* Geopolitics of Internet Infrastructure *http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/11/cowie* * ** James Cowie, Renesys Corporation Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live The growth of the global Internet is still determined, in large part, by local factors: geography, politics, and the economics of interconnection and competition. We'll examine the paths along which Internet traffic flows, focusing on the emerging markets of the Middle East and Central Asia. We'll discuss ways in which the evolution of these paths dictates the choices available to information consumers, and the costs they must pay to interconnect with global information markets. A lot is at stake, as the countries that emerge as Middle Eastern regional transit hubs will play a significant role in the evolution of the region's post-oil information economy.

*Program Your City: Legal and Governance Issues of an Urban Integrated Open Data API *<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/11/cowie>http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/11/foth* * ** Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live The physical city is covered with an increasing number of layers of digital information. At the same time, there is a significant trend towards incorporating location data into web and mobile applications: /The urbanisation of the internet, and the digitisation of the city./ Recent 'Government 2.0' initiatives have led to the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) on federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) on municipal levels. In most cases, these initiatives produce mere collections of data repositories. However, proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) often limit the full potential that could be achieved by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried. This talk presents the proposal for an information substrate with an integrated open data API -- in a way, an operating system for cities that integrates three types of data sources: * Public government data (traffic, public transport, health, population, etc.) * Social media data (eg., Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) * Sensor network data (domestic energy monitoring, river gauges, weather, etc.) The primary goal is to put intuitively accessible real-time data into the hands of citizens and residents and unleash the creative capacity of programmers and end-users who will be able to create, share (or sell) their own custom-made web and mobile based decision-support tools and applications that take advantage of data mash-ups comprising all three types of data sources and tailored to specific needs. The talk will present a number of potential demonstrator applications that illustrate the capabilities of the proposed infrastructure with a view to specifically discuss the legal, policy, copyright and goverance issues and implications that may arise.

*Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live *<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/11/opencourt>http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/12/jarvis* * ** *Jeff Jarvis, blogger, professor, and best-selling author* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live <http://opencourt.us>Thanks to the internet, we now live---more and more---in public. More than 750 million people (and half of all Americans) use Facebook, where we share a billion times a day. The collective voice of Twitter echoes instantly 100 million times daily, from Tahrir Square to the Mall of America, on subjects that range from democratic reform to unfolding natural disasters to celebrity gossip. Yet change brings fear, and many people---nostalgic for a more homogeneous mass culture and provoked by well-meaning advocates for privacy---despair that the internet and how we share there is making us dumber, crasser, distracted, and vulnerable to threats of all kinds. But not Jeff Jarvis. In this shibboleth-destroying book, Public Parts argues persuasively and personally that the internet and our new sense of publicness are, in fact, doing the opposite. Jarvis travels back in time to show the amazing parallels of fear and resistance that met the advent of other innovations such as the camera and the printing press. The internet, he argues, will change business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg's invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all.

*Searching for Context: Modeling the Information-Seeking Process of College Students in the Digital Age ** * <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/12/omln>http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/01/head *Alison J. Head, Berkman Center Fellow* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live What is it like to be a college student in the digital age? In this talk, I present a working typology of the undergraduate information-seeking process, including students' reliance on and use of Web sources. Since 2008, as part of our ongoing study at the University of Washington's Project Information Literacy, we have surveyed more than 10,000 students at 40 colleges and universities (including undergraduates enrolled at Harvard College). We have investigated how college students find information and conduct research---their needs, strategies, and workarounds---for solving information problems that occur during course-related research and in their everyday lives. We have found the large majority of students we have studied across all types of higher-education institutions in the U.S. still attend college to learn, but many are lost in a thicket of information overload. They struggle with managing the IT devices that permeate their lives. Our findings indicate that nearly all students intentionally use a small compass for navigating the ever-widening and complex information landscape they inhabit. These and other findings of Project Information Literacy have profound implications for teaching, learning, work, and play in the 21st century. *About Alison Head * Alison Head is the lead researcher for the national study, Project Information Literacy. She is a Research Scientist in University of Washington's Information School and a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Library Innovation Lab (2011-2012). Alison led the 2007 exploratory student study, which was a forerunner to Project Information Literacy. The study was conducted at Saint Mary's College of California, where she taught as the Roy O. Disney Visiting Professor in New Media for 10 years. Her research interests include information-seeking behaviors of early adults, information literacy and lifelong learning, Web adoption and diffusion, and usage of social media for collective learning. *Links* * About Project Information Literacy (PIL) <http://projectinfolit.org/about/> * PIL Research Reports <http://projectinfolit.org/publications/>

