Work here: have a voice and change the world (4/16); How to archive for the future? (4/23); DPLA Launch

Work here: have a voice and change the world

Tuesday, April 16, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

Companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook are thought to provide some of the most envied work environments on the planet. These employers promise not only tons of "perks" but the opportunity to work collaboratively on incredibly important, intellectually challenging, and cool problems that matter. These employers also promise employees a real voice in the company through things like weekly all-hands where employees can ask top level executives tough questions and a generally flat corporate structure. These are high trust, high cooperation, open work environments and studies have shown they pay off -- employees work harder and companies do better. But should employees be worried that their trust in their employer, so purposefully cultivated, has been built on promises that are more illusion than enforceable promise? What happens when employees, enticed by these dream-like environments and promises of doing good, see their employer make choices that appear anything but? From unilateral and dramatic changes in working conditions (e.g. taking away work from home being only a recent example) to normatively-laden business decisions (e.g., entering oppressive regimes and handing over user data to them, using software patents offensively [or not], or even donating money to political candidates employees ideologically oppose), are these employers holding up their end of the bargain? Are employees really getting a voice that commands employer response? Some in the labor movement think these employers create nothing more than a mirage, that like the now-prohibited company unions of the past, these employers work to ensure workers feel a sense of ownership and voice but, when push comes to shove, have nothing the company cannot just as easily take away. Others, including many who work at these companies, disagree. This talk will outline the debate and try to make headway towards some answers. Heather Whitney is a Berkman fellow and J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, where she heads up Submissions for the Journal of Law and Technology. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

How to archive for the future? Ensuring the Present benefits from a Relevant Past

Tuesday, April 23, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

If we want to preserve accessibility to valuable information about legal, political, social and cultural discourses in an era of information abundance, it becomes vital to design carefully how we distinguish between noise and significant pieces of information. In order to secure our future, we need to know how to organize our past. Daniel J. Caron joined the federal public service in 1982. In 2009, he was appointed Librarian and Archivist of Canada. One year later, he launched the modernization initiative to ensure that Library and Archives Canada could meet the multiple challenges of the digital environment. Eric Mechoulan is a professor at the Université de Montréal and visiting prof at Harvard, chair of the Intermedial Research Center on Letters, Arts and Techniques as well as the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Emerging Technologies (Montreal). RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to launch at Boston Public Library

April 18-19, 2013, Boston, MA. This event will be webcast live.

A Message from Executive Director Dan Cohen: From all of us at the Digital Public Library of America, our hearts go out to those affected by the terrible events in Boston yesterday. The tragedy took place right in front of the Boston Public Library, where we planned to have our gala launch on Thursday. I have been in touch with Amy Ryan, the President of the BPL, and I extended our sympathies to the BPL staff and their loved ones. We have all been looking forward to this week’s festivities, to celebrate how thousands of people and institutions have come together to build the DPLA, to thank our incredibly generous contributors and funders, and to mark the DPLA’s transition from vision to reality. Unfortunately, I no longer think it is possible to hold those events this week. The area around the BPL has been closed off, perhaps for several days, and it is not easy to relocate such a large-scale meeting. But logistics are the least of my concerns. People need time to mourn and to get resettled. Amy’s staff, like so many other honorable public servants in Boston, have to be there for the surrounding community first. I am very sorry to those who planned to attend Thursday and Friday. Airlines and hotels have been forgiving about rescheduling; I hope by making this decision rapidly it will be possible for all attendees to rework their travel easily. For those of you with questions about this process, please see the DPLA launch section of this website. I do not have the exact details yet, but we have already begun to plan an even larger event for the fall, one that will highlight our continued growth and emergence from the beta phase, and that also can serve as our first annual DPLAfest. This week’s event had been filled to capacity for weeks, with hundreds of people on the waiting list; we will use this time to see what we can do to accommodate even more people in the fall. We want to thank everyone for their great interest in the DPLA. The new DPLA site will still go live at noon ET on Thursday as planned, and we look forward to sharing the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums. Although we have canceled all of the formal events, DPLA staff will be available all day online, and informally in person in the late afternoon in the Boston area (at a location to be determined), for those taking their first look. I see the building of a new library as one of the greatest examples of what humans can do together to extend the light against the darkness. In due time, we will let that light shine through. The DPLA is taking the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all. This impact-oriented research effort unites leaders from all types of libraries, museums, and archives with educators, industry, and government to define the vision for a digital library in service of the American public. Join the wait list or find more information on the DPLA website>

CGA Annual Conference: Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location–Enabled Society

May 2-3, CGIS Tsai Auditorium, Harvard University. Organized by the Center for Geographic Analysis and co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The 2013 CGA Annual Spring Conference will be held Thursday and Friday, May 2-3, 2013 in the CGIS Tsai Auditorium. It is free and open to the public. Location matters. Energy, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, natural hazards, traffic and transportation, crime and political instability, water quality and availability, climate change, migration and urbanization – all key issues of the 21st century – have a location component. Critical geographic thinking, understanding and reasoning are essential skills for modern societies, and geospatial technologies for location based data collection, management, analysis and visualization have developed rapidly in recent decades. Today, these technologies are widely applied in routine operations in large corporations, entrepreneurial businesses, government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the social media of our daily lives. They save cost, improve efficiency, increase transparency, enhance communication, and help solve problems. Location-enabled devices are weaving "smart grids" and building "smart cities;" they allow people to discover a friend in a shoppi ng mall, catch a bus at its next stop, check surrounding air quality while walking down a street, or avoid a rain storm on a tourist route – now or in the near future. And increasingly they allow those who provide services to track, whether we are walking past stores on the street or seeking help in a natural disaster. Such deep penetration of the geospatial technologies into people's daily lives, however, generates policy and legal concerns with privacy, ownership rights of location information, national and homeland security, uncertainty about government funding and regulation, and more. These issues are relatively new to the academic community and to human societies at large. Technology developers, industries, legal experts, policy makers and citizen rights advocates would be well served in talking to one another as they grapple with the opportunities and challenges of a location-enabled society. The Centre for Spatial Law and Policy based in Washington, DC, the Center for Geographic Analysis, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University are co-hosting a two-day program examining the legal and policy issues that will impact geospatial technologies and the development of location-enabled societies. Registration Required. more information on CGA's website>

Bruce Schneier & Jonathan Zittrain on IT, Security, and Power

How does the Internet affect power? How does power affect the Internet? Factors such as ubiquitous surveillance, the rise of cyberwar, ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, and a feudal model of security collide to create a circumstance in which those in power are using information technology to increase their power, at the expense of users. Bruce Schneier—renowned security technologist and author—discusses these issues and more with the Berkman Center's Jonathan Zittrain. video/audio on our website>

Anil Dash on The Web We Lost

In the past decade, we've seen an unprecedented rise of powerful social networks, connecting millions or even billions of people who can now communicate almost instantaneously. But many of the promises that were made by the creators of the earliest social networking technologies have gone unfulfilled. In this talk, Anil Dash—entrepreneur, technologist, and writer—takes a look at some of the unexamined costs, both cultural and social, of the way the web has evolved. video/audio on our website>