Upcoming Events: Berkman Center 2014-2015 Orientation (9/4: Innovation Forum HKS, 9/9: Tuesday Lunch, 9/10: Research Showcase)

Berkman Center 2014-2015 Orientation: Academic Year Kickoff Activities

September 5-17. Events will take place across the Harvard campus. See each event page (and below) for more detailed information.

Please join us for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Fall 2014 Orientation to meet our faculty, fellows, and staff, and to learn about the many ways you can get involved in our dynamic, exciting environment.

This year, we're hosting a series of events across the campus of Harvard University focused on different areas of activity and research at the Center. We invite you to attend any and all that are of interest to you:

- 9/4-5: Internet Policy Symposium @ Harvard Kennedy School. 6pm ET on 9/4 (+Webcast!); 9:00am ET on 9/5.

- 9/9: Open Tuesday Luncheon @ Harvard Law School at 12:30PM ET

- 9/10: Research Showcase @ Harvard Law School from 4:30-6:30PM ET

- 9/11: Digital Problem Solving Initiative Kickoff @ Harvard Graduate School of Education at 5:30PM ET

- 9/15: Special EFF / Berkman Cyber Law Pub Trivia Night @ Harvard Law School at 7:00PM ET

- 9/17: Technical Project Showcase with the Berkman Geeks @ Harvard Law School at 3:00PM ET

As a University-wide research center at Harvard, our interdisciplinary efforts in the exploration of cyberspace address a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. If you're interested in the Internet’s impact on society and are looking to engage a community of world-class fellows and faculty through events, conversations, research, and more please join us to hear more about our upcoming academic year.

People from all disciplines, universities, organizations, and backgrounds are encouraged to attend our orientation events. We look forward to seeing you there! RSVP Required (please RSVP to each event you'd like to attend). more information on our website>

Internet Policy Symposium

Thursday, September 4 at 6pm & Friday, September 5 at 9:00am ET, Harvard Institute of Politics, Harvard Kennedy School.

The Internet Policy Symposium, hosted by Harvard University's Institute of Politics, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and The Internet Association, will feature a public forum on "Innovation in Action: How Government Policies Affect the Internet Entrepreneur?" on September 4th featuring Susan Crawford, and discussions on "Will Governments Break the Internet" and "Why Internet Policy Matters" on September 5th.

RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Tuesday Luncheon: An Interactive Conversation Lead by Jonathan Zittrain

Tuesday, September 9, 12:30pm ET, Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West B Room (2nd Floor), Harvard Law School. This event will be webcast live at 12:30PM ET.

Learn more about the Berkman Center for Internet & Society -- and its network of researchers, activists, faculty, students, technologists, entrepreneurs, artists, policy makers, lawyers, and more -- in an interactive conversation lead by Faculty Chair Jonathan Zittrain. If you’re curious about connecting with our research, our community, or our events, or are just generally interested in digital technologies and their impact on society, please join us at our first Tuesday lunch of the academic year on September 9th on the Harvard Law School campus. To find more information about this year’s Berkman Center community, visit: http://cyber.harvard.edu/newsroom/2014_2015_community. RSVP Required. more information on the IOP's website>

Berkman Research Showcase

Wednesday, September 10, 4:30-6:30pm ET, Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East Rooms (2nd Floor), Harvard Law School. Refreshments will be served.

Select Berkman projects will be present with information about their projects' current activities. Staff working with each of these projects are eager to share information about the big research questions they are considering, meet potential future collaborators, and solicit ideas. In addition to the project tabling, there will be space and opportunity to connect with other Berkman community members and open house participants. You may come for any portion of time during this session. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Digital Problem Solving Initiative Kickoff

Thursday, September 11, 5:30pm ET, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Refreshments will be served.

Please join the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University for the launch of the Digital Problem-Solving Initiative (DPSI), one of the many initiatives and projects at the Center focused on education and digital technologies. DPSI is an innovative and collaborative project that brings together a diverse group of learners (students, faculty, fellows, and staff) to work on projects to address challenges and opportunities across the university. DPSI offers participants a novel opportunity to engage with research, design, and policy relating to the digital world.

