Educators, Activists, Entrepreneurs, and Lawyers Win Berkman Awards for Internet Innovation

A Berkman Award went to Esra’a Al Shafei of Bahrain, the 21-year-old director of student-owned MideastYouth.com, whose mission is “to inspire and provide young people with the freedom and opportunity of expression, and facilitate a fierce but respectful dialogue among the highly diverse youth of all sects, socio-economic backgrounds, and political and religious beliefs in the Middle East.” MideastYouth.com fights for social change with podcasts, blogs, social networks, and online video.

Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk received a Berkman Award for founding Connexions at Rice University. Connexions lets teachers share digital texts and learning materials, modify them, and disseminate them online using a Creative Commons license. This free, open-source platform is a building block towards a system of open educational resources.

John Breen was recognized with a Berkman Award for creating FreeRice.com. FreeRice asks site users to answer multiple-choice vocabulary questions and, for every correct answer, donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. According to the website, over 27 billion grains of rice have been distributed thus far.

Carl Malamud received a Berkman Award for creating Public.Resource.Org. Malamud is making US case law and government documents freely available online. He has also made images from the Smithsonian freely available on the Flickr photo sharing site and pushed to get broadcast-quality video of all congressional committee hearings posted online by the end of the 110th Congress. He is working with the National Technical Information Service to digitize and put NTIS’ multimedia online. Malamud is making the work of governments more transparent and providing citizens around the world with greater access to legal information.

A Berkman Award was given to Noah Samara, the Ethiopian satellite expert who founded WorldSpace, whose satellite network provides radio and data services to Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Europe. His work has been cited as a major conceptual influence on XM satellite radio. WorldSpace was one of the most innovative uses of communications satellites when it was launched. In addition to the commercial satellite radio and data service offerings, Mr. Samara has provided the leadership to leverage the project to provide information and entertainment services to people in extremely rural parts of Africa and Asia.

The Berkman Center gave its highest honor, an award for pro bono service, to Jeffrey Cunard and Bruce Keller of Debevoise & Plimpton. Two of the leading Internet lawyers in the world, Cunard and Keller were honored for their pro bono service as lawyers and educators. Over the past five years, despite their demanding private practice, Cunard and Keller have volunteered thousands of hours as classroom and clinical teachers at Harvard Law School. For several years, on a weekly basis during the term, they have flown to Cambridge from Washington and New York, respectively, to teach in person. They have co-authored, and continuously updated, the leading treatise on copyright law in a digital era.