Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
March 11, 2009 // Upcoming events and digital media

To receive this Berkman Center weekly events and digital media newsletter, subscribe here: http://cyber.harvard.edu/getinvolved#mailinglists

Please join us next Tuesday for a special event with Temple Law Professor David Post, who will talk about his latest publication, "In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace". More information is here: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/03/post

[1] [TUESDAY 3/17/09] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "The role of non-monetary incentives in crowdsourcing and social production projects" with Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/03/howe)

[2] [TUESDAY 3/17/09] "In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace" with Professor David Post (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/03/post)

[3] [WEDNESDAY 3/18/09] "The Probability of Privacy" with Paul Ohm, Associate Professor of Law and Telecommunications, University of Colorado Law School (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/03/ohm)

[TUESDAY] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on NON-MONETARY INCENTIVES IN CROWDSOURCING
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3/17/09, 12:30 PM ET, Berkman Center Conference Room
RSVP is required (rsvp@cyber.harvard.edu).

Topic: The role of non-monetary incentives in crowdsourcing and social production projects
Guest: Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine

Cory Doctorow popularized the notion of “whuffie”—a reputation-based currency that took the place of money—in his science fiction book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Web 2.0 conventional wisdom—promulgated by this speaker, among others—is that whuffie and other non-monetary incentives fuel a vast portion of the collaborative, productive activity taking place on the Internet. But what little empirical data exists shows that money plays a greater role than this somewhat Utopian vision allows. Is Whuffie the next coin of the realm, just wishful thinking or a combination of both.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/03/howe

[TUESDAY] PROFESSOR DAVID POST on IN SEARCH OF JEFFERSON'S MOOSE: NOTES ON THE STATE OF CYBERSPACE
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3/17/09, 5:00 PM ET
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School
Free and Open to the Public
Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=60051726804

Topic: In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace
Guest: Professor David Post

Who governs the Internet, and how? What kind of law does it have, what kind of law should it have, and who will make that law? David G. Post will be discussing these questions and his recently-published book, In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (Oxford), which looks at these questions through Jefferson's eyes, re-creating Jefferson’s encyclopedia of the New World ("Notes on the State of Virginia," 1786), but this time for cyberspace. What kind of a “place” is it? How does it work? How did it grow as fast as it did? What kind of new things, and what kind of old things, are out there? How did they get there, and how do they get from one place to another? What kinds of communities form there? What principles should guide our law-making efforts, and the design of our law-making institutions, in a global place like this? (And along the way, he tries to figure out why Jefferson had a moose shipped to him in Paris while he was serving as US minister to France and mounted in the lobby of his residence. What was he up to?)

What people are saying about the book...

“Brilliant - and a joy to read. The book of a career: sweeping in scope, without dropping a stitch of detail.” -Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Berkman Center Co-founder

"The book is an entertaining and thoughtful discussion of the intellectual struggles at the founding of the American republic, and how they parallel dilemmas about the nature of the Internet." -Harry Lewis, Berkman Fellow and former Dean of Harvard College

This event will be webcast live. For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/03/post

[WEDNESDAY] THE PROBABILITY OF PRIVACY with PAUL OHM
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3/18/09, 12:00, Maxwell Dworkin Hall 119
Hosted and co-sponsored by the Center for Research on Computation and Society

Topic: The Probability of Privacy
Guest: Paul Ohm, Associate Professor of Law and Telecommunications, University of Colorado Law School

Nearly every data privacy regulation separates information into two categories: sensitive and non-sensitive. Often, the rules dole out special treatment for those who transform sensitive into non-sensitive information through anonymization—the elimination of personal identifiers like names and social security numbers. For example, to satisfy regulators, Google anonymizes data in its search query database after nine months and health researchers aggregate statistics before publishing them.

Two recent, newsworthy events have upended our understanding of the privacy-protecting power of anonymization. America Online and Netflix each released millions of anonymized records containing the secrets of hundreds of thousands of users. In both cases, to the surprise of all, researchers were able to “deanonymize” or “reidentify” some of the people in the data with ease.

In part by studying these events, Computer Scientists have recently taken giant strides in developing theories of anonymization and reidentification. Through this research, none of which has been rigorously imported into legal scholarship until now, they have concluded that the utility and anonymity of data are connected. The only way to anonymize a database perfectly is to strip all of the information from it, and any database which is useful is also imperfectly anonymous. This profoundly important result will do no less than reshape every privacy law and regulation and revolutionize every privacy-related policy debate.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/03/ohm

OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
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[1] 3/11/09 "Connected Publics: Power and Politics in a Networked Age" with Benkler, Turkle, Jasanoff, and more (http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/connectedpublics.htm)

[2] 3/11/09 “Measuring our Political Leaders” with Prof. D. Sunshine Hillygus and Stan Greenberg (http://content.ksg.harvard.edu/leadership/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=1&extmode=view&extid=115)

[3] 3/17/09 Harvard Law School Journal of Law and Technology (JOLT) Symposium "Delivering Medicines to the Developing World" (http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/symposium/)

[4] 3/21-3/22/09 Register now for the LibrePlanet Conference at Harvard, organized by the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/associate/meetings/2009/)

[5] 4/4/09 "Symposium to Explore the Future of Digital Collections" (http://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/reference/archive/2009/02/16/library-2-0-symposium-to-explore-the-future-of-digital-collections.aspx)

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.harvard.edu/interactive.

-RADIO BERKMAN: Democracy Mao! - The Web and Political Reform in China (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/podcasts/radioberkman112)

-CYBERSCHOLARS: Cybernetics and Revolution - Eden Medina (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2009/02/medina), Platform Studies and the Atari VCS (Atari 2600) - Nick Montfort (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2009/02/montfort), Video Games and Pro-Social Development - Gene Koo (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2009/02/koo)

-BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES with REBECCA MACKINNON on "The Tao of the Web: China and the future of the Internet" (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheons/2009/02/mackinnon)

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BERKMAN CALENDAR
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See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, conferences, and more: http://cyber.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.harvard.edu.