*Hackademia: Leveraging the Conflict Between Expertise and Innovation to Create Disruptive Technologies * *** * http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/01/kolko *Beth Kolko, University of Washington* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live This talk describes two projects that tackle the same issue: how and why do nonexperts contribute to innovation? The conflict between expertise and innovation sits uneasily in academia, where the enterprise hinges on doling out official credentials. But a lack of expertise can in fact drive people to create the kind of disruptive technologies that really are game-changers. In this presentation I'll present findings from a book-in-progress based on interviews with hackers and makers tentatively titled "Why Rulebreakers Will Rule the World." That book connects the hacking and making/DIY communities at the point of disruptive technologies, demonstrating how the lack of institutional affiliation and formal credentials within each community opens up the space for creative problem-solving approaches. The presentation will also discuss the results of a two-year experiment I've been running within the university entitled "Hackademia" which is an attempt to infect academic pursuits with a hacker ethos and challenge non-experts to see themselves as potentially significant contributors to innovative technologies. Hackademia is a semi-formal learning group that introduces mostly nontechnical students to basic technical skills and presents them with an open-ended challenge. There have been six iterations of the group so far, and each quarter new students join as we use a participant-observation model to explore how nontechnical adults gain technical skills. Hackademia is driven by a desire to create functional rather than accredited engineers, to position engineering literacy as a skill that's as important to an informed citizenry as science literacy, and to help individuals see themselves as creators rather than consumers. *Links* * A Little Bit Luddite <http://bethkolko.wordpress.com/> * Hackademia <http://uwhackademia.wordpress.com/>

*Open Government Data for Open Accountability * *** * http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/02/heusser *Felipe Heusser, Berkman Center Fellow* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live Over the past decade 'transparency' has become one of those key words in the debates on modern governance. A pervasive cliché captured by the rhetoric of politics, which has raised 'transparency' as a perfect paracetamol to potentially remedy problems as diverse as accountability, growth, public service delivery and participation. For years, the cornerstone of transparency policies has been the 'Freedom of Information Act', a regulation that since the mid 1960's has spread from 3 to nearly 80 countries around the globe, but which maybe increasingly gaining obsolesce in the context of the digital age. Open Government Data policy, is the latest chapter of the transparency story. It is moving the paradigm from 'access to public documentation' (FOIA) towards 'access to public data', avoiding obsolesce, and keeping up to date our right to access public information that increasingly flows through a digital ecosystem. Though the implementation of Open Data policies is likely to impact a diverse variety of sectors, 'accountability' is certainly one of the main domains of impact. The bursting rise and spread of online accountability tools and watch-dogs such as the Sunlight Foundation (US.), MySociety (UK), Ushahidi (Kenya), and Ciudadano Inteligente (Chile), are good examples of how the web is creating a more powerful sort of open and crowd sourced accountability. More eyes now rest upon government, the question is 'how' (if) does this matter. The talk will quickly overview the spread of transparency policy through freedom of information regulation, and point out to the rise of 'Open Government Data' as the latest chapter of the transparency story, highlighting how it potentially may impact 'open accountability' and the rise of a new breed of online watchdogs.

*The Promises of Web-based Social Experiments * ****<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/01/monroy-hernandez> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/02/hergueux+ *Jerome Hergueux, Berkman Center Fellow* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live The advent of the internet provides social scientists with a fantastic tool for conducting behavioral experiments online at a very large-scale and at an affordable cost. It is surprising, however, how little research has leveraged the affordances of the internet to set up such social experiments so far. In this talk, Jerome Hergueux will introduce the audience to one of the first online platforms specifically designed for conducting interactive social experiments over the internet to date. He will present the preliminary results of a randomized experiment that compares behavioral measures of social preferences obtained both in a traditional University laboratory and online, with a focus on engaging the audience in a reflection about the specificities, limitations and promises of online experimental economics as a tool for social science research. *About Jerome* Jerome is a PhD candidate in Economics at Sciences Po Paris and the University of Strasbourg. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where he works with Professor Yochai Benkler to develop new interactive survey methods to uncover the foundations and dynamics of interactions and behavior in online social spaces. Jerome is mainly interested in applying economics' analytical tools to the understanding of the evolution of culture, broadly defined as any set of norms of cooperation shared by a group of individuals trying to overcome particular collective action issues (be it in online or offline settings). He then tries to assess the relevance of those norms for determining a wide range of economic outcomes at the community level. Jerome originates from the French region of Alsace, near the German border. He holds an MA in Finance from the University of Strasbourg and a Master in International Relations and International Economics from Sciences Po Paris. Jerome speaks French, English and Arabic, and is heavily interested in the Middle East's politics and culture.

