New ideas, plans, and practices for technology and digital media at Harvard are being developed every day, all over the University. The conference will generate many more, and, indeed, it already has. As we explore Harvard’s digital identity in greater depth, many of the ideas and questions are prompting us to take a closer look and plan a course of action for the future. Here we learn about some of the projects in their earliest stages, projects that may eventually become leaders in developing Harvard’s digital identity into the future. This is a section that can only grow, and surely will as a result of the conference.

We would like to hear from you. Are you part of an innovative project that you would like to share? Send us an email and tell us about it.

Harvard@
The Center for Design Informatics, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and numerous other participants propose to study the feasibility of a shared space initiative for the Harvard community to research collaboratively the impact of technologies on our individual professions, our joint interests, our University as a whole, our local and neighboring communities, non-profit institutions and the international intellectual communities.

The proposed Harvard-wide collaborative knowledge center will aim to identify and utilize spaces in the Harvard campus to physically build such intellectual community and to benefit from the many shared advantages of research on technology, innovation, and society. Harvard@ will incorporate technology in innovative physical spaces to further extend the virtual space of the Harvard community. The proposal continues to build on the Universities efforts to create a uniform digital identity—and through its collaborative actions not only create such identity but factually become such identity.

This project proposes to study the technology and innovation needs of the Harvard schools, to ultimately combine our forces to implement and experiment with such new and innovative technologies—while actively including outside knowledge and expertise through the creation of a global ‘brain-center’, and while focusing on the needs of non-profit, local, national, and international institutions.

As a university at the forefront of research, education, and science—and the very idea of what a university can and should be—Harvard must be a leader in developing concrete practices and tools for integrating the Internet and digital media into classrooms, labs, libraries, and other research spaces. The tools will go far beyond just aiding individual researching and teaching. They shall ultimately provide avenues for sharing and collaboration across schools and disciplines.

The Berkman Radio Project
Lydon McGrath Productions, in collaboration with the Berkman Center and Jay Allison's Open Studio Project is producing a 12-part series of weekly broadcast and Internet radio programs this fall on the kaleidoscope of global consciousness. Berkman Fellow Christopher Lydon, a career journalist with The New York Times, public television, and public radio, describes his fall broadcasting mission as "Global Riddles of Identity, Technology, and Power... The thread, in an eclectic and digressive series, will be the basic global paradox: the 6 billion earthlings can see more clearly every day that we are connected in dimensions of climate, economics, genomics, disease, medicine, high and popular culture; and at the same the politics of terror, lopsided wealth and poverty, and imbalances of power and 'voice' seem to be pulling the world apart. The experimental question underlying the radio series is how to turn the free, democratic, and global Internet into a tool of a fresh conversation across the barriers of country, color, creed, commerce, and cliché."