wild, Wired World

How do we balance the empowering possibilities of the networked public sphere with the dark, unsettling, and even dangerous energies of cyberspace? Matthew Battles — author, cofounder of the blog HiLobrow.com, and program fellow with metaLAB (at) Harvard — blends a deep-historical perspective on the internet with storytelling that reaches into its weird, uncanny depths. The feral is a metaphor — and maybe more than just a metaphor — for thriving in cyberspace, a habitat that changes too rapidly for anyone truly to be native. This talk weaves critical and reflective discussion of online experience with a short story from Battles' new collection, "The Sovereignties of Invention". video/audio on our website>