The Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Our next Brain Gain meeting will give us an overview of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.  The Center's mission:

The Berkman Center's mission is to explore and understand cyberspace, its development, dynamics, norms, standards, and need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.

We are a research center, premised on the observation that what we seek to learn is not already recorded. Our method is to build out into cyberspace, record data as we go, self-study, and publish. Our mode is entrepreneurial nonprofit.

Our guest will be Berkman Senior-Geek-in-Residence Luis Villa.  Luis will guide us through a sampling of Berkman Center research and projects to give us a sense of the breadth and depth of the institution.  Topics will include:

• Global Voices -- a Berkman Advocacy initiative facilitating non-first world online        conversations: "At a time when the international English-language media ignores many things that are important to large numbers of the world’s citizens, Global Voices aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media. We’re using a wide variety of technologies - weblogs, wikis, podcasts, tags, aggregators and online chats - to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our inter-connected world." The initiative is led by Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman bio,  ethanzuckerman.com) and Rebecca MacKinnon (Berkman bio,  RConversation)
• OpenNet Initiative -- an anti-censorship initiative whose mission is "to investigate and challenge state filtration and surveillance practices... Our aim is to excavate, expose and analyze filtering and surveillance practices in a credible and non-partisan fashion. We intend to uncover the potential pitfalls and unintended consequences of these practices, and thus help to inform better public policy and advocacy work in this area.".  The initiative is a collaborative partnership of four leading academic institutions: Berkman/Harvard Law School, the University of Toronto,  the University of Cambridge, and Oxford University.
• Digital Media Project -- a research initiative "to help educate stakeholders – government officials, the media, artists, businesspeople, and the public at large – about the choices and values that can guide law and technology to maximize the potential of digital media for the years ahead...investigating how the transition from analog to digital can occur in such a way as to get the benefit of this transfer with as little constraint as possible..."  The project was inspired by Professor Terry Fisher's writing in Promises To Keep.  The research team includes HBS' Josh Lerner.
• StopBadware.org -- a "'Neighborhood Watch' campaign aimed at fighting badware. We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware."  The project was inspired by Professor Jonathan Zittrain's 'The Generative Internet' and Professor John Palfrey's 'Accountable Net'.  The Berkman Center and Oxford University's Oxford Internet Institute are leading this initiative with the support of several prominent tech companies, including Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems.
• H2O - Berkman's Open-Source Platform for a Global Education Network -- The H2O project, operated under a non-profit charter by the Berkman Center, is committed to transforming education by developing tools that enable true interaction across classrooms and physical spaces.  We'll take a look at some of the project's current and past products, including Playlist and Rotisserie.