Internet and Democracy

The Internet and Democracy Project is an initiative that will examine how the Internet influences democratic norms and modes, including its impact on civil society, citizen media, government transparency, and the rule of law, with a focus on the Middle East.

Global Network Initiative

In partnership with the Center for Democracy and Technology and Business for Social Responsibility, in addition to leading human rights groups, academic institutions, socially responsible investment firms, and internet and communications technology (ICT) companies — including Google, Vodafone, France Telecom, Microsoft, TeliaSonera, and Yahoo! — the Berkman Center has participated in an initiative to protect and advance individuals' rights to free expression and privacy on the Internet through the creation of a set of principles and supporting mechanisms for ICT companies.

H2O

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with support from the Harvard Law School Library, has developed a Web-based platform — H2O — for creating, editing, organizing, consuming, and sharing course materials. With this capacity to develop countless customized electronic textbooks, we envision building a corpus of open-source materials available for dynamic use by faculty and students at Harvard and beyond. Piloted with legal casebooks, H2O has been received with broad approval in Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s Torts class, with the planned expansion into a number of additional courses in the 2012-2013 school year.

Law Lab

The Law Lab is a multidisciplinary research initiative and collaborative network of University, nonprofit and industry partners. Its mission is to investigate 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...

Input to ICANN Accountability and Transparency Review Process

The Berkman Center conducted an independent, exploratory study analyzing ICANN’s decision-making processes and communications with stakeholders.

Interoperability

In early June 2012, Urs Gasser and John Palfrey released Interoperability: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems. The book is inspired by their 2005 study and paper—“Breaking Down Digital Barriers: When and How Information and ICT Interoperability Drives Innovation”—which examined the relationship between interoperability and innovation in the ICT environment. The book builds a theory of interoperability, and then illustrates how that theory works and why interoperability is relevant for consumers, companies, governments, and the public.

Youth and Media

Born This Way Foundation Partnership

The Born This Way Foundation has partnered with the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The California Endowment and The Berkman Center at Harvard to explore the best ways to reach youth and create a new culture of kindness, bravery, acceptance and empowerment.

Cybersecurity

Since spring 2010, under the guidance of Professor Jack Goldsmith, the Berkman Center team has been developing and maintaining the Cybersecurity wiki, which houses an evolving set of more than 350 foundational articles, annotations, literature, and other resources on cybersecurity, broadly-defined.

E-Publishing Models

With the generous support of the Revson Foundation, the E-Publishing Models Project is focused on exploring current issues associated with digital publishing business models and access to electronically published materials in libraries.