Looking Inward

The Internet presents opportunities for building community within large, geographically diffuse institutions. Harvard has tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff spread out among numerous schools and, in fact, multiple cities. Even our most senior administrators and faculty sometimes struggle to keep tabs on the innovative work that their colleagues are doing at sister institutions within the University.

Is it possible for the Internet to help address the challenge of building community at Harvard? What Internet-based experiments are underway at the University to improve communication, collaboration, teaching, and learning within Harvard? Can we improve the educational experience for our students by communicating via the Internet with people outside of what we have traditionally considered the Harvard community?

The purpose of this panel is to develop a sense of what it means to be part of the Harvard community in the digital age; what we're doing with the Internet to improve teaching, learning, and research at Harvard; and where the greatest promise lies for improvement in our work and life online at Harvard.

Looking Outward

The Internet enables vastly cheaper, faster means of communicating information to people far from Cambridge or Allston-Brighton or the Longwood Medical Area or Harvard's other physical spaces (the Arboretum, the Forest, Dumbarton Oaks, Italy, etc.). Every day, people from around the world send e-mail to members of the Harvard community and vice-versa; the hundreds of Harvard websites provide information, including free online courses and other material traditionally accessible only to those in residence at Harvard; and representatives of the University travel far and wide to share and apply their knowledge in person, often using Internet technologies to bring and then bring information back to those here at Harvard.

To what extent, if at all, should the University be focusing its resources to communicate with people who are not plausibly considered members of Harvard community? What are the most valuable ways in which we are doing so? What does this external focus mean for our libraries, our art museums, and keepers of others of Harvard's educational resources?

The purpose of this panel is to explore Harvard's role in the world outside our community and the ways in which the Internet is making our work outside Harvard all the richer and more effective.

Harvard's Brand on the Internet

Whether or not one agrees that Harvard has an obligation to share our knowledge and other assets with the world beyond our community, it's clear that the Harvard name has enormous power as a brand. Harvard is among the world's best-known academic institutions. For better or for worse, Harvard's faculty and students may be able to secure easier access to publishers, consulting work, or jobs than people at institutions with a less powerful brand. The Harvard brand also helps to attract attention to the research we conduct. As information becomes easier to convey using Internet technologies and more and more people from more and more backgrounds are now connected, the power of this brand grows far greater. Yet it's unclear who manages Harvard's brand or how we think about it in terms of its power and potential in this new digital era. Similarly, as Harvard's community members use the power of this brand to publish or do consulting work, questions about ownership and control as between the individuals and the University crop up quickly and persistently.

This panel is designed to dig into how the Harvard brand and the assets of its community members are managed, controlled, and disseminated in the digital age and what the hard questions posed for this issue mean for our future.

Fences and Gateways: Designing a Technology Architecture That Expresses Harvard's Values

The University has among its ranks several of the handful of core people who designed the Internet. These architects embedded values of openness, decentralization, and neighborliness into the very protocols of the Net, values that are now in question as the Net's uses have evolved from academic collaboration to commerce, file sharing, and instrument of protest and warfare. In this panel we bring together University decisionmakers attempting to develop enlightened policies responding to the demands occasioned by these new uses, and technologists who have been asked to change the network's architecture to suit those policies in turn. How much of our future lies in these decisions? What example might they set for others around the world, seeking to steward wisely control over their respective patches of this global network? Specifically, we will address the following:

To what extent can and should Harvard's network promote academic freedom by allowing the unquestioned free passage of bits?

To what extent can and should Harvard uphold legal and ethical norms by interceding to identify or prevent possibly illegal uses of the network?

To what extent should Harvard's network be a resource to the public generally as in free wireless access to passersby in Harvard Square?

As technology makes it feasible to share knowledge without boundary, what if any boundaries should remain?

More Questions