Opening Remarks 

Sidney Verba, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of Harvard University Library

• Knowledge disseminated through public books, etc., but also through teaching, in the classroom.
• New possibilities through the Internet, for people to come here, and for us to go elsewhere
• Cannot predicate future of Internet 

Richard Benefield, Deputy Director, Harvard University Art Museums

• Harvard Art Museums: Large collection, many departments, galleries, study departments, conservation, archives.
• First art history course in US taught at Fogg
• Responsibility for stewardship: Conserve, document, teach, etc.
• Expanding public education plans onto Internet
• Museums first used Internet as marketing, but now it extends to e-commerce and exhibitions
• Digital sharing increasingly important, in part due to legislation for sharing certain materials with the public
• Strategies needed to keep original art objects at the core
• Searchable databases of art objects, Sargent, Ben Shahn
• X-ray, infrared tools
• Kiosks in exhibitions, Mondrian
• April 2002: Launch of Collections Online. Now includes 50% of permanent collection.
• Complicated to build, and collecting information began 20 years ago
• Now gathering images and inventory of all objects
• Online virtual study rooms: pull a “virtual reserve list” of images and objects, encourage online discussions
• Allows scholars in other locations to study Harvard’s collections
• Leads to greater understanding of Harvard’s collections, more discussion, more visits to original works of art. 

Anthony Komaroff, M.D., Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

• How should the Medical School use the Internet to disseminate health information to the general public?
• Outside the U.S.? To illiterate populations?
• Ability to use audio/video streaming to new populations increases HMS’s opportunity
• Centralization of medical care leads to need to centralize information
• 20-30% of patients post-heart attack are not getting appropriate follow-up care. Who keeps doctors up to date? Other doctors, but also patients, with information from other sources.
• Need to get out information about necessary lifestyle changes
• Cybercondriacs: more people use Internet for health information
• Doctors understand misinformation online, but need to understand better, and use, the good online info
• Systems for pushing new information on conditions, medications, procedures, to interested patients
• HMS website: some info, but not a lot.
• Partnership with Aetna to build IntelliHealth. New, large repository of health information
• We have responsibility to let world now about health and disease. 

Peter Bol, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

• What can we share, and what is our obligation to share?
• Benevolence: middle between self-interest and full idealism
• GIS: maps and geographical information, database of locations, datasets
• Chinese Historical GIS: map with layers of historical, political, etc. information.
• Free to use, open copyright
• Ability to see how Chinese history changes over time
• Expensive—so why not charge for it?
• Goes against mission if limited access
• Need to encourage expanded use for it to succeed 

Sidney Verba, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of Harvard University Library

• Library is incredible resource, open to the world, for visiting scholars
• New program, Harvard Open Collections Program, to make digital sources available
• Sets of “mini-collections” on various subjects
• Allows other students, researchers to use Library
• Virtual “repatriation” of sources
• Availability of original materials
• First use: collecting materials on history of women from around the University
• Much research interest
• Classroom need
• Excellent collection at Harvard
• Should large contribution of time and money be serving people beyond Harvard?
• We serve our purposes by serving the world
• Also has many internal benefits at the same time—do well by doing good
• Expensive to maintain, after being built
• Should it be fee-for-service? Trying not to limit access, and go against Library ethos 

Audience Questions 

What are the confidentiality concerns for online medical information?

·        Komaroff: Much use of encryption technologies, and no record of major failures

·        Q: Security vs. Privacy. Who has access?

·        Komaroff: Too much privacy can harm patients, no one has figured out right balance yet. 

Are we giving more online access than “off-line?”

• Verba: Particular information is available online. Now limited access to Widener, other libraries, but open to study 

Will digital divide truly be bridged in a decade (as Komaroff stated)?

• Komaroff: Excess capacity and improvements, simplifications in hardware necessary. 

What about outward teaching, as opposed to just information? Teaching is what shapes minds, and makes the most difference.

• Verba: Yes, discussion here has been limited. Outward teaching is delicate subject, which Harvard is approaching. Professional schools are experimenting with this first. Major issue, gradually being addressed.
• Bol: Harvard@Home does public teaching. Online courses
• Lydon: Not just courseware, but experience and interaction of teaching, conversation
• Bol: Problem of scale

Opening Remarks by John Deighton, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School

• What is a brand?
• What does the Internet do to brand building?
• Business models of brand building. 

Remarks by John Quelch, Senior Associate Dean and Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School

• What is a brand?
• Identifies qualities and characteristics of a product, not otherwise detectable.
• The Harvard brand – more than an identifier, also a symbol of quality and representation of meaning.
• Importance of not simply what the brand represents, but more importantly the meaning of the institution given its heritage and strategy for the future. The brand then evolves from these values. 

