Monday, June 11, 6:00 pm
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School (Map)
Free and open to the public
Whether your interest is in preserving Internet freedom and opportunity, changing the economic power structure, new challenges for cyberlaw, or just turning the tables on privacy-violating business models and practices, there will be plenty to hear and discuss at Doc Searls' talk, "The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge" — also the title of his new book from Harvard Business Review Press. The book reports on progress by dozens of companies and development projects fostered by ProjectVRM, which Doc launched at the Berkman Center in 2006.
Doc will share progress toward a near future where individuals can—
- * Control the flow and use of personal data
- * Build their own loyalty programs
- * Dictate their own terms of service
- * Tell whole markets what they want, how they want it, where and when they should be able to get it, and how much they are willing to pay
— without yielding their own privacy, and outside of any one system's silo.
About Doc
Doc Searls served as a Berkman Fellow from 2006 to 2010, during which he launched and led ProjectVRM, which encourages the development of new tools by which individuals create and control their relationships with companies and other organizations. (VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management, a term coined as a counterpart to CRM, for Customer Relationship Management.)
Doc co-wrote (with fellow Berkmanian David Weinberger and two others) the 2000 bestseller The Cluetrain Manifesto, and has been an editor with Linux Journal since 1996, covering free and open source software. For that work he received a Google-O'Reilly Award for Best Communicator in 2005. In The World is Flat, author and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, calls Doc "one of the most respected technology writers in America."