*What can 21st century open government learn from open source, open data, open innovation and open journalism? * *** * <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/01/monroy-hernandez>http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/03/howard *Alexander B. Howard, Gov 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O'Reilly Media* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live In the 1990s, the Internet changed communication and commerce forever. A decade later, the Web 2.0 revolution created a new disruption, enabling hundreds of millions of citizens to publish, share, mix, comment, and upload media to a more dynamic online environment. In 2012, we're now living in the era of big data, where mobile devices and a real-time Web are dramatically shift the dynamic between governments and the governed. In the years since the first social networks went online, the disruption has spread to government, creating perceived shifts in power structures as large as those enabled by the introduction of the printing press centuries ago. As the means of publishing have become democratized and vast amounts of data have become available, new possibilities for civic advocates, activists, journalists, developers and entrepreneurs have emerged. The historic events of the last year, from Egypt to #Occupy to the SOPA debate, have breathed new life into the idea of open government fueled by technology. At the same time, a new spectre of new cutting edge surveillance states has arisen, where digital autocracies apply filtering, propaganda and tracking technologies to suppress speech, distort public opinion and capture or kill dissidents and protestors. Life is increasingly reflected and refracted by the cameras and screens of ubiquitous smartphones, accompanied by hazy norms around privacy, security and identity and Industrial Age laws and regulations that appear inadequate to the needs of the moment. In this talk on the power of platforms, Howard will talk about where the principles and technologies that built the Internet and World Wide Web are being integrated into government and society -- and by whom. These new digital platforms for communication, enabled by highly accessible and scalable Web technologies, have reinvigorated the hope that collective action can reforge the compact between citizens and government. *About Alexander* Alexander is the Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O'Reilly Media, where he writes about the intersection of government, the Internet and society, including how technology is being used to help citizens, cities, and national governments solve large-scale problems. He is an authority on the use of collaborative technology in enterprises, social media and digital journalism. He has written and reported extensively on open innovation, open data, open source software and open government technology. He has contributed to the National Journal, Forbes, the Huffington Post, Govfresh, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, CBS News' What's Trending, Govloop, Governing People, the Association for Computer Manufacturing and the Atlantic, amongst others. Prior to joining O’Reilly, Mr. Howard was the associate editor of SearchCompliance.com and WhatIs.com at TechTarget, where he wrote about how the laws and regulations that affect information technology are changing, spanning the issues of online identity, data protection, risk management, electronic privacy and cybersecurity. He is a graduate of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. *Links* * Alex at O'Reilly Radar <http://radar.oreilly.com/alexh/>

*The Growth and Decay of Shared Knowledge * ** <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/03/heffernan>http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/03/tenen * Dennis Tenen, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live Knowledge grows, but it also contracts as outmoded facts and theories are replaced with new ones. This talk will discuss our intuitions about knowledge domains and the methods by which such intuitions could be modeled empirically. Along the way, Dennis will unpack the "information as organism" metaphor, construct taxonomies of epistemological lifeforms, and consider evolutionary pressures on knowledge systems. The talk will conclude with a conversation about the health of the academic publishing industry, and about the challenges of doing comparative work between new and old media. *About Dennis* Dennis Tenen is a literary scholar and a recovering software engineer. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, working with metaLab and the Cooperation Group. His research concerns the poetics of human-computer interaction, the study of co-authorship and editorial practice, the formation of cultural capital, and experimental criticism. He is joining the faculty of the English Department at Columbia University as an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and New Media in the fall.