Remarks by Nancy Koehn, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School

• Heritage of the Harvard brand:
• Late 1800s/Early 1900s – period of industrial growth, economic expansion.
• Harvard incorporated this societal change. Astounding and intense growth of the university. This physical growth had a corresponding emotional growth as Harvard’s perception of itself changed/developed.
• University developed a clearer sense of its mission (correlation of identity, brand and mission).
• Current climate and situation of the Harvard brand:
• Dealing with the changes brought on by Harvard’s heritage:
• Shift from Ivory Tower to a part of a community
• Importance of global celebrity for the University
• Increase in the breadth of institutional objectives: social, political, economic, intellectual
• Importance of the market mentality: education as a product, importance of University business model, programs for non-degree students, focus on financial resources of the university,
• Increase in demographic and ethnic diversity of the students
• Time of great change for the University.
• Greatest level of university involvement in the community and the world. 

Remarks by Terry Fisher, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

• Harvard’s brand strategy may be analogous to Ferrari’s. Characteristics of Ferrari:
• Scarcity of product
• Quality of product
• Aggressive pursuit of companies that infringe on the trademark, including pursuit of “trade dress infringement”
• Licensing – profit maximizing. Goal of creating indicia of prestige.
• Today, trademark law has increased the number of activities that constitute infringement.
• Traditionally, Harvard’s strategy has been similar:
• Limit the number of people who can come to Harvard
• Keep high quality
• Office policing uses of the “Harvard” term in media
• Licensing
• Logical question: Should Harvard behave in this fashion? 

Audience Questions 

Is Harvard really trying to follow in Ferrari’s footsteps, or it just acting defensively?

• Quelch: Impediments to stretching brand names into new areas. Risk of unfamiliarity, lack of credibility, detract from value of the historical brand value 

Remarks by Jeffrey Rayport, CEO of Marketspace

• Multiple uses in media blurs the (1) marketability of the brand, and (2) the promise of the brand
• Impact of Internet necessarily involves the brand’s growth
• The Harvard brand has 2 effects:
• Generic effect – gives legitimacy, credibility to the product
• Specific effect – Promise, prestige, well-run
• Importance of looking at what exactly the brand name conveys, and then extending that to how the Internet will affect the brand promise of Harvard in the future.
• 4 definitions of the university
• Education of people, product is the student
• Content creation, invention, source of knowledge, product is the idea
• Repository, place of storage, product is the library (for example), museum, etc.
• Community, physical location with admittance requirements
• Harvard performs at least those 4 tasks.
• What does the Internet mean for the above 4 tasks?
• Why do we need library when the Internet offers another method of repository?
• The Internet is itself a community
• Originality of IP: Internet amplifies IP
• The Internet can educate more widely, though there are limits.
• Which of those 4 elements of brand promise should we bet on for the future? 

Dilution of the Harvard brand:

• Making lectures available over the Internet: 
• Advantages: exchange of knowledge, joint classes, web-driven multi-education teaching – online casebooks with discussion, course materials on the Internet in modifiable form (html, not pdf) encourages modification and appropriation,
• Disadvantage: corrosive to the Harvard brand, undermine variations of the Harvard business model.
• Terry Fisher favors social beneficial option, rather than the profit maximizing option (protecting the Harvard brand) 

How do we maintain (or increase) brand value while remaining true to the resources that we have?   

Harvard’s Business Model:

• Depends upon the donations from the Harvard community.
• Correlation between the intensity of the education while on campus and the proclivity of financial support after leaving campus
• Alternative business models depend on diffusing the intensity of the culture. 

Free flow of information may be essential for the brand name, however protection of the brand name requires protection.  

Issue of de-branding individuals who effectively dilute the Harvard brand. 

Terry Fisher:

• Ambiguity: What is the goal behind brand management?
• Profit maximization – requirement of defining profit maximization
• Public interest – ambiguity of ‘public interest’ definition
• Should we focus on seizing revenue streams, or on creating new modes of education to serve the public good?

John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society

• Came to HLS for Internet law. Took Nesson’s Evidence class. Prevailed in the end.

•  Architecture matters—both legal code and actual code—in shaping our environment.
• Surmise why you are on the panel?
• What is the best-case scenario for the development of the Harvard network?
• What is your worst nightmare? 

Jean Camp, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government

• KSG associate professor. Here because of interest in security and privacy. Concerned with human autonomy. Harvard is: a spiritual creature, a company, an endowment, a brand, a media conglomerate.  

Ami Vora, Harvard College ’03 and President, Harvard Computer Society

• Maybe a last-ditch effort to get a student involved. Worst case: not so bad because things are already entrenched. More regulation of what we (students?) can do on the Harvard network. FAS acts as an ISP so that students have to take responsibility for their actions. FAS could cut off access. They could prevent putting things online. Password-protect everything. Reduce student ability to take advantage of the technology that should be available.  

