Berkman West Celebration featuring Jonathan Zittrain on "Minds for Sale"

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University fondly invites you to attend our third annual celebration of our friends, affiliates and partners on the left coast at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Berkman Luncheon Series

Kudunomics: Information and Property Rights in the Weightless Economy

Sam Bowles, Santa Fe Institute, Behavioral Sciences Program

Sam Bowles will discuss how an evolutionary model and computer simulations will show how systems of property rights might respond to the challenges of the weightless economy.

Law Lab Speaker Series

Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems

Nathan Eagle, Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute

Petabytes of data about human movements, transactions, and communication patterns are continuously being generated by everyday technologies such as mobile phones and credit cards. This unprecedented volume of information facilitates a novel set of research questions applicable to a wide range of development issues. Nathan Eagle will discuss. This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET.

Berkman Luncheon Series

What Information Was

David Weinberger, Berkman Center

David Weinberger will present an informal sketch of a direction for understanding the dominance of information as concept, metaphor, etc., suggesting that we leaped into "information" because it reflected a long-held but squirrely metaphysics. There will be lots of time for open discussion. This event will be webcast live at 12:30PM ET.

Internet Companions: technical and social issues.

Yorick Wilks, Oxford Internet Institute

If a Companion were to become the internet repository for someone’s whole life, to be a “cognitive prosthesis” for dealing with their own life’s records, what safeguards are essential, both technical and legal, concerning access to such a repository during the owner’s life and after?

Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group

Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group: A Digital Democracy Debate

The Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group will convene at Yale University. This workshop offers a forum for debating the signal claim of Matthew Hindman that digital democracy, as most online commentators know it, is a myth.

Berkman Luncheon Series

From Broadcast to Broadband: Redesigning public media for the 21st Century

Ellen Goodman of Rutgers University School of Law & Jake Shapiro, Executive Director, Public Radio Exchange (PRX)

Ellen and Jake Shapiro lead a discussion on how within the broader story of media transformation generally, there’s an important role played by public broadcasting as it also transitions to a more expansive identity as “public media.”

CRCS Lunch Seminar: Programming with Authorization and Audit

Jeff Vaughan, Harvard CRCS

Jeff will introduce describes Aura, a family of programing languages, which integrate functional programming, access control via authorization logic, automatic audit logging, and confidentially via encryption.

Berkman Luncheon Series

Walled Gardens: Opening the Discussion

Elizabeth Goodman, UC Berkeley School of Information

Elizabeth Goodman proposes that discussing how urban gardeners build, maintain, and understand their relationships to each other and to their walls will help us rethink this often-used but under-considered metaphor.

Berkman Luncheon Series

Mapping Main Street

Experiments in Estrangement at the Intersection of Social Science, Art, Design, Public Media and the Digital Humanities

Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through a dynamic visualization of stories, data, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. With this luncheon talk, the creators of Mapping Main Street hope to gain specific feedback on how to further develop the project as an interdisciplinary research initiative between between the social sciences, art, design, public media and digital humanities.

Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women

The Berkman Center at Harvard University, in coordination with the Center for Research on Computation and Society, is putting together a Ruby on Rails workshop for women on October 16th and 17th.

VRooM Boston 2009

As with earlier Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) workshops, this is a free unconference, organized on the open space model. Participants choose the topics, move those topics forward in open discussion, and share progress with the whole group at the end of each day...

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

a book talk with Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

By now the perils of posting indiscreet photographs or information on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace are well known -- jobs are lost or denied, reputations diminished, and families destroyed by a single click. But the problem is far greater than this, argues Viktor Mayer-Schönberger in "DELETE: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age."

Web of Ideas

What Information Was

David Weinberger

David Weinberger will present an informal sketch of a direction for understanding the dominance of information as concept, metaphor, etc., suggesting that we leaped into "information" because it reflected a long-held but squirrely metaphysics. There will be lots of time for open discussion.

Cloud Law, Finance 3.0, and Digital Institutions: A Report from the Berkman Center's Law Lab

John Clippinger, Urs Gasser, and Oliver Goodenough

The Berkman Center Law Lab is a project devoted to investigating and harness the varied forces — evolutionary, social, psychological, neurological and economic — that shape the role of law and social norms as they enable cooperation, governance and entrepreneurial innovation. Through open observational and experimental web-based platforms and open source software, the Law Lab is seeking to understand and develop new digital institutions and research tools that can foster innovation and deepen our understanding of trust, transparency and human cooperation.

Berkman Luncheon Series

Network Recorders and Social Enrichment of Television

Herkko Hietanen, Berkman Fellow

Television recorders are going online. Device manufacturers are starting to produce consumer devices and software that can be connected to Internet at consumers' homes. New models of innovation are starting to emerge, and this talk will propose the social enrichment of TV offerings may prove to create disruptive innovation to an industry accustomed to control the consumption of content.

Communication and Human Development: The Freedom Connection?

Amartya Sen, Michael Spence, Yochai Benkler, Clotilde Fonseca

Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Michael Spence joined Information and Communication Technology (ICT) experts Yochai Benkler and Clotilde Fonseca in a public discussion of the role of communication and ICTs in human development, growth and poverty reduction. Michael Best moderated the panel, which was part of the International Development Research Centre's second Harvard Forum.

OneWebDay: Working Space Mash-up brainstorming session, Party, and More

Join Berkman Center Research Associate Tim Hwang and Research Assistant Catherine White for a session open to all to discuss this year's theme: One Web. For all.

Transforming Scholarly Communication

Lee Dirks - Director, Education & Scholarly Communication / Microsoft External Research

In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. This talk will review the elements of this vision and explain the need for semantic-oriented computing by exploring eResearch projects that have successfully applied relevant technologies—and anticipated impact on scholarly communication as we know it today.

Berkman Luncheon Series

Broadband Internet for Eastern Africa: Policy and Legal Issues

Professor Calestous Juma, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

The launching of Seacom’s fiber optic cable in July was the single most important infrastructure investment in eastern Africa since the construction of the Uganda Railway, then dubbed "The Lunatic Express." This talk explores the implications of this development for Africa’s capacity to expand the global market for access devices, creation of content, and development of markets. It identifies key policy challenges and opportunities facing Africa countries arising from the introduction of broadband Internet.