*Unexpected Development: Decolonial Media Aesthetics and Women’s ICT4D Video* http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/04/benfield * Dalida Maria Benfield, Berkman Center Fellow* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live ICT4D (Information Communication Technology for Development) powerfully frames women’s grassroots video production in the Global South, much of which is distributed widely through YouTube. Often, these videos reproduce racialized and gendered discourses - legacies of colonialism - in their narratives of economic, social, and technological progress. However, there are also videos by women’s groups that defy both the historical linearity and spatial fragmentation of the ICT4D framework. These videos instead remix, reclassify, and globally reconnect women’s experiences in the contemporary moment. Culled from hundreds of online videos produced by ICT4D programs, including those in countries classified as having “Low Human Development” according to the Gender Inequality Index of the United Nations Development Program, these media represent powerful instances of a decolonial aesthetics, an altogether unexpected development. These ICT4D videos make compelling claims for other historical narratives and visions for women’s future lives, identities, and uses of information communication technologies. *About Dalida:* Dalida María Benfield's research addresses artists’ and activists’ creative uses of video and other networked digital media towards social justice projects. Her work is focused on the transformational capacities of media art across different scales. As an artist and activist, she has developed production, education, exhibition, and distribution initiatives focused on youth, women, people of color in the U.S., and local and transnational social movements, including co-founding the media collective /Video Machete/. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of California-Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, /Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages: Third Cinema, Now,/ chaired by Trinh T. Minh-ha, considers contemporary media art theory and practice, including work by Cao Fei, Michelle Dizon, and the Raqs Media Collective, in relation to the Third Cinema movement. As a Fellow at the Berkman Center, she is studying race and gender in the online presence of ICT4D programs, as well as working on collaborative projects with the Networked Cultures Working Group, the Cyberscholars Working Group, and metaLAB(at)Harvard.

*A Public Right to Hear and Press Freedom in an Age of Networked Journalism* http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/05/ananny * Mike Ananny, Berkman Center Fellow* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live What does a public right to hear mean in networked environments and why does it matter? In this talk I’ll describe 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. I’ll trace how this right appears in contemporary news production, show how three networked press organizations have used Application Programming Interfaces to both depend upon and distance themselves from readers, and describe how my research program joins questions of free speech with media infrastructure design. I will argue that a contemporary public right to hear partly depends upon how the press’s technologies and practices mediate among networked actors who construct and contest what Bowker and Star (1999) call “boundary infrastructures.” It is by studying these technosocial, journalistic systems—powerful yet often invisible systems that I call “newsware”—that we might understand how a public right to hear emerges from networked, institutionally situated communication cultures like the online press. *About Mike* Mike Ananny is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and, starting August 2012, will be an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He researchers social uses of digital technologies, concentrating on how technological, institutional and normative forces both shape and reflect networked journalism and press freedom. He earned his PhD from Stanford University (Communication), his Masters from MIT (Media Laboratory) and his Bachelors from the University of Toronto (Computer Science & Human Biology). He was also a founding member of the research staff at Media Lab Europe as part of the Everyday Learning group. He has held fellowships and scholarships with Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the Trudeau Foundation, LEGO Corporation, Interval Research Corporation, and has worked or consulted with LEGO, Mattel and Nortel Networks, helping to translate research concepts and prototypes into new product lines and services.

*Watch me play: Live streaming, computer games, and the future of spectatorship* http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/06/taylor * T.L. Taylor, Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen * Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-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. *About TL* T.L. Taylor is Associate Professor in the Center for Computer Games Research <http://game.itu.dk/> and a founding member of the Center for Network Culture <http://itu.dk/networkculture/> at the IT University of Copenhagen. She has been working in the field of internet and multi-user studies for over fifteen years and has published on topics such as play and experience in online worlds, values in design, intellectual property, co-creative practices, avatars and digital embodiment, gender and gaming, and e-sports. Her new book about professional computer gaming, /Raising the Stakes:E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming/ <http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12799> (MIT Press, 2012) has just been published. She is also the author of /Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture <http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11725>/ (MIT Press, 2006) which used her multi-year ethnography of EverQuest to explore issues related to massively multiplayer spaces. Her co-authored handbook on ethnography and virtual worlds (Princeton University Press) will be out summer 2012.

*The Information: James Gleick talks about his new book* http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/05/jgleick Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live James Gleick, author of /The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood <http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/0375423729>/, will discuss his new book. *About James* James Gleick is a native New Yorker and a graduate of Harvard and the author of a half-dozen books on science, technology, and culture. His latest bestseller, translated into 20 languages, is /The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood/, which the NY Times called "ambitious, illuminating, and sexily theoretical." Whatever they meant by that. They also said "Don't make the mistake of reading it quickly."