• Palfrey: Technology at Harvard in terms of offensive and defensive situation. Offensive: using it to do something. Defensive: preventing stuff. 

• Vora: Best case is offensive. Finding ways to innovate. Don’t just mirror the traditional way that courses are taught. Take advantage of the possibilities. We aren’t taking advantage of them yet. Internet not just a (very very good) repository. 

Dan Moriarty, Assistant Provost and Chief Information Officer

• Here b/c active involvement in development/management of HU network. Worst case: [Stats: 5 million email messages a day, 20,000 web pages, tons and tons of data, technology being adopted throughout the university.] Integration of technology and the technology doesn’t work at some point. Something breaks. It is now too central for us to be able to handle it breaking. Just keeping it working is a challenge. Have to balance adding in new technology against maintaining stability. Best case: Harvard’s technology architecture is flexible and nimble. Imagine everyone across the University creating it. Making it capable of handling that creativity quickly. Can support the University’s goals going forward. 

• Palfrey: Dan Moriarty manages a large University-wide team. 

Esther Dyson, Chairman of EDventure Holdings Inc.

• Student when best technology was a telephone and a mechanical typewriter. Learned about computers and the Internet after Harvard. Involved with the architecture of the Internet itself. (Chairwoman of ICANN board). Harvard an experience, a credential, an education (for some), a network of friends. Experience can be vastly improved with a good infrastructure.

• First, does it work? Can you get access, can you control your personal data, etc. Balance between freedom of movement and security from being watched. This is the minimum. The platform.
• Worst case: it can track you and take advantage of you.
• It can create and support the tools for online communities within the community to support themselves. The University shouldn’t do too much itself. Should help professors and students to do it. You don’t want total openness (because what is cool about being Harvard then?), but you don’t want to totally wall us off (if we aren’t already). 

• Palfrey: Defensive side of equation: monitoring us, system might break, minimum privacy standards. Scott Bradner online interview (on conference site). Is there really a trade-off between security and openness or might there be a third way?  

• Camp: Stating the question as open or closed suggests we know what our options are. Open to whom? Open to students? But the courses shouldn’t be open. Students here need the intellectual risk provided by the Harvard environment. Keeping it closed makes it safer. If you want to build a good learning environment you need a safe learning environment. We don’t want alum community open b/c that is the brand issue. Also the alums are the donors. They want to serve HU and the world at the same time. Open basic information to the world in order to make what happens at Harvard help the world. We can’t make the same decision for every student.  

• Palfrey: It is Dan’s job to make these decisions. Dan is thinking about them as concrete decisions.  

• Moriarty: Two faces of security are protecting personal identity, privacy, right to access info. Second, the ability to intervene when something bad starts happening. Do watch for compromised machines, DOS attacks, sniffers. People appreciate that kind of monitoring. Openness is where the choice comes in. Terry Fisher may have the right to decide whether a class of his is sent over the Internet vs. whether it happens without his consent. What if students enrolling in HLS believe that their comments in class are going to be a matter of public record? You need to allow for personal choice in these things.  

• Palfrey: If we are concerned about security at University level, we sometimes need to know which student did what on the network. What about a policy that lets us do that? Policy: We have the ability to track you. We’ll track you when we do need to. It is not going to be established exactly which instances in which we’ll do it.  

• Vora: You need that policy. You (a student) could be doing something that is compromising the entire network. Harvard has to avoid liability, so it has to know what students are doing in some situations. Students need to be able to trust that there is no Big Brother here. Not being tracked all the time. Have to trust that they are not using all the data they have about us. 

• Camp: Do you trust the whole University?  

• Vora: Do I have any choice? I agreed by enrolling.  

• Dyson: There is probably some fine print that guarantees some rights to students about when they can be tracked. Students should know whether they are being tracked and what rights they have. They’ll have to track the innocent to find the guilty. I don’t see that Harvard should be acting as parents for students. 

• Palfrey: We do get letters about DMCA compliance.  

• Moriarty: DCMA: we are a passive provider and we get protection from DMCA so that we aren’t liable for copyright infringement on network. But if notified we have to act on it. So we get notices from DMCA. We have to pursue those against students. Up until this year the number of notices served to Universities was quite small. The volume has gone up by an order of magnitude. It is a hassle to comply. Complying with these notices is a strain on the university. However if left unmanaged, the file-sharing applications have a lot of outbound traffic (b/c they act like servers sometimes even without their knowledge). Causes the network to degrade and is not providing the kind of service people expect.  

• Camp: Trust, P2P, students are serving content and the app is reselling the processing power on the network. Students get licensed software while they are at University. They continue to use it after they graduate. 

• Palfrey: Offensive side of using a network. Last session is a session about what we can do to implement these ideas. What are the best-case things we can do use our network? 

