Interop: The Promise & Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems; Live streaming, computer games, and the future of spectatorship

Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems

Today! 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>

Watch me play: Live streaming, computer games, and the future of spectatorship

Tuesday, June 5, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

Computer gaming has long been a social activity, complete with forms of spectatorship. With the growth of live-streaming the boundaries of audience are shifting. Professional e-sports players and amateurs alike are broadcasting their play online and in turn growing communities. But interesting issues lurk around notions of audience (and revenue), IP and licensing, and the governance and management of these spaces. This talk will present some preliminary inquiries into this emerging intersection of "social media," gaming, and broadcasting. T.L. Taylor is Associate Professor in the Center for Computer Games Research and a founding member of the Center for Network Culture at the IT University of Copenhagen. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge

Monday, June 11, 6:00pm ET, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA. Free and open to the public.

Whether your interest is in preserving Internet freedom and opportunity, changing the economic power structure, new challenges for cyberlaw, or just turning the tables on privacy-violating business models and practices, there will be plenty to hear and discuss at Doc Searls' talk, "The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge" — also the title of his new book from Harvard Business Review Press. The book reports on progress by dozens of companies and development projects fostered by ProjectVRM, which Doc launched at the Berkman Center in 2006. Doc will share progress toward a near future where individuals can— * Control the flow and use of personal data * Build their own loyalty programs * Dictate their own terms of service * Tell whole markets what they want, how they want it, where and when they should be able to get it, and how much they are willing to pay — without yielding their own privacy, and outside of any one system's silo. Doc Searls served as a Berkman Fellow from 2006 to 2010, during which he launched and led ProjectVRM, which encourages the development of new tools by which individuals create and control their relationships with companies and other organizations. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Dries Buytaert on Making Large Volunteer-Driven Projects Sustainable

The Drupal community is one of the largest and most active Open Source projects on the web, 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. 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. Dries Buytaert — the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform, and president of the Drupal Association — shares his experiences on how he grew the Drupal community from just one person to over 800,000 members over the past 10 years, and, generally, how large communities evolve and how to sustain them over time. video/audio on our website>

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

Mike Ananny — Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism — describes 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. video/audio on our website>