From Theory to Practice: Featured Projects
Overview
Format: Round Table Discussion
Lead: John Palfrey
Potential Participants: Colin Maclay (GNI), Wendy Seltzer (Chilling Effects), Ethan Zuckerman
(Global Voices), Jonathan Zittrain & Laura M. (Herdict)
The first day closing session will feature the founding members of a diverse set of projects – several of them incubated at the Berkman Center – that have taken on some of the key challenges related to openness and freedom agenda outlined in the earlier sessions. By bridging theory and practice of “cyberlaw”, this session will feature different platforms, strategies, and networks that leverage online tools as a means of both confronting challenges to liberty in the online space, and capitalizing on the new modes of connection, production, and distribution that it affords. Featured projects will include:
- Global Voices, which works with bloggers and translators from around the world to
collect and curate reports from citizen media, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media;
- Chilling Effects, which provides an online clearinghouse for tracking and analyzing
DMCA takedown notices and other cease-and-desist notices sent to Internet users;
- Ushahidi, a platform which has been used as a tool to easily crowdsource information
collection, interactive mapping, and data visualization, using multiple channels, including SMS, email, Twitter and the web, and others;
- Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society
organizations, investors, and academics who have created principles and a collaborative approach to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector.
- Herdict, an online platform that crowdsources Internet users’ real-time reports of website
inaccessibility and outages around the globe.
Required Reading
- Global Voices
- Chilling Effects
- Ushahidi
- Global Network Initiative
- Herdict For more information on Herdict, see Case Study: Herdict