BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Upcoming events and digital media // February 9, 2011

[TUESDAY 2/15] Berkman Luncheon Series: "Whose choice? ICTs for “development” and the lives people value" with Dorothea Kleine, Lecturer at the UNESCO Chair/Centre in ICT4D, Royal Holloway, University of London (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/02/kleine)

[WEDNESDAY 2/16] Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group at MIT, with Leah Buechley of the MIT Media Lab on "LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardwareʼs Long Tail is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities"; Yashomati Ghosh of the Berkman Center; and Dave Karpf of Rutgers University on "Don't Think of an Online Elephant: Explaining the Dearth of Political Infrastructure Online in America" (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/cyberscholars/2011/03/mit)

[2/19-20] Students for Free Culture Conference 2011 // New York City (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2011/02/freeculture)

[SAVE THE DATE 2/25] "The Googlization of Everything" with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything & Professor at the University of Virginia (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2011/02/vaidhyanathan)

Special note: Tomorrow evening (2/10) Berkman Faculty Co-Director John Palfrey will moderate a conversation with a terrific panel of media theorists and scholars, including Berkman Center fellow Jeffrey Schnapp, on "Digital Humanities 2.0: Emerging Paradigms in the Arts and Humanities in the Information Age." The event is presented by the Humanities Center at Harvard and the Dean of Arts and Sciences. Open to the public, though seating is limited. We hope you can attend. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~humcentr/conferences/index.shtml


[TUESDAY 2/15] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on ICTs FOR "DEVELOPMENT" AND THE LIVES PEOPLE VALUE
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2/15/11, 12:30 pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required to ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu

Topic: Whose choice? ICTs for “development” and the lives people value
Guests: Dorothea Kleine, Lecturer at the UNESCO Chair/Centre in ICT4D, Royal Holloway, University of London

Recognising that ICTs are powerful tools shaping people’s everyday lives, practitioners, policy-makers and academics in the ICT for development (ICT4D) field engage with these technologies in the name of “development”. Yet understandings of development differ and too often remain implicit and removed from participatory processes involving the intended users. Techno-euphoria and the focus on universal access distracts from the very individual choices people should have to integrate technologies in their everyday practices (or not). Working with Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach and its view of development as freedom, this open conversation will discuss the diverse and potentially conflicting ideologies embedded in state ICT policies and technical artefacts and the intended and unintended consequences. It will explore potential technological and process innovations which could lead to more participatory decision-making on policy and technology design – an area where all countries can be classified as “developing”.

About Dorothea

Dorothea Kleine is Lecturer in Development Geography at the UNESCO Chair/Centre in ICT4D at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work focuses on the relationship between notions of “development”, choice and technology. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with the IBG) and has worked as a consultant/advisor to EuropeAid, DFID, GTZ and to NGOs. She is the author of Surfen in Birkenstocks (Oekom, 2005), a book on the potential of the Internet for the Fair Trade movement and has recently been managing action research using smartphones to assist socially and environmentally responsible consumption choices (www.fairtracing.org). She is currently completing her new book, Technologies of Choice (MIT Press) which offers an operationalisation of the capabilities approach for evaluation and project design in ICT4D.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/02/kleine


[WEDNESDAY 2/16] CYBERSCHOLARS at MIT
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2/16/11, MIT Media Lab, Room E14-525
RSVP is required to susannes@mit.edu

The "Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group" is a forum for fellows and affiliates of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, Yale Law School Information Society Project, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University to discuss their ongoing research.

This month's presenters will include: Leah Buechley of the MIT Media Lab on "LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardwareʼs Long Tail is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities"; Yashomati Ghosh of the Berkman Center; and Dave Karpf of Rutgers University on "Don't Think of an Online Elephant: Explaining the Dearth of Political Infrastructure Online in America". For abstracts and more information, visit the event website.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/cyberscholars/2011/03/mit


[2/19-20] STUDENTS FOR FREE CULTURE CONFERENCE 2011
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2/19-20/11, New York City
Organized by Students for Free Culture, Co-Sponsored by Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Register @ http://conf11.freeculture.org/about/

The Students for Free Culture Conference is a gathering of student activists, intellectuals, artists, hackers, and generally interested people to discuss the latest issues in the free cultural world, especially with a focus on student involvement and participation. The conference will feature keynotes from the creators of Diaspora, Pablo Ortellado, and Susan Crawford, as well as panels on remix culture, open education, and fashion and copyright. The second day is an unconference where anyone is invited to pose a panel, discussion, gathering, or hack session. Registration is pay-what-you-want, and travel funding is available by request.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://conf11.freeculture.org


[SAVE THE DATE 2/25] THE GOOGLIZATION OF EVERYTHING
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2/25/11, 12:00pm, Harvard Law School
Free and open to the public; RSVP is required to ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu

Topic: The Googlization of Everything
Guests: Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything & Professor at the University of Virginia

Siva Vaidhyanathan will discuss his new book, "The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)." From Siva: "Google dominates the World Wide Web. There was never an election to determine the Web's rulers. No state appointed Google its proxy, its proconsul, or viceroy. Google just stepped into the void when no other authority was willing or able to make the Web stable, usable, and trustworthy. This was a quite necessary step at the time. The question is whether Google's dominance is the best situation for the future of our information ecosystem."

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2011/02/vaidhyanathan


OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
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2/10: Digital Humanities 2.0: Emerging Paradigms in the Arts and Humanities in the Information Age, featuring Berkman Fellow Jeffrey Schnapp and Berkman Faculty co-director John Palfrey // Harvard Humanities Center (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~humcentr/conferences/index.shtml)

2/10: Large-Scale Digital Humanities Scholarship: Some Initial Experiments // Tufts University (http://www.cs.tufts.edu/colloquia/current/?event=728)

2/14: Robin Chase on Excess Capacity: The Source for the Next Wave of Innovation // IBM Research (http://ctr4ss-robinchase.eventbrite.com/)

3/3: Technology and Regulation Symposium -- Technology: Transforming the Regulatory Endeavor // Berkeley Law School, Berkeley, CA (http://www.law.berkeley.edu/9842.htm)

3/25: Fifth Annual Law & Information Society Symposium: Mobile Devices, Location Technologies & Shifting Values // Fordham University (http://law2.fordham.edu/ihtml/cal-2uwcp-calendar_viewitem.ihtml?idc=1110...)

4/6-7: Beyond Books: News, Literacy, Democracy and America's Libraries // MIT Center for Future Civic Media (http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Biblionews)


DIGITAL MEDIA: Watch and Listen
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Did you miss this week's luncheon talk? Catch up with Berkman videos, podcasts, pictures, and dig in to our archive at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive.

-LEWIS HYDE on "Common as Air," with response by ROBERT DARNTON (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2011/hyde)

-BRIAN KERNIGHAN on "Why (In)numeracy Matters" (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2011/02/kernigh...)


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BERKMAN CALENDAR & UPCOMING EVENTS PREVIEW
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See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, conferences, and more: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events. All of our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.


ABOUT US
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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.