When to Blow the Whistle? (11/20); Cooperation in a Peer Production Economy (12/3); Re-Thinking IPR Models for the Poor (12/10)

When to Blow the Whistle? A discussion on the role of whistleblowers in society

Wednesday, November 20, 7:00pm ET, Harvard Allston Education Portal, 175 North Harvard Street, Boston, MA 02134.

The Ed Portal and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society will host an evening of small-group discussions led by Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School, founder and director of the Berkman Center. With a focus on building community and thoughtful discussion, we will explore the unfolding debate around transparency, secrecy, leaks, and morality. Come to the event to engage in small-group discussions about the pertinent questions raised by the disclosures of Edward Snowden. Refreshments and a light dinner will be served. RSVP Required. more information>

Cooperation in a Peer Production Economy: Experimental Evidence from Wikipedia

Tuesday, December 3, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

From Wikipedia to Open Source Software, Peer Production – a large-scale collaborative model of production primarily based on voluntary contributions – is emerging as an economically significant production model alongside firms, markets and governments. Yet, its impressive success remains difficult to explain through the assumptions of standard economic theory. In this talk, Jerome Hergueux will engage the audience in a reflection about the prosocial foundations of cooperation in this new Peer Production economy, taking Wikipedia as one paradigmatic example. Based on the results from an online game-theoretic experiment in which hundreds of Wikipedia contributors took part, Jerome will assess economics’ traditional understanding of the other-regarding motives that can foster online cooperation. In this process, he will ask the question: how can we start to build a workable theory of individuals’ motivations to freely contribute time and efforts for the provision of global public goods?

Jerome Hergueux is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Sciences Po (Department of Economics) and the University of Strasbourg (Institute of Political Studies) specialized in behavioral economics and experimental methods. He is a Research Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (2011-2014), where he does most of his Ph.D. work. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Re-Thinking IPR Models for the Poor

Tuesday, December 10, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

We are depending on new technologies to meet the challenges ahead for our planet. Facing a growing population, resource constraints, climate change and a global food system under stress, we are pinning our hopes on new technology. But we don’t do a good job of leveraging our innovation systems to impact the poor. 780 million still lack access to clean water. 1/5 of humanity lives without electricity. 80% of sub-Saharan Africa is farmed with a hand-hoe. IPR is the fundamental driver of innovation, but donors, practitioners and policymakers are more divided than ever in their views on how IPR can be used to impact the poor. Sara Boettiger will discuss the need to re-think existing models (e.g. patent pools, clearinghouses, humanitarian use licensing), re-invent our research agenda and work to shift the international debate.

Sara Boettiger is Senior Advisor at Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture and Assistant Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley. She is co-founder of four non-profits centered on the application of technology to meet the challenges of global poverty, including: PIPRA, Global Access in Action, GATD and AgPartnerXChange. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Zeynep Tufekci on Social Media-Fueled Protest Style From Arab Spring to Gezi Protests in Turkey

What can we learn from the protest wave of the last years? How does social media impact the capacity for collective action? Does social media contribute to blunting movement impacts by facilitating horizontal, non-institutional and "leaderless" movements? How do these movements compare with their predecessors like the civil-rights or anti-colonial movements? In this talk Zeynep Tufekci -- assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, a faculty associate at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University -- discusses these questions by drawing from research on a variety of social movements including the "Arab Spring", European indignados movements, Occupy and Turkey's Gezi protests. audio on our website>