• Dyson: minimalist view. Very bottom-up. Not into going to class, but still got a wonderful education at Harvard. Harvard gives you much more than you can possibly take advantage of and you choose from it. The Internet is not the critical differentiator for Harvard. It is probably the students. Let people be creative. Let the professors come up with specific things. Let them come up with wonderful tools. Strategic differentiation using the Internet is not a great idea. What else are we trying to achieve? How can the Internet help me to do that thing better?  

• Palfrey: This is consistent with Bok, Summers.  

• Vora: This conference talks about social commitment. This is not how I think of Harvard. Harvard keeps resources for students. But people here seem to be saying that we need to share what we have with the outside. I think the openness is a great step. I share concerns about branding. I share concerns about resource availability for students. But one of the ways that Harvard can be open is through the Internet. Let more outsiders get into the community through the Internet. Put our stuff out there.  

• Camp: Transform the way I teach with the Internet. More than putting my slides on the Internet. I’d like to have the intro class out there and have a sense of what my students are getting. Like to see the evidence class linked to the Texas death penalty project. Use the real problems in the world as examples for class. Really work on those problems through the Internet. Not just Harvard giving, but Harvard getting too. Transformation of teaching. 

• Palfrey: To what extent is Harvard really free to define its policies? To what extent is it bound from the outside?  

• Moriarty: In many cases we are free. But there are also a lot of compliance issues. One major change is the rise in demands on research institutions from the outside. The MIT open courseware initiative is a terrific initiative. One of the things you realize is that the intellectual property that comprises your course, you may not own any of it or may own none of it. It may be very difficult to open it up.  

Audience Questions 

NYT “Pentagon plans computer system that would peek at personal info of Americans.” A system that would ferret out terrorism by monitoring. If the U.S. government asks for the student data from Harvard, how should/would Harvard respond?

• Dyson: Hope that Harvard would say no. Gets tougher when they single out specific people who fit racial/ethnic profiles. What do you do then?
• Vora: I don’t know how Harvard should react to that. I hope they don’t comply with that. I think it would be bad for the academic and social institution that Harvard is. This is morally wrong to reduce people’s privacy to this extent. But what happens if they don’t comply?
• Moriarty:  There is no University-level monitoring. This is not happening. But when the university is served with a warrant or asked to cooperate with an investigation, we cooperate. We do what is required when asked to do it. But it is different when it is preemptive and selective.  

Harvard is decentralized (each tub on its own bottom and in terms of disciplinary distinctions). But we have Harvard.edu. How can the .edu domain bring things together?

• Dyson: Way overestimating the importance of the domain name. It is a domain name, not an architecture. The structure is what you do with it internally. It doesn’t implicitly mean that everything is all together.
• Moriarty: One principle of Harvard’s architecture is that it is collaboratively planned. It is distributed, decentralized. We have thousands and thousands of domain names.
• Nesson: I registered the domain name “fairharvard.org” but had to give it up. I also registered “unfairharvard.org”. Harvard wanted me to give them up. Engage in active imagination: there is a big educational, broad- and narrowcasting network: do you see Harvard as having a part of that?
• Moriarty: We need to let it happen. The issues that the technology is raising are about the mission of Harvard and what it should be and how we can use the new technology to further it. The technologists have to look ahead and anticipate it to make it possible for it to happen when the Harvard thinkers want it to.  

Will the convergence of the Internet mean that students will not want Harvard’s technology? Harvard wireless policy.

• Vora: Undergraduate houses getting wireless access in common areas. You can have a study group in the dining hall. Also being put in a lot of the classrooms. Professors turn it off during class. It is not very useful then. CS buildings are completely wired.
• Palfrey: Esther, give free consulting to Harvard on wireless policy.
• Dyson: Wireless has no bad side. If you want to use it you should either not worry about security or make sure you have a secure channel. Having wireless freely available is a gift to humankind. ISPs should see that it is to their advantage to let more people on. I’d put it everywhere. Tell the professors to be more interesting in class. We run conferences and if the speaker is really boring, people just chat online. Having a wireless net in while there is a lecture/talk happening it creates an interesting back channel. For discussions, it makes it possible to tee up the questions to get the people who are on topic or to know what people are talking about. 

Personal information control. How has the Harvard network been architected to handle archiving of personal information about students. What is Harvard’s policy? What should it be?

• Moriarty: Reality is complicated because there are local implementations at each school and differing policies. The only area of interest is the question applied to personal machines. University has a pretty thoughtful policy on the protection of privacy of student information. If Ami were to use the backup service, that would come with some pretty high protections based in the privacy policy. The real issue is what the people who have access to the information who do it.
• Camp: Crimson cash—you put money on your ID card—you can get one that is anonymous. The anonymous card does not give you key card access.
• Palfrey: wrap up. State one question: How can Harvard’s technology architecture help us become more of a community? This panel has let us know why the architecture matters. Thanks.