Applications are open until September 6 - click here to find out more. You do not need to be a Harvard student or a DPSI participant to attend this event.

Speakers will include Dean Martha Minow, Professor Urs Gasser, Professor Tom Eisenmann, and Research Fellow Justin Reich. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Cyberlaw Pub Trivia: A Joint EFF / Berkman Center Event

Monday, September 15, 7:00pm ET, Wasserstein Hall, HLS Pub (1st Floor), Harvard Law School. Refreshments will be served. Cash bar.

Please join us for a special edition of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cyberlaw Pub Trivia Night -- held in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society as part of our 2014-2014 orientation activities -- which will bring together legal geeks, students, EFF board members, faculty, and others who are interested to join us for an evening of cyberlaw pub trivia. Trivia questions have been carefully constructed by EFF's crack team of technology law experts, focusing on the obscure, fascinating and trivial aspects of privacy, free speech, and intellectual property law.

A Note on RSVPs: If you plan to come with a team (6 people per team), please encourage your teammates to RSVP as soon as possible, as we will close registration when we hit capacity. In order to allow as many people as possible to participate, teams with less than 6 people may have individuals without a team added to them on the day of. Individuals: Don't have a team? No problem, we will help bring together cool and competitive teams. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Drone Warfare and the Public Imagination

Tuesday, September 16, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

In 2012, U.S. drone strikes occurred most often in which nation?

If you don’t know, don’t feel too bad. You’re not alone. You could just admit it and join the 27 percent of Americans who report that they haven’t a clue. Or you could guess, give the wrong answer, and join the 60 percent of Americans who just plain get it wrong. Many people know this answer first-hand, but they tend not to be Americans, and for them the answer has a non-trivial significance.

A large majority (65 percent) of Americans claimed that they had heard a lot about the U.S. drone program in 2013. This is a significant increase from the year before. But what they’d heard hadn’t furnished the answer to this most basic question about the purpose and nature of targeted killings. This makes sense, since the media often focuses on what is most important to its readers: namely, themselves. This is why the death of Americans in targeted killings dominated early discussion of drone warfare, why the mere prospect of domestic surveillance has taken center stage in the drone debate, and why commercial uses of drones has gained more attention in 2014.

So what should the media cover when it comes to drones and military robotics? What is worth reporting? And what responsibility do journalists have to focus in on the most pressing moral and legal questions when it comes to drone technologies? At what point should reportage blend into legal commentary and moral argumentation? What are the dangers associated with this sort of public discourse?

John Kaag is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Director of the Doctoral Program in Global Studies. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Technical Project Showcase with the Berkman Geeks

Wednesday, September 17, 3:00pm ET, Pound Hall, Harvard Law School.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society welcomes students and other Harvard community members to an open session with the Center’s software development and systems operations team (affectionately known as "The Geeks”).

Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Director of the Harvard Law School Library, and Faculty Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, will kick things off, and the Geeks will present some of the most interesting projects and initiatives currently on our plates.

The Berkman Center's Geek Cave works with ruby, perl, php, bash, jQuery, PostgreSQL, MySQL and a slew of other tools to build and extend open source software, create scalable websites, and manage the mixed desktop network that keeps the Center moving. We have a small group of talented, devoted, fun, full-time developers on staff that want to hear about your 1337 coding skillz and talk about fun projects to pair code or geek out on; two project managers to give you tips to about keeping your work on track; and technologists to talk about what hardware and software support it takes to deploy our projects on Berkman infrastructure.

This is a great opportunity to learn more in detail about the technical work done at the Berkman Center, to learn how your own personal or class-related projects might align with the Center’s, and to consider ways you might be able to collaborate with our team on some of the work we have lined up for this year!

More info about the projects that we work on can be found on our github organization page at http://github.com/berkmancenter. RSVP Required. more information on our website>